Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on “Mute Melancholy” Ethan Frome)

“The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield…. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. 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.”—Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

I should have written about Ethan Frome in September, on what would have been the centennial of its publication by Scribner’s, but the date slipped by. Perhaps it’s for the best: Ever since I read this as a high-school freshman 37 years ago this month, it’s impressed me as the most wintry of fiction.

The 1993 film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novella was a major disappointment. It had all the hallmarks of a production that would have come close to matching its high literary quality, especially with the leading actors in the rural love triangle: Liam Neeson as Ethan Frome, Joan Allen as his shrewish wife Zeena, and Patricia Arquette as their pretty young servant, Mattie Silver. Unfortunately, the pacing was glacial, a far cry from the original source’s concentrated, searing plot.

The description above alone is highly cinematic, filled with precise, economically selected details that accumulate to heavy symbolism.

Consider the name of the village: Starkfield. Can you think of a name more resonant in classic American literature? It evokes an environment in which everything is stunted. Production for both crops and mills is meager, and the barrenness extends to the Fromes’ marriage, which has produced no children (Zeena, several years older than her husband, is constantly sickly) and only a joyless fidelity that is no substitute for love.

The above description of Frome, coming from the novella’s prologue, is preceded by another in which the narrator is brought up short by the sight of the taciturn farmer, “the ruin of a man,” characterized by “a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain—which, we’ll discover shortly, implies the restrictions imposed by Frome’s marriage.

Frome’s bearskin is “worn”—i.e., tattered, beaten-down, defeated. His silence during his drive practically becomes absorbed into the larger “mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe.” The subdued repetitions (Frome’s “silence” and the “mute” landscape, “melancholy” and “woe”) work in counterpoint to the talk about him in the town. Most ironically, the surprising and grim conclusion overturns nearly everything that Harmon Gow had hinted.

The most natural detail in this description might also be the most symbolic. Ethan’s bay, we are told, is “hollow-backed.” Similar to the term “broken-backed,” this implies that the horse is staggering beneath a crushing weight, just as Ethan is in his daily existence. The impact of burdens, on both the horse and its master, is profound: “hollow-backed” is a common equine deformity (a back curved abnormally downward), reflecting Frome’s own disability.

The narrator is driven in Frome’s sleigh, the vehicle that, by the story’s end, will lead to the farmer’s death-in-life. At the same time, Wharton cannot simple promote a weakling pummeled by circumstance. A tragedy requires a hero, someone whose strength makes inevitable his decision to rebel against fate. And so, she provides a quick suggestion of latent possibility, a “brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero”—a Berkshires Achilles.

Such a hero must be strong indeed even to think of defying the bonds of society’s conventions. Wharton memorably evokes Frome’s failure to remake his world because it is a fictional incarnation of her own. Three years before the novel’s publication, in an effort to break free from her unhappy marriage, she had embarked on an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. (Indeed, the first initials of the novella’s lovers clue us in to their fictional inspirations: Ethan=Edith, Mattie=Morton.)

One might ask how Wharton, a product of the New York aristocracy, could write so convincingly of the Berkshire poor. It’s easy enough to ascribe it to imagination (and you can practically hear Wharton guffawing in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, over the reviewers who stated, incorrectly, that she had never seen the Berkshires before she wrote about them). But, if she might not have been able to understand Ethan Frome’s economic plight, Wharton understood the psychological bonds that restricted and deformed her failed hero all too well.