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Setting In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

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The Importance of Setting in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome In her novel Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton uses a country setting to establish the values of morality and duty against the lonely and isolated backdrop of the “mute melancholy landscape” of 1881 Starkfield, Massachusetts (Wharton 13). In a snow-covered New England village, protagonist Ethan Frome, with his wife Zenobia and his love Mattie Silver, searches for a life of fulfillment. The reader senses Ethan’s struggles by observing the harsh winters in Starkfield, the bleak state of Ethan’s farm, and the poor conditions of his home. The harsh winters in Starkfield elucidate the “sluggish pulse” of its citizens (8). During the winters in Starkfield the people are so depreciated by the awful …show more content…

“Even for that part of the country the kitchen was a poor-looking place”(151). The kitchens in the New England part of the country where not extravagant or beautiful in any way so saying that the Fromes kitchen was even worse is saying a lot about their lives and the way they live. “The furniture was of the roughest kind”(151), the furniture was plain, old, and unappealing representing the carelessness of the way that the Fromes kitchen appeared and the ruin of the home, farm and mill making them not be able to afford lavish things. “Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood meagrely against the plaster walls” (151). The description of the materials in the Fromes home are rough and broken. The brokenness of the kitchen supplies provides evidence for how the people living in the Fromes house are broken, their love lives are broken, and their everyday lives are broken. They do not even bother to try to fix the utensils, they do not care for how their kitchen is presented exemplifying the lack of motivation and drive for a good happy life. The conditions of a person's home says a lot about them and the conditions of the Fromes home says that they have a dejected and miserable

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