It’s impossible for me to point to particular selections or passages from this novel to illustrate my point, but I’m losing a bit of empathy for the main character, Ethan Frome.
Intrigued by him in the narrator’s introduction as a tall, crippled, silent man who willingly helps her/him but lets slip only bits and pieces of his background, in finding out more from the chapters that lead us back into his younger days I’m withdrawing a bit from this man. While we understand that he’s taken with a lovely young cousin of his invalid wife’s who has come to help out, we see only a brief glimpse of the wife’s illness and attitude before we’re hit with this man’s secret desires.
The problem here, and far be it for me to find fault with love, seems to be that Wharton hasn’t established fully the relationship of Ethan and his wife, Zeena, prior to the appearance of Mattie, whom he’s fallen for hard. So when I come to this scene, which is still the opening scene where Ethan walks Mattie home from a dance (it’s slippery out, I guess), I find myself pulling away:
Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the shutterless windows of the house wer dark. A dead cucumber-vine dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and the thought flashed through Ethan’s brain: "If it were there for Zeena–" Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in there bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed… (p.51)
The double whammy here is that without a real description or definition of Zeena’s illness, even that much of it is put on, I’m looking here at a man who wishes his wife were dead because of her appearance. Now I’m sure she’s been a trial for him, and the little I’ve seen of her does make her sound cranky and manipulative, but it’s just, well, it’s just not enough. I believe this relationship between Ethan and Zeena could have been a bit more built up to deserve my understanding of his actions.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology