![]() ![]() As they go down the sledding hill one last time, Ethan steers them toward a large tree with the intent of killing them both, but in the crash he and Mattie are instead badly injured. Zeena, sensing what has occurred, soon resolves to send Mattie away again, and on the last night before her departure, Ethan and Mattie take a sled-ride together. The coming of Zeena’s pretty and sweet-natured young cousin, Mattie, to the Frome household is a magical change in Ethan’s life, and he and Mattie soon fall in love with each other. However, Zeena quickly became a querulous invalid herself, leaving Ethan feeling more unhappy and isolated than ever. This “flashback” traces the younger Ethan’s thwarted desires to leave Starkfield and pursue higher education, and his marriage out of a sense of duty and out of sheer loneliness to a cousin, Zeena, after she came to nurse his dying mother. The majority of the story is the narrator’s imagined reconstruction of Ethan’s youth, based on his incomplete knowledge of the man gained from other townspeople. The text is constructed as a frame story wherein the narrator, an engineer who is temporarily in Starkfield for a project, becomes intrigued with Ethan Frome, a solitary farmer. This novella is set in the village of Starkfield, in western Massachusetts, and the barren, isolated winter landscape that the town’s name connotes is influential to the events and themes of this tragic narrative. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |