Ethan Frome: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

This short novel captures in a few incidents and some scenery the life and mood of Ethan Frome, a quiet, New England farmer with a great depth of feeling but a sad lot in life. The story is told from the perspective of an engineer sent on a job to rural Massachusetts, a place Edith Wharton knew well as it was in this neighborhood that she built her home, The Mount near Lenox. The story of Frome has just three main characters-Ethan, his sickly wife Zeena, and Zeena’s cousin Mattie who, in part through her own misfortunes and family tragedies, comes to live with the Fromes and take care of Zeena. But in these three there is a breadth and depth of humanity that is staggering. Wharton uses the frigid, snow-bound landscape of winter in the Berkshires to mirror the cold, clamped down lives of these people who are representatives of the concept of quiet desperation. Wharton shows great cruelty, deep affection, and everything in between in one small, isolated farmhouse by the side of a road that ceased to be a busy thoroughfare long, long ago. Wharton’s landscape of Starkfield, the setting, is beautiful and sad and her narration of the tragedy of the Frome’s is a brilliant, unforgettable story.

Wharton's text, a gripping, terse tale of three3 people trapped in the aptly named town of Starkville, is supplemented here with wonderful secondary sources. I generally recommend Norton editions for people who love literature and literary scholarship, and this is no exception!

Edith Wharton, that is no way to end a book! Okay, I guess it is...it was just a shocker!

One of my favorite love stories. Edith Wharton’s genius is evident.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; afterword by Alfred Kazin. Highly recommended.Ethan Frome is a powerful story about powerless people. The title character is held in thrall by his parents, his land, his poverty, and his lifeless and loveless marriage. His wife, Zenobia (Zeena), cannot escape the confines of her narrow mind; her imaginary illnesses and the status they give her in a small village like the aptly named Starkfield, Massachusetts; and the meanness of her own life (symbolised by her attachment to her pickle dish and her refusal to use it, even for visits by the minister). Finally, there is Mattie Silver, the relative who has come to help care for Zeena and the house and who has nowhere to go. Interestingly, the three prisoners are related; Zeena is referred to as a cousin of Ethan's, while Mattie is Zeena's cousin. Zeena is, literally and figuratively, the central figure who connects them all and who keeps Ethan and Mattie apart.From his youth, Ethan's impulsive, reactive nature leads him into trouble. When Zeena helps him out with the care of his mother, who dies and leaves him alone and lonely, "before he knew what he was doing, he had asked her [Zeena] to stay there with him." It is soon thereafter that he discovers that his loneliness gave him selective vision and that Zeena is more than a good nurse; she's an excellent hypochondriac. When someone asks him if he lacks money, "'Not a bit,' Ethan's pride retorted before his reason had time to intervene."Ethan is hindered from all he desires, whether it's his technical education, his potential career as an engineer, or the arms of Mattie Silver, by his prevailing sense of duty and honor. Although he feels trapped on his land and in a farming life with which he is not happy because he has had a succession of people for whom to care-first, his father, then his mother, then Zeena-Ethan tells Mattie, "I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome." Later, his last thought before unconsciousness will be about his responsibility to his horse: "I ought to be getting him his feed . . ." He struggles constantly with his need to be free of Zeena and his obligation to take care of her.Zeena and Mattie are contrasted throughout; Zeena's lashless lids are nothing like Mattie's fully lashed lids, which Ethan observes "sinking slowly when anything charmed or moved her." Her laughter is seen "sparkling through her lashes." While Zeena is thin and hard, Ethan sees Mattie (in Zeena's overnight absence) as "taller, fuller, more womanly in shape and motion" than when she is under Zeena's watchful eye. Light, which brings out the sharp hollows of Zeena's face as in a horror film, "threw a lustrous fleck on [Mattie's] lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows." Is this Mattie as she really is, or is this Mattie as Ethan's loneliness and imagination needs her to be.Around Mattie, Ethan is often overcome by the strength of his emotions. When she serves him dinner, with the cat lying drowsily by the stove in a carefully drawn domestic scene, "Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being." This sense of being overcome recurs throughout their encounters. He doubts that he inspires such a glow. "Could it be his coming that gave her such a kindled face?" He is jealous of every man Mattie encounters, particularly the wealthy Irish grocer's son, Denis Eady.Whether Wharton is writing of society New York or rural New England, such an illicit romance cannot succeed, and Ethan's fails spectacularly-leaving behind people who are emotional and physical wrecks. Zeena is transformed into reluctant caregiver, while Mattie is transformed into yet another part of the trap that keeps Ethan on the farm, impoverished financially, intellectually, and emotionally. His emotions about his fate and that of his would-be lover are never revealed other than through an indescribable look that haunts those who witness it. In life, all are more dead than the Fromes in the graveyard. Ethan Frome is the literary embodiment of Wharton's quote, "Life is the saddest thing, next to death."Ethan Frome's framework is awkward; a narrator from outside Starkfield manages to get into Ethan's home and learn the whole story, which then is improbably told in great detail in third-person omniscient. This detracts only slightly from the novel's wintry, claustrophobic atmosphere and evocative powers. In her introduction, Wharton calls the reader "sophisticated" and the people of whom she writes "simple"-as stark as the New England backdrop. Yet Ethan Frome, for all his "simplicity," is a rich, fully realised person as memorable as Newland Archer (The Age of Innocence)-and as tragic as Lily Bart (The House of Mirth).Diane L. Schirf, 14 June 2003.

