Biographical Summary
Edith Wharton lived a very interesting life. She had grown up in a relatively high class family. She had some trouble in her relationship though. Most of her novels are written about her past life experiences. Although she did have challenges to face, Edith Wharton ended up extremely well.
On January 24, 1862, Edith Wharton was born in New York City. Her parents are George Fredric Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. They were descents from English and Duitch colonists who made money banking, real estate, and shipping. She has two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The family moved to Spain for about a year and then moved to Pairs. Summer of 1870, they moved to Germany, and there Edith got typhoid fever. At age ten, she moved back to Manhattan. She was taught by a governess and also taught herself by reading her father’s library. In 1885, she married Edward Robbins Wharton. She was twenty three and he was tweleve years older than her. He was a wealthy banker but they did not have an easy relationship. They had two different outlooks on life, Edith was more artistic and he was more about business and work. She had a love affair with Morton Fullerton and ends up divorcing Edward in 1913. She moved to Pairs for a more artistic surrounding. In Paris, she met many famous writer and intellectual people. She really enjoyed gardening and very fashionable houses. She had a love for arts and letters. SAhe had surrounded her self with a beautiful world, even though in realtiy the world she lived in was anything but beautiful. She lived life against what society believed a women should be. She wanted to stand out against the rest of society and do something.
Edith Wharton wrote at least eighty-five...
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...at people think and what happens to herself. In the end of the whole novel, both characters make the right and conscious decision to live their lives as they have before they met each other.
WORKS CITED
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Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934. Print.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Scribner, 1968. Print.
"Wharton, Edith 1862-1937." American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Vol. 1: 1900 1909. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 2 Nov. 2013
In Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, Ethan, a reserved young man was torn between two women. He was married to Zenobia Frome, but his true love was his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver. Zeena and Mattie were different in all aspects. Mattie was a caring, loving, beautiful young girl, while Zeena was a sickly, shrewish woman aged well beyond her years. Ethan was continuously drawn to Mattie throughout the novel, as she was much more attractive and amicable than Zeena.
Perhaps Edith Wharton's reason for writing Ethan Frome, was that it so vividly reflected her own dreary life. Abandoned of any love as a child from her mother and trapped in a marriage similar to that of Zeena and Ethan, Wharton found herself relying on illicit love. This illicit love was also her favorite topic of writing, which helped her to escape her own tragedies. She spent many nights in the arms of other men searching desperately for the love she believed existed, but had never felt, which is evident in all of her writings.
Set in 1881 Starkfield, Massachusetts, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome reveals a recurring theme in literature: “the classic war between a passion and responsibility.” In this novel, protagonist Ethan Frome confronts the demands of two private passions: his desire to become an engineer that conflicts with his moral duty to his family and his love for Mattie Silver that conflicts with his obligations to his wife Zeena. Inevitably placing the desires and well-being of his family before his own, Ethan experiences only “‘[s]ickness and trouble’” and “‘that’s what [he’s] had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping’” (12). The reader understands Ethan’s struggles when he abandons his studies at Worcester, when he considers running
The creative writing techniques that Wharton uses within her writing enhance the story and make it worth reading. Wharton is very descriptive in almost every aspect of her story. This gives the reader another element to the story rather than just reading dialogue or general descriptions. A point where Wharton gets descriptive, is when she starts to explain Frome’s house and how “ the image (of itself) presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their mornings’ work without facing the weather, it is certain that the ‘L’ rather the house itself seems to be the center, the actual hearth-stone of the New England farm” (Wharton 11). This shows how detailed Wharton can get. It not only gives the reader a g...
