There are ten things I love about Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. This bleak, wintry tale is overall pretty depressing, but there are some elements about it that make me happy. Here they are:
- The creepy cat who causes all the trouble, and in my witchy interpretation is not only sapient but is Zeena’s familiar too. I imagine the cat like Ursula’s electric eels in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The eels are really good at sabotaging the romantic night Ariel and Erik have. The cat is a good saboteur too.
- How pickles are really important to the novel and how Wharton hams it up with the pickles. She even works in a dead cucumber vine that symbolically and dramatically trails over the house’s doorframe.
- The potted geranium symbolism. The geraniums say so much with so little. They are the star of this novel with their “faint, sharp scent.” Ethan grew them for Mattie, and my favorite moment is when Zeena pointedly snips dead leaves off the plants.
- How it’s narrated by a dude bored on a work trip so he pieces local gossip together like it’s his job. He’s an engineer that works on power plants, and he uses words like “currents,” “counter currents,” and “fiery wires” when he’s describing about sexual moments between Ethan and Mattie.
- The book is so short, a true novella.
- Dead wood and deadly wood drive this novel’s plot. There’s obviously the deadly elm tree integral to the “smash-up,” but there are also many other pivotal dead wood details. For example, the only reason the narrator is stuck in Starkfield, Massachusetts for an extended, undetermined amount of time for work is because he is waiting for a “carpenters’ strike” to be over.
- If I was going to gift this book to someone, there’s so many great items that could be paired with it to make it an extra thoughtful book gift. I would give this book with a red scarf, or a jar of pickles, pickle stickers, or geranium stickers.
- The narrator is fixated on the human circulatory system and the color red. So much so, they both get worked into the narrator’s storytelling over 40+ times. I have an annotating guide all about how and where to annotate tab these elements on Etsy.
- How the “smash-up” scene at the end and the dancing scene in the beginning (where Ethan is creepily watching Mattie) have so much language overlap. They’re truly interconnected scenes. Wharton even works the word “danced” into the “smash-up” scene, I think, to make it unquestionable that these scenes are interconnected by her deliberate design.
- The way the novel ends with a woman speaking out loud, getting the final word, even though a man narrates the whole story and a man’s name is in the title. What’s more, the final clause of the last sentence is funny, and we really need some funny to end on after this very sordid tale is told. Mrs. Hale is the funny one. She is definitely not holding her tongue and is sharing all her inside thoughts when she ends the book with “and the women have got to hold their tongues.”
Two ways to get a copy of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton that support my blog:
- Purchase the Penguin Classics Edition on my Bookshop.org affiliate page.
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