Edith Wharton's 'Ethan Frome' (1911), one of the shortest, grimmest, and most perverse novels in American literature, was partially based on a real New England sledding accident as well as on aspects of Wharton's own loveless marriage. Formerly known for crisp social satires such as 1905's 'The House of Mirth,' the gripping 'Ethan Frome' understandably met with limited critical and commercial success upon its release.Superbly written, 'Ethan Frome' is almost realistic American fiction at its finest. After the unnamed narrator arrives in the small Massachusetts village of Starkfield at the height of winter, he quickly becomes fascinated with a tall, striking, and partially crippled man, Ethan Frome, that he repeatedly sees moving silently around the landscape. The narrator finds that the friendly local people are willing to speak at length about other matters, but about Ethan Frome he can learn almost nothing.Temporarily hiring Frome to provide him with transportation, he discovers that Frome is an unusually intelligent, intellectually curious, and sensitive man. Caught far from his own home on a freezing night, Frome offers the narrator a night's shelter at his own meager farmhouse, and thus the opportunity for Frome to recount his troubled history is presented. But then the narrator states, "It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story." Scholars have subsequently debated why Wharton decided to add this sentence, but all have agreed that, despite its ambiguity, the recounting of Frome's tragic history as given is ultimately an uncertain one.The story as recreated is almost biblically simple: Ethan, who is married to a coarse, domineering, vindictive, and malingering woman, Zenobia, falls in love with his wife's live in servant, Mattie, and Mattie, who is young, beautiful, and innocent, with Ethan. After a tender night alone while Zenobia is away ostensibly seeking a cure for her ailments, Ethan and Mattie desperately attempt to wrest themselves from Zenobia's grasp; but the results of their efforts are horrific.Taking its cues from the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Brontes, 'Ethan Frome' offers a comfortless vision of perdition that suggests that hell on earth is the inevitable lot of some.Wharton's sense of integrity ultimately carries the novel, but the book's presentation of an amoral universe, the triumph of evil, and the utter transformation of innocence into what is most repulsive in human existence makes 'Ethan Frome' a work whose conclusions many readers will reject as untenable.The book's inexorable denouement probably explains Wharton's disinclination to attribute the main narrative to Ethan, allow the narrator to it present it as objective if fictional history, or wholly take credit herself. Though the hard facts provided in the book's final pages are undeniably established, the manner in which they are reached is left a matter of ambiguity, suggesting that while the writing of 'Ethan Frome' was probably a cathartic experience for Wharton, she may have also found the final result objectionable, distasteful, or repellant.

Perfect !Rien à signaler.L'objet correspond à ce que j'ai reçu.Objet en parfait état.L'objet a répondu à mes attentes.

Le livre que je viens de recevoir ressemble plus à un livre d'occasion qu'à un livre neuf : coins de la couvertures écornés, tranches des pages sales. Il devait traîner sur une étagère depuis pas mal de temps. J'achète régulièrement des livres d'occasion chez World of Books qui sont en meilleur état que ça.