"If you know the post office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was." (Wharton) The way the writer portrays Frome puts across a feeling of continuity, as if he was a part of the scenery
In this aspect, the narrator's point-of-view is affecting the story, by giving the novel a sense of realism. (Wharton, 2009) This makes the story seem more credible, because of the way the narrator is telling it
Ethan'll likely touch a hundred…Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away" (Wharton 5)
This illustrates how Ethan is a prisoner of his town's morality. Even a relatively unfeeling Starkfield resident Harmon Gow confides to the first-person narrator of the beginning chapter, regarding Ethan's broken appearance: "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters" (Wharton
This explains the paradox of the novel's construction: as Murad notes, the narrator "enters Ethan's mind, expresses Ethan's thoughts with more sophistication than Ethan could possibly be capable of, and reveals acts and ideas of Ethan's that no one in Starkfield could have known and have been the source of the narrator's information." (Murad 94)
The irony here is that, in some way, Wharton wants Starkfield to feel like a version of hell. Critic Lionel Trilling has suggested that Wharton is engaged in deliberate symbolism with the name of the town; although he does not admire the novel, he claims that "Ethan Frome was admired because it was 'stark' -- its action, we note, takes place in the New England village of Starkville -- and because the fate it describes is relentless and inevitable" (Trilling 332)
Most of the smart ones get away." (Wharton, 2) We are already told that Frome's woeful physical condition can be blamed on Starkfield itself, but there is the additional sly suggestion here that being in Starkfield is indistinguishable from being "dead and in hell
Being homely and sickly, Zeena shows that she cannot live up to this socially-imposed expectation and in a way she has failed her husband for this, making his feelings for Mattie more acceptable to the readers of the period. Mattie is constantly compared or associated in the novel with the color red, which is often connected with sin, fire, and blood and also of passion (Fournier 106)
She declares that it is the most precious thing she owns but in truth she is mourning over the loss of her marriage; not from a feeling of love but impropriety. Wharton does not take a negative stance on the adulterous feelings of the protagonist, nor does she promote his feelings as something good but treats him as a real person in a real world who struggles with the reality of living with social pressure and having his own yearnings (Peel 138)
Since she is a Victorian woman, her major goal in life was to get married and to be a dutiful wife and to not venture outside of the home. The only chance she had in life was in getting married and being over thirty-five she was already considered an old maid, her prospects not helped any by her old appearance and habits (Pennell 108)
The two women are most easily contrasted in the end of the novel when their eventual situations have been discovered. Of the Frome house at the end of the story the narrator says, "I don't see there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down at the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues" (Wharton 77)
Zeena seemed to understand his case at a glance. She laughed at him for not knowing the simplest sick-bed duties and told him to 'go right along out' and leave her to see to things" (Wharton, Chapter 4)
When forced, because of circumstances, to work (Zeena has nothing to live on, if Ethan dies) the 'angel at the hearth' is capable of toil. "Where the conditions of life rendered it inevitable that all the labour of a community should be performed by the members of that community for themselves, without the assistance of slaves or machinery, the tendency has always been rather to throw an excessive amount of social labour on the female" (Schneider 1911)
Though she seems to love him and adores his new wealth, he cannot transform himself into the type of personage Daisy would spend her life with. He does try though; after a physical affair begins, Nick notes that the former "caravansary" of Gatsby's life falls "in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes" (Fitzgerald 90)
The obsession with blackness and darkness, as well as with an extremely rich internal reality that his external world fails to live up to, that is apparent in Ethan From's character can be read as an obsession with suicide, as well. The fateful ride on the sled that leads to Ethan and Mattie's injuries, causing Mattie to take Zeena's place as the infirm female and obliterating Ethan's desires for her -- and in all probability his ability to act on them -- fits with this interpretation nicely (Bernard 180-2)
J. Eckleburg on an advertisement for an oculist who never came to town and the "false promise of Daisy's moneyed voice" (Samuels 786)
The evidence of the way Mattie rekindles his passions appears throughout the book -- it is, indeed, in many ways what the book is about -- but is especially clear when he works up the courage to take her arm in his in order to walk her home: "He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it against her scarf. He would have liked to stand there with her all night in the blackness" (Wharton 49)