Psychoanalysis of Ethan Frome, Psychology of Ethan Frome, Why Ethan Frome is a classic.
Ethan Frome is a very short work of fiction – and, if you
haven’t read it, please do. It will take
only a couple of hours, and I think you
will find it enthralling – at least I did.
Here is a link to a free online version of the text.
As much as I liked it, Ethan Frome’s structure is a bit
clunky. We start out with a first person
account of a fellow who comes into a small (imaginary) rural village in
Massachusetts, in 1910 and observes Ethan Frome, “the most striking figure in
Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.” Tall and once strong, he was crippled in a “smash
up” – a wonderfully ambiguous term – especially in a village that didn’t have
automobiles: we assume that he was in a carriage crash – or maybe a train
crash. He now walks with a twist,
turned sideways, and can’t take full steps – I pictured him wearing ankle
cuffs connected by a chain the way that prisoners do. The narrator does what he can to discover who
this man is, interviewing people in town and closely observing him, and
ultimately he hires him – not to discover more about him, but because the horses
in town are sick and Ethan can drive him to the nearby train depot to get the
supplies that they need. On the way back
from the depot, a blizzard blows up and Frome invites the narrator into his
home – and from there the narrator pieces together Ethan Frome’s life – one that
he tells, then, not in the first person, the way he does in this introductory
bit, but in the third person, laying it out as flashback as it were, in the
subsequent eight chapters. Finally, in a
sort of double post script, the narrator returns in the first person and we see
through his eyes the result of the “smash up.”
So, the reader is fed a tidbit, a morsel. Our interest is piqued. We want to know what happened, and then we
are told that – the story moves from Frome’s imprisonment in Starkfield, where
he returns after engineering school and a brief stint in Florida – what could
be more freeing from the Massachusetts winters than a bit of tropical Florida? –
to care for his ill father. After his
father dies, his mother falls silent – and he must care for her as she “listens”
– to my mind for auditory hallucinations – when the wind blows. Frome’s cousin comes to help him out and he
is so relieved to hear a real voice – and distraught at the death of his mother
– that he asks her to stay on – to marry him – but wonders later if he would
have done this if his mother had died in the spring instead of the winter. He imagines that his wife, Zeena, will move
with him to the city, but she is insecure and afraid of being anything less
than the top dog, which she will never be able to do in a place even a tiny bit
more sophisticated than Starkfield where she is notorious for being the most ill of
all the women in town – what a badge of honor!
She spends her time seeking new patent medicines to cure her woes while
Ethan labors to scratch out a living from their hard scrabble farm and water
driven sawmill.
Wharton describes Ethan and Zeena’s characters largely from
the outside – largely from how they are perceived by others. We don’t have access to the center of their
marriage directly – but I begin to experience it as one of shared and even
desperate misery as they each blame the other for the straits they are in. They are both bleak and unhappy, but Ethan is
by far the more sympathetic character as he appears interested and capable of
growing into something else – something – someone – who is alive, while Zeena
appears to be hanging on with a death grip to misery.
Into this deadened world waltzes Mattie, Zeena’s relation
who shows up to be her helper after her father dies and after she is found
incapable of supporting herself. Taken
on as kind of favor, but clearly an indentured servant, she has the unenviable
task of trying to do something that Zeena will approve of. Of course she fails, but she stays the course
– continuing to try to bring order and even a little joy into this tight and
deadened household. As her stay with the
Frome’s approaches a year, Zeena becomes interested in marrying Mattie off – in
part to relieve them of the burden of having to care for her, but also, it
becomes apparent, because she may have been aware of a growing affection between Mattie
and Ethan even before they, themselves, are aware of it.
