Victim In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

Stuck on a farm, forced to deal with the eventual death of both his parents and lost in the beauty of the house maid Mattie Silver, Ethan Frome is a victim in Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome. Throughout the novel, Wharton highlights the circumstances Frome's faces that lead him to his incident on the sled when Mattie and he crash into a tree. Wharton begins Frome’s journey of poor circumstances when his father dies and he is left in Starkfield to tend for his sick mother while still emotionally stricken. His life is further trampled by his deteriorating love for his wife Zeena. After falling in love with his house maid Mattie Silver, he reflects upon the true nature of his love that he had for Zeena and comes to the conclusion that he was rushed into it due to the circumstances. The accumulation of his mother's illness and …show more content…
The accumulative emotional stress Frome faces leads the reader to believe Wharton undoubtedly portrays the main character as a victim of tragic circumstances, largely due to his monotonous lifestyle. The death of his father and the subsequent illness of his mother forces Ethan to return to Starkfield and ends his further education. Besides the emotional toll which Frome faces due to the loss of his father, he receives little income farming due to the long harsh winters Starkfield endures. Wharton describes the winter by saying it, “shut down on Starkfield, and… a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale sky,” when elaborating on the conditions Ethan must face (14). The depiction of the brutal Starkfield winters continues as Wharton describes the win, “the cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy