. Spinning .

Despite my trepidation at seeming less than enthusiastic about what has been listed as classic literature, I’ve got some issues with Edith Wharton’s novel.

One thing that I’ve mentioned here already is the inability to rouse my sympathies for Ethan Frome in his dilemma of an old (gee, at 7 years his senior she’s all of 35!) and mostly hypochondriacally invalid wife, Zeena, and his strong feelings for her young cousin, Mattie. And again, it is not the betrayal of infidelity that bothers me; I’m a believer of the notion that there are tremendously worse sins that people commit against each other daily that are clearly not in the name of love. 

Now the fault may be mine, in that I’m married now, and older; no longer the cute, young and fancy free chickie I used to be.  But I don’t believe that that’s it.  I believe, in fact, that the fault lies in Wharton’s story. In reading constantly and consistently good novels of late, I may be more aware of writing techniques and more wary of believing the author so readily.  (Except Paz’s My Life With the Wave, or anything Marquez tells me really happened, for me, really happened.)  But with the beginning of Ethan’s story, where he is watching young Mattie secretly at a dance, there is an established lovestruckness that doesn’t tell me why, or give much justification for his dislike of his own wife.  So right there, I’m poised to argue.

But this, I believe is the real problem:

Wharton on Mattie, the girlfriend:  She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s.  Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brow. (p. 81) 

or: She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies. (p. 120)

Wharton on Zeena (the wife):  Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, the other held a lamp.  The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. (p. 53)

While it is well within the author’s right to offer description, there is almost of sense of hatred towards the wife in his many descriptions of her.  I picked up  on an authorly bias that immediately had me playing devil’s advocate. 

It also had me mistrusting the narrator. 

The ending was a strange twist, and a bit melodramatic leading up to it, wherein Mattie convinces Ethan to hop on a sled and ride into a tree in a grand suicide attempt meant to keep them together forever.  The twist is pure Alfred Hitchcock material.  This sledding suicide attempt is when Ethan incurred his crippling injuries, and evidently, Mattie came out pretty bad as well.  The first person narrator of the introduction now comes back to us to let us in on the secret, as Zeena prepares a meal, Mattie sits crippled in a chair, grumpy and mean as Zeena had ever been, and poor Ethan is resigned to his life now with two sickly old ladies.

Decent writing, of course.  Descriptive and full of imagery of the setting and characters.  But still, not one of the intricate or powerful stories I’m getting used to reading.  In doing my after-reading research, I’ve noticed attempts at finding symbolism, such as the red scarf and red ribbon that Mattie wears.  I barely took note of that, knowing that of course, red is a symbol of passion, and life.  Out of a box of hair ribbons any woman would have selected the red to dress up and attract a beau.

Good then, but not great.

With the introduction prior to chapter one we are being told by a first person narrator about a man named Ethan Frome.  In Chapter one, we are into third person (removed?) because the first person narrator from the intro has left off saying in effect, "here’s what I heard…"  All well done so far.

My problem as I’ve stated is not with the non-linear structure, but that the reader is given too little backstory to this "backstory" to evoke sympathy for Ethan Frome.  Now here I am in the middle of the book, and I’m getting the backstory of the meeting and marriage of Ethan and Zeena and finally can somewhat soften towards Ethan. 

The problem is, I’m wary of him, having learned flat out from the beginnng of Chapter One that he couldn’t be trusted. 

Obviously I’m no expert on literature or writing ability, and I do like the story and writing style for its showing of these people and their world in simple but descriptive language, but the more I read, the more readily I am bothered by little quirks such as these.

Sometimes our writerly approach to reading can cause some confusion with the author’s intent.  In starting Ethan’s story, he was described as a young man.  Yet his wife seemed awfully crabby and sickly for that age.  I suspected she was older.  Even with the adjective "young," it is common to believe, based on other readings, that in the time period, work on a farm still took its toll and people aged quickly, as well as dying earlier than current times and diseases such as tuberculosis were common. 

Now I find my answer:

Though she was but seven years her husband’s senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already an old woman.  (p. 64)

However, it does seem like Zeena has a history of illness, if not a hypochondriac, so that I would have thought that she’d been diagnosed in the former case, not as sickly looking as Wharton describes her in the latter.  It would also be reasonable to suspect that she hasn’t truly done hard labor–the house is not clean and constantly kept in order–so I’m not sure I buy this whole thing.

The problem here for me is not the "sin" of Ethan’s desire for Mattie, but rather a lack of substantiating groundwork for the situation, not necessarily backstory, but something that makes me feel Ethan’s pain.

It’s impossible for me to point to particular selections or passages from this novel to illustrate my point, but I’m losing a bit of empathy for the main character, Ethan Frome. 

Intrigued by him in the narrator’s introduction as a tall, crippled, silent man who willingly helps her/him but lets slip only bits and pieces of his background, in finding out more from the chapters that lead us back into his younger days I’m withdrawing a bit from this man.  While we understand that he’s taken with a lovely young cousin of his invalid wife’s who has come to help out, we see only a brief glimpse of the wife’s illness and attitude before we’re hit with this man’s secret desires. 

The problem here, and far be it for me to find fault with love, seems to be that Wharton hasn’t established fully the relationship of Ethan and his wife, Zeena, prior to the appearance of Mattie, whom he’s fallen for hard.  So when I come to this scene, which is still the opening scene where Ethan walks Mattie home from a dance (it’s slippery out, I guess), I find myself pulling away:

Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the shutterless windows of the house wer dark.  A dead cucumber-vine dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and the thought flashed through Ethan’s brain: "If it were there for Zeena–"  Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in there bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed…  (p.51)

The double whammy here is that without a real description or definition of Zeena’s illness, even that much of it is put on, I’m looking here at a man who wishes his wife were dead because of her appearance.  Now I’m sure she’s been a trial for him, and the little I’ve seen of her does make her sound cranky and manipulative, but it’s just, well, it’s just not enough.  I believe this relationship between Ethan and Zeena could have been a bit more built up to deserve my understanding of his actions.

Wharton has employed the technique of changing first person pov to third immediately after an "Introduction" by the narrator and switching to the basic "here’s the story I found out…" to begin Chapter one with a younger Ethan Frome, the man who intrigues her/him in the opening.  Here we meet she who intrigues young Ethan:

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset.  He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him; a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.  (p. 34)

Very nice simile–"a window that has caught the sunset."  What Wharton gives us is both a feel for Ethan, as he watches Mattie, his wife’s young cousin who has come to help out, and for the woman herself.  You can see him falling in love.  You can see her confident, fun-loving nature.

You can see the trouble ahead.