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Comparing Age Of Innocence And Ethan Frome By Edith Wharton

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Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome were written both by Edith Wharton as a backlash against romanticism. She subverts the previous expectations of the genre by questioning the nature of love and the idealism of marriage. In Ethan Frome, Ethan is trapped in a marriage with his cousin Zenobia Frome, or Zeena, and his love with Mattie Silver. Meanwhile, in Age of Innocence, Newland Archer is engaged and married to May Welland but truly desires to be with her cousin Ellen Olenska. In these two marriages, Wharton clearly demonstrates that permanent happiness from a perfect marriage is a naive ideal to live up to. In both Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome, the characters’ roles and statuses in society serve to highlight the division in their respective …show more content…

In the typical novel in the romantic period, the power was either equal or distributed towards the man, as was typical for the time. However, Wharton turns this idea on its head by having the female characters control the male lead. In Ethan Frome, Zeena, the hypochondriac housewife, who was seen as weak by the society at the time, manages to have power over her physically strong husband. However, due to the social hierarchy at the time, Zeena is forced to use underhanded means to achieve her goals. She constantly reminds Ethan of her weak stature, also stating that “The doctor says it'll be my death if I go on slaving the way I've had to. He doesn't understand how I've stood it as long as I have” in order to make Ethan as guilty as possible of her treatment. (Ethan Frome 65) However, this constant manipulation by Zeena only leads to weakening the romantic relationship between the two marriages. This plays into a different aspect of the romantic novels: the idea of an everlasting and happy marriage. While Ethan and Zeena are married, they are miserable. Zeena manipulates Ethan to do things for her, while Ethan secretly wants to elope with Maddie. However, even Madie is only using Ethan for job security, as she is afraid that Zeena will throw her out. Finally, when Ethan attempts to “escape” his marriage in a Romeo and Juliet suicide attempt, the epitome of …show more content…

Similarly to the setting of Ethan Frome, Age of Innocence is set is a period where there is a strict power balance and social hierarchy among the people. Thus, Wharton has May use manipulation in order to gain power, as it will keep the appearances of the power balance to outsiders, but in truth gives May the ability to control Newland. For example, May is able to convince Newland to invite certain people, by subtly convincing Newland of their apparent social status, such as when she asks him “but wasn't he a little common?” to get him to not invite the Frenchman. (Age of Innocence) While effective, these strategies are what lead to a rift in their relationship, as Newland feels weak and unable to love his wife as much. Thus, Newland pursues the romantic ideal of eloping with a lover: Ellen. However, it is Newland’s naivete and belief that their romance was ideal that only lead to the failure of the relationship, as Ellen could not live up to these ideals. Thus, The Age of Innocence mocks the romantic ideals of a perfect marriage, by having the marriage be a loveless, manipulative relationship, and the cliche of eloping with a mistress fails due to Newlands

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”(Wharton 3). Because of his loneliness, he asked Zeena to marry him without thinking it through. He had no feelings for her and desperately hoped it would make him feel better. While being married to Zeena, his unhappiness peaked and caused him to fall in love with another girl who was the Fromes’ maid, Mattie Silver. Romance was in the air and most definitely not between Zeena and Ethan.

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In fact, the only reason Ethan and Zeena married each other was for the desperate demand for money due to sickness, first with the poor health of Ethan’s mother and then the sickness of Zeena. They were stuck in a cycle of finding money just to take care of each other, especially since all the debt that accumulated from the farm was now stuck to their name. While some people were constrained by money, others went out to look for ways out, such as in the story, “A Wagner Matinee,” which illustrates Aunt Georgiana, a young Boston music teacher, who decides to marry a younger man named Howard Carpenter. The author explains, “Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad... They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates usually reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery.

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Ethan Frome’s mother becoming ill was the first step toward the destiny that would keep Ethan in Starkfield forever. This destiny required his wife, Zeena, to become sick as well. It was necessary for Ethan to remain there since it would lead him to meet Mattie Silver, who would push him even closer to his fated downfall. Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie’s destinies were tangled together because of the conjoined circumstances that surrounded the three of them.