The way I am telling the story does not do it justice. This story, while told in the third
person, is also told from the point of view of Ethan. He is caught, unawares, by a love that moves
from 0 to 60 in no time and one that has been on slow boil forever. We (or I) worry that he is misreading Mattie –
doesn’t she have a big crush on the kid in town? – meanwhile we know that we
are headed in a rush towards the big mash up – and when that comes, it comes
not once but twice and we get to experience all the delicious anticipation and
excitement – the exhilaration that leads up to it – but also the masochistic
and sadistic foreshadowing – the sense of being trapped – the wish to die –
intense and powerful feelings and hopes and fears that are only hinted at but
that we can imagine deeply as we head down toward the mash up in the gathering
gloam.
Lionel Trilling, among others, criticized this work for lacking a moral or ethical center. I
think it is about nothing but the moral quandary of loving – freely and openly,
with hope, and moving towards what brings us joy – and the terrible, awful
consequences of that. Does it matter
that this, Ethan’s first love, comes in the context of a marriage? Wouldn’t his ruined self – and the ruins of
his love – have haunted his marriage even if that marriage had not come after losing his first love? To know freedom is to, forever, chafe at what
once felt like fate – because suddenly there is a new possibility – and continuing as we are means that the rest of our lives will be lived as if we are dragging around a
ball and chain rather than simply doing what comes next.
Once upon a time, when I was young, I worked on a big
research project in which we were studying the family members who care for
folks with Alzheimer’s disease. The
folks who were most affected by the work – physical and emotional – of caregiving
were spouses – and female spouses were the ones who were likely to hang in
there longest – and therefore to experience the most distress. We did a small project in which we expected
to bring good to the people we were working with. We hired respite caregivers who would relieve
the spousal caregivers of their duties for four hours every Wednesday
afternoon. They could use that time to
go get their hair done, or to shop, or to just take a bath or a nap – whatever they
wanted to do. Well, the effect was the
opposite of what we intended. The
caregivers, instead of feeling better, suddenly felt that they could not return
– that their lives were too difficult.
We should have seen this coming – it was not unusual in our interviews
with them for them to say something to the effect of, “I didn’t know how bad it
was until I started talking about it.”
Ethan Frome had been in the traces for a very long
time. He set aside his dreams to care
for his father, then his mother, then his wife.
It wasn’t a good life, but it wasn’t bad – it was what it was, until a
little fresh air blew in in the person of Mattie. And this killed him. He couldn’t leave – as badly as he wanted to –
and she couldn’t stay, but it turns out she couldn’t leave either. Each of the protagonists ends up leading a
life they don’t want to – confronted by what they have caused by being
themselves. What a perfect tragedy. This has been made into a movie with Liam Neeson as Ethan Frome - it sounds like perfect casting - but I think it would make an excellent opera. The protagonists could all sing about how are ruined in three part harmony while the stranger narrates. And what an everyday experience this is. I know this sounds grim – especially as we
start a new year – and it is. This delicious,
delicious book, which draws us into the warmth of love and a love that is
reflected, ultimately reflects a much harsher reality. We are freighted more by our moments of
freedom than by the uninterrupted drudgery that we would otherwise engage in with resignation. Hope is definitely a double edged sword - while it can help us move out of the space we are in - it can also illuminate just how trapped we are withing that space.
Earlier today, on a walk, I was thinking about how happiness
is so elusive for those of us who have so much – it feels like if we had just a
little more we would be able to more fully live – and yet is that little bit
more ever enough? It certainly wasn’t
for the Queen of Versailles (follow the link for a review of the documentary
about an American who seemed to have everything). And for those of us who have very little I
think there is also a starkness to living – we can’t deny how miserable it is
to live (OK, Hobbes, for some of us life is solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short). Would that there were
a mean – a place that is a sweet spot – maybe somewhere in the 1950s in a
sitcom – where what we have is enough and the people we love bring us joy.
Edith Wharton was born Edith Jones and her family had so
much wealth that they were the ones about whom the phrase “keeping up with the
Joneses” may have been termed. All of
her wealth apparently bought her a loveless marriage. Was it duty that led her into it? Was she tempted with something sweet and
joyous that brought her nothing but misery?
Ethan Frome would suggest that even – or especially – those things that
bring us joy can be the most difficult of all.
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