The Theme Of Altruism In Ethan Frome By Edith Wharton

Altruism is always an admirable trait, but as with any other trait, if altruism is taken to an extreme, it can result in consequences such as giving away so many resources that one would be unable to provide for himself and being unwilling to risk harming others. This theme is portrayed in the short novel Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, by means of the main protagonist and tragic hero, Ethan Frome. Due to his tragic flaw of selflessness, Ethan fails to muster up the courage to stand up for himself, which dooms him into the final demise, in which he and Mattie Silver cripple themselves in a sledding crash. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Ethan possesses the tragic flaw of excessive selflessness. One detail to support this is when he

Even from the prologue it is stated that Ethan couldn't bear abandoning anyone who needs help, including his father, mother, and wife (Wharton, 2). This foreshadows the choices that Ethan made and his reasons for remaining in such a quagmire of a situation when he was shown to be quite capable and ambitious in his prime. As such, shortly after, it is bluntly written that, "[his] father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's studies[...]" (Wharton, 13). Due to his decision to take over his father's failing farm and heal his mother, he had to cease his education, which would have allowed him to pursue his dreams of an intellectual life. Additionally, since Ethan couldn't handle the ordeals of managing the barn, tending to his mother, and detecting her pervasive silence, he asked his cousin Zeena for assistance (Wharton, 36). Because her relative vitality and intelligence refreshed the atmosphere of the house, he felt enamored by her presence, and requested that she marry him, under the impression that she would be smart enough to help him with his dream of "[being] an engineer, and to [living] in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things" (Wharton, 36-37). Nonetheless, Zeena gradually became as silent and sickly as Ethan's

Throughout the book, Ethan is vigilant about maintaining Zeena's ignorance about his relationship with Mattie, mainly to prevent her from going through Zeena's wrath, which would likely result in her termination from any sort of job opportunity and destitution. As a result of this, Ethan's horror is apparent when Zeena informs him of her plans to replace Mattie with a more competent servant, to which he responds by begging her to not let her flesh and blood wallow in the streets penniless (Wharton, 63). This triggers Ethan's full-blown anger towards Zeena, which in the end, only cumulated to a clutter of ineffectual words that couldn't sway Zeena's decision or Mattie's fate. Even when considering the most drastic solutions, such as migrating to the West with Mattie alone, he realizes that not only does he not have the money to travel there, but that he would risk Zeena laboring with the farm work in feeble health and leeching funds off of the very friends that were so kind to him before (Wharton, 79). Due to these obstacles, Ethan forces himself to give up on any sort of escape due to the inconveniences he would cause his friends and family. When Ethan does admit to Mattie that their love was virtually impossible, Ethan emotionally implodes under the pressure of not being able to save Mattie from being replaced and accepts Mattie's