Ethan Frome

In Western culture especially, red’s visual intensity and its association with blood have made it the color of love and lust. As the object of Ethan’s desire, Mattie is linked to the color; she wears a red scarf and later a red ribbon, and Wharton often describes her as flushed or blushing. The significance of this symbol is especially evident given the novel’s otherwise bleak color scheme; these flashes of red are virtually all that interrupt the whites, grays, and blacks of the New England winter. Figuratively, the color therefore represents not only Ethan’s feelings for Mattie, but also his related sense that she’s the only “bit of hopeful young life” in an otherwise grim and death-like existence (22).

However, the same associations that link red to desire also tie it to sin, guilt, anger, violence, and danger. Guilt and desire are in fact inseparable for Ethan, since acting on his feelings for Mattie would mean breaking his marriage vows and (if the two ran away together) abandoning his duties to his wife. This is why the pickle dish that Mattie inadvertently breaks is red; the dish was a wedding present for Zeena and Ethan, and by setting it out to “make the supper-table pretty” (71)—and her dinner with Ethan special—Mattie “breaks” Ethan and Zeena’s marriage. Similarly, Ethan and Mattie’s attempted suicide leaves the former with a “red gash” on his forehead, permanently symbolizing his shame as well as the illicit relationship’s violent end.

Sickness and injury are pervasive in Ethan Frome. Although Zeena’s problems may be partly psychosomatic, the physical effects are real; although only 35, she looks like “an old woman,” with lined, “sallow” skin and false teeth. Ethan’s parents also suffered from health problems, as Harmon explains: “Fust his father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain […] Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby” (13). Nor are these problems unique to the Fromes: “Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had ‘troubles’” (61). Ethan and Mattie are initially the exceptions, but they, too, end up disabled after the sled crash.

It is telling that so many of these ailments are psychological or neurological—that is, that they primarily impact the person’s thoughts, feelings, or sensations. Images of death are common in Ethan Frome; one notable example is the cucumber vine that “dangle[s] from the porch [of Ethan’s house] like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death” (32). However, the novel is relatively uninterested in physical death, instead framing its characters’ existence—their poverty, isolation, and despair—as a form of emotional and spiritual death far worse than the real thing; it’s the fact that Ethan will “likely touch a hundred” that the narrator finds so horrifying because “[h]e looks as if he was dead and in hell now” (9). Likewise, the prevalence of illness and injury in Starkfield is inseparable from the town’s decline. The dilapidated buildings—especially Ethan’s “diminished” and gutted farmhouse—reflect not only economic distress, but also the spiritual malaise of the town’s residents.