Ethan Frome
Background Information
10H English
Ms. Russo
Part I: Biographical Sketch of Edith
Wharton
Edith Wharton was born Edith Jones,
into an upper-class New York City
family in 1862.
She was privately educated by
governesses and tutors, both at home
and abroad.
At an early age she displayed a
marked interest in writing and
literature, a pursuit her socially
ambitious mother attempted to
discourage.
She received a marriage proposal at a
young age, but her prospective in-laws
ended the engagement because they
felt the Jones family was too snobbish.
Then, in 1885, after another broken
engagement, Edith married Edward
Wharton, an older man whom the
Jones family found to be of a suitably
lofty social rank.
The temptations of illicit passion constitute
an undeniable focus of Wharton’s fiction,
and many have pointed to Wharton’s
unhappy marriage as an explanation.
Wharton found temporary solace in her
surreptitious affair with the journalist
Morton Fullerton, which coincided with the
collapse of her marriage.
It was in the wake of this affair and her
ensuing divorce that Wharton wrote many
of her most successful and endearing
works.
Wharton’s fiction was especially
effective at piercing the veil of moral
respectability that sometimes masked
as integrity among the rich.
In her fiction, conforming to social
norms is constantly at odds with a
rejection of conformity.
Ethan Frome (1911) is
one of the few pieces
of Wharton’s fiction
that does not take
place in an urban,
upper-class setting.
Interestingly, Wharton
based the narrative of
the novel on an
accident that occurred
in Lenox,
Massachusetts, where
she traveled
extensively and had
come into contact with
one of the victims of
the accident.
In 1937, after
nearly half a
century of devotion
to the art of fiction,
Wharton died in
her villa near Paris
at the age of
seventy-five.
She remains one of
America’s most
cherished
novelists.
Quotes by Edith Wharton:
“There are two ways of reflecting light: to be the candle or
the mirror that reflects it.”
“True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new
vision.”
“The only way not to think about money is to have a great
deal of it.”
“I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one
contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests
more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery,
than the marriage tie.”
“How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be
‘American’ before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated,
being enlightened, being humane, and having the same
intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?”
Realism & Naturalism as Literary
Movements
Realism is, in art and literature, a term covering a broad
range of views centered on the attempt to depict life as it is
usually experienced, without recourse to miraculous events,
larger-than-life characters, or supernatural intervention.
In a realistic text, the emphasis is on the way things are for
ordinary people, whose behavior and speech mirror their
social position and cultural attitudes.
In this sense, realism is opposed to romance, which
represents life as we would like it to be, or to other antirealist approaches such as expressionism and
impressionism.
A key feature of realist literature is its emphasis on the
author’s objectivity.
Naturalism was a late 19th century
movement in literature and art that
grew out of realism.
The basic effort of naturalism lay in
the attempt to produce a scientifically
accurate depiction of life even at the
cost of representing ugliness and
discord.
Examples of Literature from this
Period:
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, The Age of
Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan
Frome
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage,
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Source Information:
The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Nina Baym, Ed. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1998.
Lathbury, Roger. Realism and Regionalism
(1860-1910): American literature in its
historical, cultural, and social contexts.
New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006.
Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and
Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark
Books, 1999.