Wharton’s parents raised her in aristocratic society. Her father, George supported the family working in real estate, while her mother Lucerita was a stay at home mom. Her mother was devoted to high society, and was unsupportive of her interests in writing. (Todd and Wetzel) Unlike her mother, Morton Fullerton supported Wharton. While in England, Wharton met Fullerton. As their relationship progressed, she became close friends with Katharine Fullerton. Katharine was Morton’s orphaned sister, that his family took in. (Witkosky) While Wharton was in England her husband was seeking “cures” for his depression. As portrayed in the novel, Ethan Frome’s wife Zeena was constantly seeking cures for her illness. Like Teddy, Zeena was isolated from society and kept to herself. Ethan’s wife was devoted to high society because she came from an aristocratic home. Therefore, Zeena never supported Ethan’s interest in becoming an engineer. Wharton’s mother was alike to Zeena when it came to how her life was lived. Ethan’s lover, Mattie Silver, was taken in by the Frome’s in the novel. She had no family who wanted her just like Katharine Fullerton. Mattie was raised by the Frome’s in a society she did not know how to adapt to because she was never taught how. “Mattie is attempting unsuccessfully to fit in a society she does not understand.”
Edith Wharton, originally named “Edith Newbold Jones”(Cliff Notes), was born on “January 24, 1862 in New York City to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones and died on August 11, 1937”(Cliff Notes). She was born into a wealthy family and was a “designer, short story writer and American novelist”(Cliff Notes). Wharton descended from the English and Dutch cultures. She had two siblings, one known as “Frederic Rhinelander Jones” (Cliff Notes) who was sixteen years older than her, and “Henry Edward Jones eleven years older”(Cliff Notes). While her brothers attended boarding school, Wharton became “raised as an only child in a brownstone mansion on West Twenty-third Street in New York City”(Cliff
Finding himself in a small New England town of Starkfield during the winter, the narrator sets out to learn about the life of a mysterious local named Ethan Frome. Ethan Frome is a novel written by Edith Wharton, her writing style is characterized as simple and retrained, lives led by her main characters, is deceptive. Throughout the novel, Wharton builds up patterns of imagery, patterns of behavior and specially charged works. All of which serve a definite style and structure purpose. Her attention to minor details and her use of structure to relay Ethan’s complicated and tragic life story to readers enables her to portray her characters as victims of the rules of society while dealing with isolation and silence, love, and obstacles. Wharton
Garcia, Angela. "Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome." American Writers Classics. Ed. Jay Parini. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004. 89-108. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 4 Feb. 2014.
Ammons, Elizabeth. “Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and the Question of Meaning.” Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1979, pp. 127-140.
Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. WNC Database. Web. 7 Dec. 2011.
Like Alice, who divorced was twice. Another example of how Edith and this particular story is compares to her life is Alice’s daughter is sick with typhoid and when Edith was 10 she suffered from typhoid fever and almost died. Also like Lily and most children her age Edith Wharton also had a governess. Wharton’s main concept in the story was the theme of divorce and survival of the fittest. By having the other two men being around the current marriage and dealing with some of struggles of divorced and being able to survive New York’s
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
Emily Dickinson grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts in the nineteenth century. As a child she was brought up into the Puritan way of life. She was born on December 10, 1830 and died fifty-six years later. Emily lived isolated in the house she was born in; except for the short time she attended Amherst Academy and Holyoke Female Seminary. Emily Dickinson never married and lived on the reliance of her father. Dickinson was close to her sister Lavinia and her brother Austin her whole life. Most of her family were members of the church, but Emily never wished to become one. Her closest friend was her sister-in-law Susan. Susan was Emily's personal critic; as long as Emily was writing she asked Susan to look her poems over.
...g through the motions, her eyes tearing up, her lip quivering, the music swelling. It's too much and I resent it, but it makes me worry. I'm certainly not worrying that the plot will not go exactly how I know it will go. I worry, instead, that it will go that way. I worry that she'll stop running, that she'll move to New York to be with Her Man, that she'll say she's sorry for whatever shortcomings she might have displayed during their brief and apparently enchanting courtship, that she'll change herself to fit his idea of what she should be. She has to do it and I know she will. But it still makes me sad, knowing that she has to do this to make everyone else feel secure — again and again, in movie after movie — that they're also making the proper apologies and the right choices, because any other choices are unimaginable for Pretty Women and their gonnabe mates.
... sense of truth. The puppets represent the tangible truth that we as individuals are able to observe as we age and ‘unlock’ the shackles of our youthful knowledge.