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I think that all three of them could of used a little bit of help and done something differently. The piece of advice I would give to Ethan is to choose wisely from the start. The only reason he married Zeena leads back to when his mother was sick, he felt that things would turn out better and now in the long run

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In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton depicts Ethan as a tragic hero who gets downtrodden by his circumstances and mainly, his personality. He has the tragic flaw of not being willing to put anyone in pain even if he benefits from it. Through this, he gets blocked from pursuing an education when he must care for his ill parents. Consequently, he also doesn’t get to socialize with other people of his age, making him feel awfully lonely. To further his tragic predicament, he marries Zeena, his cousin who arrives to take care of his mother and unfortunately, she prevents him from pursuing his love for nature and engineering by wanting to stay in Starkfield forever for her own ego.

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A marriage without love and a life with misery. Spring or winter, it would’ve all been the same. In addition to Ethan’s conflicts with Zeena, he now had more weight over his shoulders with Mattie. Leaving with Mattie gave a horrible twist to his story.

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Throughout the novel, Wharton juxtaposes Ethan's feelings for Mattie and Zeena through

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In this case Ethan and Mattie could never be together due to the marriage. Meaning, Ethan was never able to obtain the desire of being with his lover. Zenobia (Ethan’s wife) notices Ethan changing due to the fact of Mattie’s arrival. As any fearful woman would do Zenobia hints at the dismiss of Mattie’s importance anymore. Suggesting that she didn't want

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Many see their hometown as wonderful and enjoyable, but in the novel, Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, the small town of Starkfield, Massachusetts has a sort of weather that makes people who live there, such as Ethan Frome, miserable. In the novel the severe weather in Starkfield serves as the prime purpose for Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie’s horrible demise. He did what he could to find pleasure in his marriage with Zeena, yet he had trouble rediscovering the initial reason for marrying her. Once Mattie came along, her and Ethan started to fall for each other and he became unfaithful in his marriage and eventually it resulted in him sharing his unhappiness with both Mattie and Zeena. Ethan Frome lived in Starkfield his entire life.

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The main character, Ethan, starts to like someone else, despite him already being married. Although he starts to have such thoughts, his intentions are understandable considering that he was never in love with his wife, Zeena. In Edith Wharton 's Ethan Frome, Ethan doesn 't come out as an admirable person because he can 't face his problems, and he always tries to run away from them. Ethan has never faced the problems between him and Zeena, and neither has he ever confronted his feelings to Mattie. Ethan doesn 't understand that running away from problems isn 't going to make them disappear.

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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.

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Ethan’s bad choices of leaving school, feeling lonely and marrying Zeena and then also being avoidant when he wants to leave her. Obviously, Ethan Frome’s tragedy is all caused by his personal decisions. One of many ignorant choices Ethan makes is when his mother gets ill, somewhere in the beginning of the story. During this time, Ethan dropped out of college.

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How a man goes about dealing with his past experiences portrays not only his character, but also his true inner self. This is especially true in Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome. The main character, Ethan Frome, struggles with the consequences of his decision to marry his wife Zenobia following the loss of his parents. Ethan made this disastrous decision because of a feeling of obligation from societal pressure and ancestral conservatism. Wharton controls Frome like a puppet throughout the story displaying his perpetual contentions with his mistake-ridden marriage and uses it to power the novel as a whole.

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Forcing Mattie to leave is Zeena’s desperate attempt at solving the love triangle. Zeena hoped that Mattie leaving would guide Ethan and Zeena back to their original relationship without distractions. However, Zeena could not have anticipated that the lovers’ prospective separation is needed for them to confess their feelings for each other and the culmination of the painful saga. The story comes to a climax when Mattie says “we’d never have to leave each other any more” referring to their suicide and unity in death (Wharton 63). Ethan agrees to her solution and the problem of their living apart is solved.

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738 Words | 3 Pages

Both Zeena and Ethan have varying responses, however both showing some commitment to repair their union. In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton utilizes a broken pickle dish, to represent the views of espousement, and the representation of their varied human actions. Ethan and Zeena Frome’s marriage represents a union based on obligation rather that love. Throughout the story, Ethan is a weak and submissive husband under the control of a domineering wife.

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