WAS EVER AN individual as cruelly tested as Ethan Frome? Tormented by obligation and duty which trap him in one hell, passion eventually places him in another, even more unforgiving one. This is a tale guaranteed to unsettle all who read it; it is also Edith Wharton's finest achievement. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton (1911)
All too often regarded, not entirely unfairly, as a slavish disciple of Henry James, Wharton, best known as a satirical observer of the upper-class New York society into which she was born, set her heartbreaking novella in the bleak farming landscape of a rural Massachusetts that at times feels closer to the Canadian wilderness.
The grim fatalistic power of the narrative surpasses the irony of another major work, The Age of Innocence (1920), in which love is destroyed by the kind of people "who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage".
Hardworking Frome is not without courage. When an outsider, the narrator, had first arrived some years earlier in the small town of Starkfield, he noticed Ethan Frome: " . . . the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man."
It was not merely his great height - the locals tended to be tall, "it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain." Bit by bit the narrator pieces together, courtesy of the chatty townsfolk, Frome's story and the appalling legacy of an accident which occurred some twenty-four years earlier.
The narrative device of a visitor becoming privy to events occurring years earlier which have become part of local history has echoes of Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Wharton weighs every word and draws her characters with precision. The narrator's curiosity sets the scene and establishes some sense of the small rural community. When the town's horses fall ill to an epidemic, the only potential mount still healthy happens to be Frome's old bay. The narrator's urgent need of transport brings him to Frome. Poor weather causes Frome to invite the narrator to stay the night. Then Wharton allows the drama to unfold through a vivid flashback to Frome's youth as imagined by the narrator.
Wharton the city writer reveals the eye of a poet when she describes the winter landscape through which the eager young Ethan Frome walks: "The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead."
Within sentences Frome emerges as having something in common with Hardy's Jude; Frome had been at college but his father's death had put an end to his studies. His mother's illness had brought his cousin Zeena into the household to care for her. Ethan Frome thanked his cousin, some years his senior, for her devotion, he married her.
The young Ethan Frome walking through the snow has a lightness of heart; he is on his way to collect his wife's young cousin Mattie Silver from a dance. Their mutual fondness is obvious. Wharton magnificently balances the contrast between this tenderness and the misery of Frome's marriage. Zeena has decided she is ailing from a number of illnesses, is obsessed with her health and rules the household with a snide viciousness. Her overnight absence caused by a visit to yet another doctor alerts Frome to the possibility of a very different life.
Anticipation underlies each casual exchange, each gesture. The sexual tension is obvious as is Frome's romantic sense of decency. All expectations falter with the sudden return of Zeena. The characterisation of the vindictive wife is a triumph for Wharton. Zeena's new plans make Frome, caught between passion and honour, determined to act. When he responds to Mattie's despairing plea, the outcome is catastrophic, laced with a chilling irony only too true to life.
• This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon
