The Battle Between Moral And Love In Ethan Frome By Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome is a story written by Edith Wharton. The story revolves around the main character Ethan and his battle between moral and love. The story is told by a narrator who is an engineer and from the first glance of Ethan gets interested in his life. The engineer starts asking other residents about Ethan and gets different stories about him.In the story, Ethan lives in a farmhouse located in Starkfield, Massachusetts. In the farmhouse, there is Mattie, who recently arrived and is the caretaker of Ethan's wife Zeena. Mattie is a young, pretty girl while Zenna, on the other hand, is known for having witch like features meaning she’s the opposite of Mattie. Ethan recognizing this and starts being fonder of Mattie. He even starts picking her …show more content…
Ethan is a very quiet, hard-working man, who believes himself to have morals.Ethan was a Puritan meaning he had to have morals, always do the right thing as stated in the bible because that was what puritans believed in “The Bible”. So the act of cheating on your wife and running away from her is against the Puritan culture. That is one of the many reasons Ethan didn’t pull the trigger on his and Mattie’s plan of dying together. He wants to be a good husband and a good Puritan. In pg 7 paragraph 1 it states “ 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”(Wharton 7). This shows us that even the narrator who doesn’t know Ethan at all can predict his character. Ethan’s facial expression showed the narrator a lonely, sad person who was all his life isolated in the cold winters. Meaning that the narrator predicts that the reason for Ethan's character is most likely because of the cold Starkfield winter and not because of his tragedy. …show more content…
Ethan being from a very small poor town always had the dream to go to a big city and become an engineer surprisingly just like the narrator. He went to college but had to stop because of his father death meaning he was the one who now had to take care of the family farmhouse. An isolated farmhouse from the village causing more loneliness for the people in the house.But if the story was told during the warmer seasons then Ethan's dream would have been something along the line of starting a business in Starkfield with the beautiful weather. One of the key catalysts for Ethan not moving away from Starkfield is Zeena. On page 38 paragraph 2 it describes “She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan, she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of their marriage, she developed the “sickliness”(Wharton 38). What this shows us is the actual reasoning for Zeena’s sickness, She doesn’t want to move and the thought of it makes her scared because in a big city she might lose her identity. What this does is it changes the lives of Zenna and Ethan both. Then their relationship wouldn’t have been since Ethan starts to not like Zeena when she starts changing and turning sick. Also, Mattie