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Katelin Grande
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English 11 H
20 December 2015
The Central Purpose of Ethan Frome
The beginning of Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome has always nagged at me. I have read the texts numerous times, and I end up glossing over the first lines, or more accurately forgiving the narrator them, in order to consume the rest of the text without prejudice. However I always feel like fraud, as is my nature to move towards the parts of a text that trouble me.
I am not the only reader who has struggled with the unnamed narrator’s early revelation that he “had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” Cynthia Wolff, in A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, argues that readers must ask themselves why the novel “begins insistently and obtrusively” and why
“Wharton would begin thus, assaulting us with the narrator’s presence in the very first word.”
Wolff’s strong diction expresses my impression as well: the insistent and obtrusive assault is the roadblock to Zeena, Mattie, and Ethan’s actual story. It is the up-front and stark admission that the upcoming story is being mediated by a person who doesn’t have firsthand experience with it, and further, that the narrator is cobbling it together from a variety of sources who have a variety of motivations and a variety of versions. Wolff’s assertion that the text is evidence of “an extraordinarily literary self-consciousness” is valid; Wharton is signaling to us that she is constructing this story, and that we are twice removed from it: first through the narrator, and second through the people who are relaying the story to the narrator.

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The idea of the frame story and “literary self-consciousness” is characteristic of Modernist texts. And many critics agree that the frame narrative allows Ethan Frome to reside on the side of
Modernism, or at least balance on the border of it, but R. Hovey takes issue with Wolff’s extreme view of the narrator. Hovey criticizes Wolff’s claim that the true story of Ethan Frome becomes irrelevant once the reader begins to ask “who in the world is this ghastly guide to whom we must submit as we read the tale”? To be fair, Wolff’s assertion that the narrator’s story is questionable at best and completely unreliable at worst is within the realm of reasonableness. After all, the the end of the Prologue when he enters the Frome house, the diction once again relays the subjectivity of the narration: “I found the clue to Ethan’s story, and began to put together this vision of his story.”
The narrator doesn’t discover the key to the truth, he discovers a “clue” to “this vision,” surely suggesting that there are other visions of the story, one of which is closest to the truth.
So while the question of the importance narration remains on the table, Robin Peel offers another perspective. While she concedes that the text can be “read as a narrative about narrating,” she further urges us to consider that Wharton “never lets go of her primary concern, which is not the abstraction of consciousness or self-reflexivity but the impact of social and economic pressure on human behavior.” If one ignores, like I have in the past, the framing of the text, Peel’s assertion is easy to adopt. But it nags at me still.
I cannot speak to Wharton’s primary purpose, but it makes sense to me that these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. The narrator of the text, whether recounting a tru-ish story or a figment of his wild, winter-fed imagination, reflects concerns and issues that setting support. The text, a subtle and carefully-crafted view into the lives of people living in a snow-blanketed Northeastern town, allows readers multiple ways to engage it. Perhaps Wharton wasn’t so single-minded in her purpose after all.

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Works Cited
Hovey, R. "B. Ethan Frome: A Controversy About Modernizing It." American Literary Realism,
1870-1910 19.1 (Fall 1986): 4-20. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism . Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 84. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Criticism Online . Web.
20 Dec. 2015.
Peel, Robin. "Ethan Frome, Modernism, and a Political Argument (1911)." Apart from Modernism:
Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction Before World War I . Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2005. 123-144. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review . Ed. Tom
Burns. Vol. 136. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Criticism Online . Web. 20 Dec. 2015.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Article by Cynthia Griffin Wolff." A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith
Wharton
Online
. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Oxford University Press, 1977. Rpt. in
Literary Criticism . Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 27. Detroit: Gale, 1988.
. Web. 20 Dec. 2015.
Twentieth-Century
Literature Criticism