Ethan Hawke

Edith Wharton was the author of Ethan Frome and many other celebrated novels. She was born in into a wealthy family in New York on January 24, 1862. The third child and only daughter of George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, the young Edith spent much of her childhood in Europe, mainly France, Germany, Italy. There she spent most of her time developing both her gift for languages as well as a deep appreciation for beauty – in art, architecture and literature. Returning to New York in…

One of Ethan Frome’s centric ideas is that Ethan retreats from life into a vision. He escapes his reality to enjoy a few blissful moments in his dream, but never acts to make that dream come true. Harmon Gow says, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away”(Wharton 6). While having every reason to leave Starkfield and his querulous wife, the man doesn’t. Ethan’s moral and social values combined with his indecisiveness cause him to retreat from life into a…

In the novel, Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton uses the country setting of Starkfield. The name “Starkfield” gives the reader a cold, hard impression of the snowy New England setting. Wharton conveys Starkfield as a place of primitivism and ignorance because of its isolation and bitterly cold climate. Ethan Frome, the protagonist, is a subject to his environment as he lives a cold, cyclic life. However, Ethan isn’t the only one who is affected by his environment, as Zeena and Mattie also live in…

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…

Modeled after Edith Wharton's novella of the same name, the 1993 adaptation of Ethan Frome does a pleasant job in retelling the original story. In the film, as in the novella, Ethan Frome depicts the story of a scandalous love triangle between Ethan (Liam Neeson), a farmer, Zeena (Joan Allen), Ethan’s sickly wife, and Mattie (Patricia Arquette), Zeena’s caretaker set in a dull New England town. These three characters, all with very different in personalities, trapped in a claustrophobic…

For example, Edith Wharton repeatedly uses motifs to highlight important pieces in her novella. Specifically, Wharton involves the motifs man as a victim of fate, snow and cold, and the power of silence and isolation to create greater meaning in Ethan Frome. Undoubtedly, the motif man as a victim of fate shows up repeatedly to add depth to Edith Wharton’s short novel.…

like where the patient lives and Similarly, the setting of the novella Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton contributes to a deeper meaning other than a description of the place where Wharton stages the story. Undoubtedly, Edith Wharton uses the setting to illuminate the qualities of Naturalism, create symbolism, and develop the persona of Ethan Frome in her novella of the same name. Certainly, Edith Wharton’s use of setting in Ethan Frome categorizes the novella as a literary work in…

In the essay Pierce uses numerous rhetorical devices and uses them at the right time to make the essay more effective with a condescending diction and a long and involved syntax, which also helped set the conversational tone and serious mood. This essay had numerous rhetorical devices throughout the essay, in fact there is a rhetorical device in the first line, “Once upon a time” (Pierce, Line 1), this is cliche as “Once upon a time” is very used and familiar phase and the reader knows that it…

In the book Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, a man named Ethan who lives on his family’s farm with no hope of leaving, struggles to support and to love his wife. When he begins to fall for his wife’s cousin who is helping out in the house during the midst of a cold depressing winter, she begins to turn it into a winter wonderland. Many aspects of the book lead up to the suicide attempt of Mattie and Ethan; it all starts with Mattie turning down Denis Eady and then Ethan kissing the cloth.…

to her that she wouldn’t use it, keeping it for storage. While yelling at both Mattie and Ethan, her “voice br[eaks] and two small tears h[a]ng from her lashless lids [that] ran slowly down her cheeks” (Wharton 68-69). Zeena was always described as coldhearted without emotion.…