Edith Wharton And Ethan Frome

1249 Words3 Pages

Dasha Kozhevnikova
Ms. Winslow
AP English Language and Composition
18 February 2015
Edith Wharton’s Feminism “We can’t behave like people in novels, though can we?” questioned Edith Wharton in one of her renown novels, The Age of Innocence (Goodreads). As a writer, she combined her own values regarding culture and humankind into her novels. In fact, she often queried issues regarding society’s social standards and behaviors, especially emphasizing feministic ideals. Therefore, Edith Wharton thoroughly presents the motif of feminism through her novels, The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome. Unquestionably, Edith Wharton’s specific principles and thoughts on how society should have been structured during her time period sources from her own …show more content…

In fact, this marriage is the source of many of her troubles that she expresses in her novels’ storylines (Leach 31). She numerously considered filing for a formal separation between them, but instead spent most of her time traveling and studying abroad, leaving less time to spend with her husband. Furthermore, she had an affair with a man, Morton Fullerton, who encouraged her desires to find her own happiness. Her book, Ethan Frome, greatly conveys her relationship with Edward Wharton, but through indirect methods. In fact, “woven into the book were some of her most deeply felt personal emotions” …show more content…

Because most of these principles originate from her marriage with Edward Robbins Wharton, they take a truly feministic approach. The novel is about the narrator’s experience and meeting of Ethan Frome, a character of much depth. Throughout the novel, one finds out that Ethan Frome faced the troubles of a failing marriage. The story’s plot revolves around a love triangle between him, his wife Zeena, and Zeena’s cousin, Mattie (Kitto). Zeena and her cousin prove to be immensely divergent characters with contrastive personalities and behaviors. Zeena holds a controlling, unnerving, commanding type of personality, showing that Frome married her because of an inner sense of duty. On the other hand, Mattie has a more appealing, ambrosial personality with a more submissive nature in comparison to Zeena. Throughout the novel, Ethan Frome suffers internal conflict by not being able to choose between a sense of obligation to commit to his wife and his sense of desire to be with Mattie

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