Ethan Frome

Mattie Silver is a cousin of Zeena’s who moves from Stamford to Starkfield in her early twenties. She grew up in a middle-class household, but her father wasn’t as well-off as he pretended, and her parents’ death left her penniless and searching for work. Following brief stints as a bookkeeper and store clerk, Mattie ended up boarding with the Fromes in exchange for her services as a housekeeper. She isn’t especially good at domestic work, and her shyness makes her fearful of Zeena’s criticisms. Nevertheless, over the course of the next year, Mattie recovers the health and vitality she lost as a wage laborer, becoming a vibrant young woman with dark hair and eyes. Her surname hints at both her vivacity and her kind and earnest nature by suggesting bright, untarnished metal.

Mattie’s youth and evident enjoyment of life powerfully impress Ethan, rekindling the hopes and desires he set aside in leaving college and marrying Zeena. Ethan also feels a deep personal connection to Mattie, who seems to share his intelligence and sensitivity; she is “quick to learn, but forgetful and dreamy” (24), she responds as strongly as he does to the beauty of the New England landscape, and she shows interest in Ethan’s scientific teachings. Since Wharton depicts Mattie at a double remove—through the narrator’s reconstruction of Ethan’s impressions—it’s hard to know how accurate this assessment of her is. It is notable, however, that Mattie is the one who first proposes suicide; presumably, she would only do so if her love for Ethan was deeply felt.

The suicide attempt changes Mattie dramatically, leaving her paralyzed from the neck down and aging her prematurely; at roughly 45, she’s gone completely gray, and her face is “bloodless and shrivelled […] with swarthy shadows sharpening the nose and hollowing the temples” (95). Her injuries, coupled with the experience of depending on her one-time rival for care, have made her even more restless and ill-tempered than Zeena. It’s a central irony of the novel that by trying to escape his wife, Ethan inadvertently turns Mattie into a second version of her.

Zeena Frome is Ethan’s wife and cousin; the two met when Zeena, whose name was then Pierce, came to Starkfield to help Ethan care for his sick mother. Her efforts as a nurse, coupled with Ethan’s loneliness, persuaded him to propose to her after his mother’s death, but the relationship quickly soured; Zeena became increasingly hypochondriacal and began using her sickness (real or imagined) to bully and manipulate her husband.

Villainous as Zeena seems, there are some reasons to pity her. Her physical appearance indicates that her health problems aren’t completely fabricated (though the fact that she’s later able to care for Mattie suggests they can’t be too severe); Zeena is 35 at the time the main narrative takes place but wears false teeth and has a “drawn and bloodless” face (39). Wharton also strongly implies that Zeena recognizes her husband’s attraction to Mattie and perhaps suspects that he’s considering leaving her. This point is especially significant given the novel’s historical context: At the time, the outlook for an abandoned, aging woman with no income of her own would have been bleak. Furthermore, wives’ powerlessness relative to their husbands undoubtedly created an incentive to leverage whatever tools they had—in this case, illness—to their advantage.

Ultimately, however, the reader can only access Zeena through the eyes of both Ethan and the narrator. This is true of several characters, but it’s especially noteworthy in Zeena’s case, not only because Ethan has cause to dislike her, but also because her most defining feature in his eyes is perhaps her inscrutability—that is, the fact that she can’t be read, understood, or sympathized with. Zeena speaks in a monotone voice, has a habitually “shut face,” and rarely says exactly what she means. For Ethan, who craves intimate connection, these characteristics amount to a deliberate refusal to allow him access to her inner world and only deepen his resentment of her.

Somewhat unusually, the first-person narrator of Ethan Frome is not the work’s protagonist. In fact, he is a relatively minor character, appearing only in the book’s Prologue and its final pages. As an engineer assigned a job at a nearby power plant, the narrator feels an outsider’s curiosity towards Starkfield and provides a (theoretically) disinterested perspective on its residents.

Whether the narrator truly is objective and reliable is debatable, not least because he’s had to piece together Ethan’s story from several different accounts, along with his own conjectures. This situation raises several questions, including why he takes such an interest in Ethan and how his own prejudices might influence the story he tells about him. The fact that the narrator is a well-educated engineer is relevant in both instances because it links him to the more cosmopolitan, wealthy, and technologically advanced world that Starkfield is cut off from. His curiosity about Starkfield could therefore be seen as condescending or voyeuristic, and his sympathy for Ethan as projection; since Ethan shares the narrator’s interest in science and engineering, it would be natural for the narrator to conclude that Ethan is sensitive and intelligent in a way Starkfield’s other residents aren’t.

Andrew Hale, a “ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly double-chin” (43), is Starkfield’s builder; he’s also the father of Ned Hale, who is Ruth Varnum’s fiancé and, later, husband. Hale’s work brings him into frequent contact with Ethan, who sells lumber to him and at one point asks him for an advance payment. However, while Hale likes to give the appearance of prosperity, he’s actually pressed for money much of the time: “[T]hough he did a fairly good business it was known that his easygoing habits and the demands of his large family frequently kept him what Starkfield called ‘behind’” (43). Knowing both this and Hale’s generous nature, Ethan is all the more ashamed when he briefly considers borrowing money from him under false pretenses.

Ruth Varnum is the daughter of Starkfield’s sole lawyer; she is a close friend of Mattie Silver’s and the fiancée (and later wife) of Ned Hale. Historically, the Varnums were one of the town’s more well-to-do families, but their fortunes have declined by the time Ruth, now middle-aged and a widow, takes in the narrator as a lodger. Nevertheless, the narrator describes her as retaining “a certain wan refinement” (11), which he suggests gives her particular insight into events in Starkfield: “[T]he accident of a finer sensibility and a little more education had put just enough distance between herself and her neighbours to enable her to judge them with detachment” (11).

Harmon Gow is a Starkfield native who tells the narrator the basics of Ethan Frome’s story; Gow used to drive a stagecoach and consequently came to know “the chronicle of all the families on his line” (8). Nevertheless, the narrator is dismissive of Gow’s ability to do Ethan’s story justice, saying he “developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted […] [but] the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps” (10).