As we get ready to head back to school, Acculturated is reevaluating some of the “classic” books routinely assigned to children to read during the school year. Do they still deserve to be granted the label of “classics”? Are there better books kids could be reading? And what ideological and cultural messages are these books really sending our children?
There was a memorable collective groan from my classmates every day as we trudged into 10th-grade English to discuss the latest chapter of Ethan Frome. “Froooooome!” went the refrain, the title character lending itself well to our expressions of despair. Everyone hated it.
There was no obvious reason why we should despise Edith Wharton’s 1911 novel about a sad-sack Yankee farmer. After all, high-school reading lists are full of grimness: Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka. For some reason, the modern English curriculum can be kind of a downer.
But the process of getting through every disquisition of Ethan Frome’s inner turmoil, every tortured rationalization he comes up with, every depressing description of the stark New England landscape, was especially unbearable. The New York Times’ contemporary review of the novel called it a “cruel, compelling, haunting story” and a “grim tale of a bud of a romance ice-bound and turned into a frozen horror.” Hard to believe the book didn’t thrill us Millennials.
Ethan Frome opens with a frame story introduced by an unnamed narrator living temporarily in fictional Starkfield, Massachusetts. For some tenuous and narratively convenient reasons, the narrator becomes obsessed with figuring out the life story of a mysterious local, a gangly, sullen farmer with a limp named Ethan Frome. After meeting and gaining Frome’s confidence, the narrator endeavors to discover the truth behind the infamous “smash-up” that has left our ignominious hero physically and emotionally broken.
Many years before, when the bulk of the novel takes place, we learn Ethan had fallen in love with Mattie, the cousin of his dying wife, Zeena. Mattie lives with the Fromes as a housekeeper, but Ethan longs for more. Mattie, it turns out, is into it, too. What follows are a couple hundred pages of melodrama, starring Ethan as the stoic but tortured Yankee, Mattie as an alluring ingénue, and Zeena as the hectoring, put-upon wife.
When Zeena finally realizes what’s going on, she decides to send her cousin away, and Ethan appears to have no choices. He can’t leave the sickly Zeena to tend to a failing farm, and he doesn’t have the money besides. But Ethan also can’t stand the thought of living without Mattie. So as a farewell outing, the two would-be lovers take a sled on a nearby hill. Mattie and Ethan agree to kill themselves by sledding directly into a tree (that’s the “smash-up”), but both survive. Back in the present, the narrator discovers that Zeena is no longer sick and is taking care of the now-bedridden Mattie and lame Ethan.
Wharton’s message alternated between a kind of Puritan-tinged karma and ironic nihilism. Ethan Frome has been dealt an awful hand: barren farmland, a life spent caring for sick parents then a sick wife, abandoned studies in engineering, and the emotional pang of a forbidden love. Are we supposed to see his arc, including and especially his failed attempt at release via suicide, as tragic?
Given Zeena’s own seemingly fatal condition, Ethan’s plight is difficult to sympathize with. Take this gem, after Zeena tells Ethan she’s sending Mattie away:
All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. For a moment such a flame of hate rose in him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her.
Ethan is understandably angry, but he also never stops to think about how Zeena must feel seeing her husband in love with another woman living in their own house. Ethan is temperamental and whiny, bitter and self-centered. He can’t see a young couple happily enjoying each other without feeling a “pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.” He judges the whole world against his own pathetic lot and wallows in self-pity. On second thought, Ethan sounds exactly like someone a teenager might relate to.
So why are we supposed to care about Ethan Frome’s melodrama? Perhaps because Wharton wants him to demonstrate that life is a cruel joke. Having been forced to read her miserable soap opera, I’m inclined to agree.
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