EthanFrome

[|**Ethan Frome**] sets the story in a wintry New England town where an unnamed narrator tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with dreams and desires that end in an ironic turn of events. Ethan’s character is one that comes full circle moving from silent desire to action to quiet submission ordered by life’s circumstances. Ethan Frome, first described as “the most striking figure in Starkfield” (Wharton 3), immediately followed by the narrator saying “he was but the ruin of a man with a “careless powerful look…in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chainis married to Zeena, of which Wharton describes as “sickly, cantankerous He is the sole caregiver of his wife until Zeena’s young and beautiful cousin, Mattie Silver, arrives to help with housekeeping. Ethan is taken in by Mattie’s youthful beauty and good humor, but his taking to Mattie does not go unnoticed by Zeena. In fact, when she realizes Ethan and Mattie’s mutual attraction, she plans to hire someone less attractive and to have Mattie sent away.

I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little- except a vague botanical and dialectical- resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweet-fern, asters and mountain-laurel, and the conscientious reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been overlooked. I give the impression merely as a personal one; it accounts for "Ethan Frome," and may, to some readers, in a measure justify it.
 * Introduction:**

It was adopted into a [|movie] in 1993