How Does Wharton Manipulate The Weather In Ethan Frome

The image is tantalizing: a small, desolate town, cursed with numbing chilliness, has its streets, its buildings, and its trees blotchily painted upon layers and layers of colorless coldness. The heavy snow continues falling, stacking, growing, and engulfing the town in white, dull skies threatening no stop, until there is a sudden halt. Just for a moment, the skies are clear, pure and bright. A pleasant warmth touches every spot, every nook, and every cranny drenched in snow. Everything seems to be filled with a bright warmth before the cold chill engulfs the town once more and continues to bury the town even further into a bitter, cold winter. In Edith Wharton's novel, Ethan Frome, the dark climate exemplifies Ethan's grief of living a miserable life in Starkfield. His long term marriage with his bitter wife, Zeenobia, only adds to his hardships and it is clear that his only source of joy comes from the company of Zeena's young and cheerful cousin, Mattie Silver.

Wharton links the climate and weather to Ethan's feelings to connect the idea that one's desire to ignore misery can drive one to hastily pursue any chances at joy, but misery itself tends to never diminish if the cause is never directly confronted. Wharton creates a parallel between Ethan's feelings of grief from living in the wintery town of Starkfield to its constant and never-ending, cold climate in order to convey that misery will remain constant when left undealt with. As the novel opens, the narrator describes Ethan as a ruin of a man with explanation that he had spent too many winters in Starkfield. The narrator describes the small town as a white landscape with dark skies, and its "phase of crystal clearness [follows] long stretches of sunless cold; ... storms of February [pitch]