What were we reading in 1911?
Each month of the Centennial year one of our librarians will look at a notable book published during 1911, and give you a glimpse of what people were reading while Loyola Marymount University was just getting started.
Our third review in the series comes from Systems Librarian Meghan Weeks. (For more information about the entire series, click here!)
Ethan Frome is a tragic novel written by Edith Wharton, started in 1907 and first published in 1911. Wharton, whose maiden name was Edith Newbold Jones, was born in 1862 to a wealthy family. (Some say that the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses" refers to Edith's family.) Growing up in the United States and Europe, she was educated by private tutors. In New York in 1885, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, but divorced him in 1913. She wrote several novels, short stories, and poems, including The Age of Innocence, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
Ethan Frome is set in the village of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Although Starkfield is a fictitious place, the name aptly describes the setting, which is desloate and suffers from especially harsh winters. The first chapter is told from the viewpoint of a visitor who stays in Starkfield one winter while working nearby. This visitor, who is never named, occasionally encounters a curious man whom he describes as "the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man." This man is Ethan Frome. Ethan is very tall, but his right side is mangled, causing him to walk with a decided limp. The visitor is curious about Ethan and what happened to him, and asks around, getting bits and pieces of the story from the villagers about a "smash-up" that happened many years ago and which caused Ethan's lameness. Then one week, the visitor has to hire Ethan to take him to and from work, but there is a blizzard and the visitor stays a night on Ethan's farm. When he goes into Ethan's house, he "[begins] to put together this vision of his story."
The second chapter starts the “vision” which goes back more than twenty years before the “smash-up.” Ethan is a young man who was studying to be an engineer but had to come home to care for the farm after his father had an accident. His father dies and his mother becomes ill. His cousin, Zeena, comes to live with them and helps to care for his mother. Ethan’s mother passes away during one of those Starkfield winters, and out of desperation and gratitude Ethan asks Zeena to be his wife. Soon after their marriage, though, Zeena becomes sickly and her cousin Mattie comes to live with them as an unpaid servant. Mattie’s parents had died and left her with very little money, and since she is neither skilled nor educated enough to find work, she has nowhere to go. Ethan and Mattie develop a mutual attraction which does not go unnoticed by Zeena.
One day, Zeena announces that her illness is much worse, and she must go to one of the bigger towns to see a new doctor. Ethan is excited that he will be alone with Mattie and they have a nice dinner together at the farm, but the cat accidentally breaks one of Zeena’s favorite pickle dishes given to her by a relative. Ethan plans to glue it back together temporarily and hope that Zeena doesn’t notice it before he can replace it. However, Zeena comes back the next day and tells Ethan that the doctor says she needs a “hired girl” and that Mattie must go to make room for her. Zeena also finds the broken dish, which strengthens her decision that Mattie must go the following day. Ethan, furious and distraught, considers leaving with Mattie, but comes to the realization that he must stay because he doesn’t have the money to start a new life with Mattie. He also feels guilty because Zeena would have no one to care for her and no means to support herself.
Ethan, against Zeena’s wishes, decides to take Mattie to the train station himself. On the way there, they lament over their separation and stop at a hill where they had planned to go sledding before Zeena’s early return. The hill is a steep and curved slope with a big elm tree at the bottom. They decide to take the sled ride that they had planned before they part ways. Walking back up the hill, they embrace with a kiss and Mattie suggests that go down again, this time going straight into the elm tree so that they would “never have to leave each other any more.” Ethan agrees, and they go down the hill once more and right into that elm tree. Their wish to not leave each other comes true—but not in the way that either had envisioned. Ethan turns into the mangled man described in the first chapter, Mattie ends up paralyzed, and Zeena now has to take care of both of them. In the final chapter, the visitor describes when he first sees all three of them as he enters the Frome house on the night of the blizzard, and how twenty years of suffering in this tragic situation have sapped the life out of all of them.
Ethan Frome is considered by many to be Wharton’s most tragic novel and it varies from her other works in that it portrays simple people in a small New England village rather than aristocrats. A couple of themes that make this novel as interesting today as it was when it was published in 1911 are the struggle between personal happiness and a person’s sense of duty or responsibility and how a person’s environment, in this instance the landscape and poverty, can have a negative effect on his/her emotional well-being.
