Ethan_Frome__a_Literary_Soap_Opera

One may look to All My Children to get his or her daily drama, but if one wants a the true Jerry Springer experience, then an hour or two must be contributed to reading into the sex, scandal, and sin of Ethan Frome. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a novel using symbols for lies, lust, and love. Wharton’s personal life takes form in the symbols of Ethan Frome. Her life was one filled with sexual dissatisfaction in her marriage and scandal when she had an affair. Wharton uses symbols for sex and tragedy to illustrate her personal life. In Ethan Frome, readers are faced with watching Ethan and Zeena’s marriage slowly malfunction and fall apart at the seams. The shattering of their marriage is symbolized through the pickle dish on which Mattie serves dinner to Ethan. The pickle dish is an item that Zeena cherishes. It was a wedding gift from her aunt and she keeps it up on the top shelf on the china cabinet so nothing can happen to it. This indicates that Zeena appreciates her marriage with Ethan and does not want anyone to harm it. Then Mattie, the interloper who would reintroduce sexuality to Ethan's life, takes the pickle dish down and, as a result, falls from the table and shatters. This symbolizes how Mattie’s interference in Ethan’s marriage caused Zeena and him to fall apart. “Once it is broken, it represents Mattie and Ethan’s disloyalty.” Wharton also uses these symbols to provide a glimpse into her personal life. Wharton’s disloyalty to her husband, his “diagnosis as a manic depressive and his increasing instability” led to the couple’s divorce in 1913” (Wolff). Wharton’s scandal lies, and eventual downfall of her marriage parallels that of Ethan’s sin. Edith Wharton uses the color “red” to symbolize sex, scandal and affection throughout the entirety of Ethan Frome. It is whenever Ethan and Mattie are alone together that Mattie is described as having some red object somewhere on her frame. For example, when Ethan and Mattie are outside the church, Mattie is wearing a “cherry-coloured scarf” (Wharton 20). Also when they are alone together on the night that Zeena is out of town, Mattie is illustrated as wearing “her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her neck; but through her hair she had run a streak of crimson ribbon” (Wharton 54). It is not known if Mattie is wearing red when Ethan and Mattie are not alone together. This symbolizes how Mattie and Ethan’s affection for each other is kept clandestine when others are around, but as soon as they are alone the feeling are revealed. It may also be pointed out that in her descriptions of the setting when they are alone together, Wharton does not utilize any color other than red. Outside the church, “the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow,” (Wharton 18). While alone at the Frome Household, Mattie is wearing “darkish stuff” until her red ribbon is noted. Readers do not see any color other than the red. This is also a symbol for Ethan’s passion for Mattie. Ethan is blinded by his adoration for her, and cannot see anything else when he is alone with her. The other beauties of the world have no affect over Ethan when he is alone with Mattie, all he can see and feel is her beauty. Red is also seen on Ethan himself. According to the narrator of the story, there is a “red gash across Ethan Frome’s forehead” (Wharton 3). This red scar serves as a Scarlet Letter for Ethan. He must walk around with the proof of his sin, the proof of his scandal, basically written across his forehead. The hue of the scar also refers back to Mattie and his weakness for her. Lastly, the color of the pickle dish is a symbol for sex and scandal. The pickle dish is made of a “gray-red glass” (Wharton 54). “The redness of the dish suggests not just that Zeena's sexuality is on the shelf but also that Mattie's sexuality is replacing Zeena's” (Hattenhauer). The scarlet shade of the dish suggests that the attraction between Mattie and Ethan is coming between the marriage of Ethan and Zeena, therefore, causing it to break. Wharton allowed a glimpse of her personal life to show through in the usage of these symbols. In 1907, four years before her divorce with her husband, Edith Wharton “began a deeply satisfying three-year love affair with Mortin Fullerton” (Wolff 72). Wharton’s contentment and guilt for her affair took form in Wharton’s usage of red as a symbol. Edith Wharton’s intimate life with her husband is also manifested through the usage of the dead cucumber vine hanging on the front door of the Frome house and the pickles served to him by Mattie. According to Margaret B. McDowell, Edith Wharton and her husband “never achieved satisfying sexual expression with each other” (McDowell 4). Wharton’s use of the hanging, dead cucumber vine is a symbol for Ethan’s (along with her) disappointing erotic encounters. As Ethan and arriving at the house on the night of the church dance, Ethan sees a shriveled vine on the front door. The shriveled, dead cucumber vine makes Ethan envision and hope for Zeena’s death for it is an “emblem[s] of a lost or past fertility” (Waid). The usage of the dangling cucumber vine suggests that Ethan and Zeena’s sexual life is also something that is dead and dangling above Ethan’s head for him to see every day as he walks into his house. Wharton transitions from her disappointment in her unsatisfactory sexual activity with her husband to her happiness in her affair with Mortin Fullerton. Wharton shows this contentment through the pickles which Mattie serves to Ethan at dinner on the night they are alone together. The pickles, as described in the novel, are Ethan’s “favorite pickles” (Wharton 54). One can visualize these pickles as being plum, moist, and inviting. This symbolizes the sexual desire between Ethan and Mattie. Unlike the dead, dry and unseen passion between Ethan and his wife, the fervor between Mattie and Ethan is alive and tender. This transition from Ethan’s nonexistent sexual intercourse with Zeena to his passionate desire for Mattie also corresponds to Wharton’s own intimacies from her absent love with her husband to the exhilarating ecstasy from Morton. The infamous elm tree into which Mattie and Ethan crash on the night where they decide to end their lives plays a huge role in the symbolism of Ethan Frome. The elm tree is a “representation of sexual temptation” (Napierkowski 130). Mattie and Ethan are awestruck by the huge elm tree even when they know two of their friends almost died by crashing into it. They are drawn to the danger of the elm tree just as they are drawn to the danger of each other. They know that their affection for each other will only result in a miserable crash, but they continue to take the risk. Another symbol used on this terrible night where these “star-crossed lovers took their life,” is the sled on which Ethan and Mattie coast down into the elm tree. The sled is a symbol of their relationship. The sled “is borrowed, one that, like their passion, ‘technically they have no right to’” (Napierkowski 130). Wharton uses these symbols to show the consequences of her scandal in her life. “The juxtaposition of love and suffering in Ethan Frome……reflect[s] in some degree the intensity that Wharton gained from sexual experience as well as some of the ambivalence she experienced in love” (McDowell 54). Winter and cold are key symbols in the writing of Ethan Frome. “Cold is an absence, a diminishment, a dwindling, and finally a death” (Wolff 76). The season in which the story takes place symbolizes the life of Ethan Frome: from the death of his father causing him to leave his studies which he loved, to the illness of his wife causing his massive debt. Winter is used as a symbol to make the reader not only know what is going on but to feel the bitter, ice cold of Ethan’s long and depressing life. The use of winter also parallels with her own mournful life. “An overview of Wharton’s necessarily includes her unhappy forty-year relationship with her mother, her twenty-eight year marriage troubled by unresolved sexual dissatisfaction…and her husband’s worsening mental illness after 1903” (McDowell 2). Wharton expresses the adversity she had to overcome through the threshold from the outside world with Mattie into the Frome household with Zeena. On the night of the church dance that Ethan escorted Mattie back to his house, he struggled against passing over the threshold into his house because Zeena was standing in the frame of the door. However, on the night that Zeena was in a different town and Mattie stood in the frame in the exact same manner as Zeena, he showed no struggle in passing over the threshold. In fact, he stepped right over it with great ease. This symbolizes the internal conflict Ethan must endure every day knowing that he can be with someone he loves when he on the outside or stay with someone who needs him on the inside. There comes a point in the novel when Ethan almost decides to break free of the threshold and commit himself to the outside world with Mattie, but then he decides against his plan for he knows he would be signing a death slip for his wife’s life. Wharton’s usage of the threshold in Ethan Frome as a symbol of hardship also parallels with the hardship of Wharton’s life. “Every passage of this threshold entailed a momentous and terrible struggle” in Edith Wharton’s life (Wolff 78). Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is, overall, a reflection of her own dramatic and depressing life. She lets her readers take a glimpse into her personal sex life with sexual and tragic symbols for her failed relationship with her husband and her successful affair with Morton Fullerton. Edith Wharton’s “star-crossed lovers” in Ethan Frome create a dramatic, nail-biting literary soap opera. Works Cited Cicacarelli, Sheryl and Marie Rose Napierkoswki, eds. Novels for Students. 29 vols. Farmington Hills: Gale Research, 122-143 Hattenhauer, Darryl "Wharton's Ethan Frome." Explicator 51.4 (1993): 226. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. McDowell, Margarett B. Edith Wharton, Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Waid, Candace, and Harold Bloom "CANDACE WAID ON A VISION OF UNRELENTING INFERTILITY." Bloom's Major Novelists: Edith Wharton (2002): 51-53. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. New York: Charle's Scribner's Sons, 1911. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Ethan Frome: ‘This Vision of His History.’” Modern Critical Views: Edith Wharton. Ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsed House Publishers, 1986. 65-87