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Ethan Frome, a poor, downtrodden New England farmer is trapped in a loveless marriage to his invalid wife, Zeena. His ambition and intelligence are oppressed by Zeena's cold, conniving character. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie arrives to help care for her, Ethan is immediately taken by Mattie's warm, vivacious personality. They fall desperately in love as he realizes how much is missing from his life and marriage. Tragically, their love is doomed by Zeena's ever-lurking presence and by the social conventions of the day. Ethan remains torn between his sense of obligation and his urge to satisfy his heart's desire up to the suspenseful and unanticipated conclusion.… (mere)
BookshelfMonstrosity: In Remembering Laughter a woman confronts her husband's escalating use of alcohol; in Ethan Frome the title character's wife is difficult and demanding. Both novels elegantly depict a husband obsessed with his wife's sister, resulting in a love triangle with tragic consequences.… (mere)
This is a good novel. I did actually like it and I think it does a great job of integrating the harshness of the New England winters with the plot. If you look into Wharton's life and understand the history of the setting, I think it's even more enjoyable... but that's just me. Book nerd. Still, I recommend reading it if you haven't. I don't want to give any real spoilers, but I do feel like I should give fair warning that the novel is not likely to give you the warm fuzzies... but it's still worth reading. And, hey, it's on Harold Bloom's gigantic list of titles in the Western Canon... so there's that. ( )
kind of meandering and tedious at times but at the same time a great book that now that i have finished and can look back on is even more enjoyable ( )
I haven't read this since the 10th grade, but I remember it pretty well, which makes me think it must have been good. Also, as Nathan mentions, it's pretty much the go-to literary reference when talking about big bummers, so it gets some cred for that, too. ( )
That was a smash-up conclusion at the climax of this claustrophobic chamber drama. The central characters include not only Ethan, Zenobia, and Mattie but Winter as well. It casts its heavy mantle on half of each Berkshire year, driving people indoors, turning them inward, and occasionally tempting them to sled down the hill on crisp moonlit nights. At the bottom, a large elm looms; its role as nemesis is clear. From the first mention, the reader is as sure as when a rifle hangs over the fireplace in a Chekhov play that this will play a crucial role in the plot. The suspense lies in not knowing how until the end. Wharton’s depiction of a loveless couple locked in a malignant embrace had me siding with Ethan (after all, the novella isn’t named Zenobia) until I realized that Wharton had mentioned in passing that nearly every woman in town was ailing. She never explores why; it’s just the way it was. Coupled with winter was a grinding poverty and the desperation it brought with it. The result is as ineluctable as Greek tragedy. ( )
Lots of great sentences, and the narrative is lurid enough to pull you in. But Edith Wharton was not a poor New England farmer, and I never became convinced she knew the first thing about this world and what motivated its inhabitants. Also, it's full of the kind of heavy-handed symbolism that literature teachers love but really does not appear in Wharton's other works. I can just hear English teachers in my head asking, "what does the pickle dish symbolize? and what is the significance of the cat?" Blah!
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. (Author's Introductory Note)
The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners.
Citater
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.
...we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts, and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farmhouses that make the landscape lonelier.
Sidste ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: “There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn’t live. Well, I say it’s a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was shocked at me. Only he wasn’t with me that morning when she first came to… And I say, if she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.”
Ethan Frome, a poor, downtrodden New England farmer is trapped in a loveless marriage to his invalid wife, Zeena. His ambition and intelligence are oppressed by Zeena's cold, conniving character. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie arrives to help care for her, Ethan is immediately taken by Mattie's warm, vivacious personality. They fall desperately in love as he realizes how much is missing from his life and marriage. Tragically, their love is doomed by Zeena's ever-lurking presence and by the social conventions of the day. Ethan remains torn between his sense of obligation and his urge to satisfy his heart's desire up to the suspenseful and unanticipated conclusion.
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10
This is a good novel. I did actually like it and I think it does a great job of integrating the harshness of the New England winters with the plot. If you look into Wharton's life and understand the history of the setting, I think it's even more enjoyable... but that's just me. Book nerd. Still, I recommend reading it if you haven't. I don't want to give any real spoilers, but I do feel like I should give fair warning that the novel is not likely to give you the warm fuzzies... but it's still worth reading. And, hey, it's on Harold Bloom's gigantic list of titles in the Western Canon... so there's that. (