Morality In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

With Zeena gone Mattie and Ethan use a particular red glass pickle dish. Later to be shattered and broken by the cat. Zeena eventually comes home and finds out about the broken dish as well as

Ethan Frome’s mother becoming ill was the first step toward the destiny that would keep Ethan in Starkfield forever. This destiny required his wife, Zeena, to become sick as well. It was necessary for Ethan to remain there since it would lead him to meet Mattie Silver, who would push him even closer to his fated downfall. Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie’s destinies were tangled together because of the conjoined circumstances that surrounded the three of them.

DEFINITION. In the passage Ethan Frome, the marriage between Ethan and Zeena would begin from the illness of Ethan’s mom and the need for money for Zeena. Furthermore, “When [Ethan and Zeena] married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out the difficulties resulting from Mrs. Frome's long illness, they would sell the farm and saw-mill and try their luck in a large town... But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility

In the book Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton multiple objects are used to represent big moments in the book and is heavily used. There are many objects that clearly relate to people and relationships between people. The first emblem that represents love between Mattie and Ethan is Mattie's red scarf and ribbon in her hair. The first symbol is the pickle dish representing Ethans and Zeena’s relationship. The final commodity is the cat which represents Zeena.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Edith Wharton’s naturalist novel, Ethan Frome, is written using the point of view from an omniscient narrator. The details included about the narrator, such as the fact that he is an engineer who is not from Starkfield, allows for Wharton to control which aspects of the characters are explicitly revealed and what is left to the interpretation of the reader as they learn about Mattie, Ethan, and Zeena. This inclusion of an omniscient narrator, who has no personal ties to the characters, allows for the development of the relationship between Mattie, Ethan, and Zeena to play out with an increased sense of realism as Wharton builds a frame narrative, irony, and gaps of knowledge within the novel. Frame narrative plays

The novella, Ethan Frome, was about a poor farmer who had a forbidden love with a girl that he could never be with. The conflicts, characters, and symbols of this story give this novella a sense of loneliness and isolation from the outside world. The conflicts in Ethan Frome represent the depression and loneliness of living in the countryside in the early 1900s. Zeena was always fighting for Ethan’s attention.

He could have just not taught his kids, his morals would not have rubbed off on

Before Mattie used the dish, it was in the china closet never being used. This could symbolize Ethan and Zeena’s relationship before Mattie. It wasn’t really love that got them married. They never showed their love for each other in the story. The dish symbolizes how their relationship was never really ‘used.’

”(Wharton 3). Because of his loneliness, he asked Zeena to marry him without thinking it through. He had no feelings for her and desperately hoped it would make him feel better. While being married to Zeena, his unhappiness peaked and caused him to fall in love with another girl who was the Fromes’ maid, Mattie Silver. Romance was in the air and most definitely not between Zeena and Ethan.

The quest for happiness can be a long and winding path. One that Ethan didn’t know where to start from, or where to go when he got on it. He struggled in making key decisions to achieve happiness for himself. Instead of choosing happiness Ethan chose to isolate himself from others and not pursue his feelings although it went against his own moral code. In the novel “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton, the title character, Ethan, immolates his euphoria so he can obtain an improved quality of life for his family and to retain a superb reputation.

In the story, Ethan Frome, by, Edith Wharton, Ethan and Zeena Frome’s broken pickle dish is a symbol of their dysfunctional relationship, of the unusual setting under which it is destroyed, and the ideas of matrimony. The

Mattie is panicked and worried when the pickle dish is knocked over and destroyed by the cat, and 3. Ethan is trying to figure a way out to repair or get a new pickle dish. Each of these represent different parts of Ethan and Zeena’s marriage and the relationship between the three characters. In Ethan Frome, the pickle dish is kept up high on the shelf so that nobody can get to it.

The nature of the Frome’s marriage was made transparent when Ethan fell in love with another woman. When the novel begins, Frome demonstrates his cowardice when confesses that he

Ethan’s bad choices of leaving school, feeling lonely and marrying Zeena and then also being avoidant when he wants to leave her. Obviously, Ethan Frome’s tragedy is all caused by his personal decisions. One of many ignorant choices Ethan makes is when his mother gets ill, somewhere in the beginning of the story. During this time, Ethan dropped out of college.

Another reason why Zeena suddenly began caring for Mattie and Ethan is that she wanted to put an end to their relationship. At the beginning of the book, Zeena notices that Ethan has started shaving every day, leading the reader to think that Zeena knows about Ethan’s secret crush. And as the novel progresses, Zeena concocts a plan to send Mattie away. But the most concrete evidence of this claim is when Zeena snapped at Mattie, “You're a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It's the way your father begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn't get at 'em—and now you've took from me the one I cared for most of all—” This remark helps the reader realize that Zeena may actually care for Ethan if the reader speculates that the “one” Zeena is talking about is Ethan himself and not the pickle dish.