Ethan Frome Literary Analysis

In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton conveys that you will never be satisfied if you try to choose between love and responsibility. Through her use of the metaphor comparing winter to Ethan and his life, Wharton illustrates the dissatisfaction that comes from attempting to choose between two equally beneficial and detrimental choices. Around the time of his mother’s death, Ethan was alone and overwhelmed, but then Zeena was there and she filled the “mortal silence” that had surrounded his mother’s sickness. Ethan had “felt that he might have ‘gone like his mother’” if a new voice hadn’t entered the picture. It was Zeena who provided this relief and allowed him to feel “free to go about his business again,” which “magnified his sense of

Zeena is the deep winter chill that is cold and plotting, while Mattie is the bright life of winter that is colorful and passionate. The two women fulfilled different hopes of Ethan; he had a “restlessness” and a “desire for change and freedom” (21). Zeena was Ethan’s “freedom” once upon a time; she enabled him to return to his routine and he felt obligated to her for that, creating the sense of responsibility he feels toward her. Now, Mattie is Ethan’s “change.” She enables him to see color in the previously monochrome landscape through love tinted lenses, and she found a way “to utter his secret soul” (14). Though, both of these options leave something to be desired for Ethan. If he were to choose responsibility he would lose Mattie, his love that “when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset” (14). If he were to choose love he would abandon Zeena, whom he feels responsible for. He couldn’t handle the thought of leaving Zeena with the “burden” (56) that would be placed on her if he were to leave, even if it would free him from all of the “possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena’s narrow-mindedness and ignorance”