What Is The Setting Of Ethan Frome

“Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away” (Wharton 13). The setting of the novel Ethan Frome creates an atmosphere which helps establish the character of Ethan Frome himself. Ethan is a man living a very depressing life in Starkfield, Massachusetts with his wife Zeena, whom he doesn't feel affectionate towards and only married because he's afraid to be alone. The environment he’s in is the only reason why he fell in love with Mattie. He's part of the lower class and lives in a secluded area, there's no way for him to divorce his wife and “start a new life” with Mattie, the love of his life.
Because Starkfield is so cold and lifeless and lays “under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pose skies”

Since his mother became very ill, Ethan had to stop his career to care for her and when she died Ethan was left alone with Zeena (who's planning on leaving Starkfield) to care for the farm. The author says that “after the funeral, when [Ethan] saw [Zeena] preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter…” (57). This quote basically tells us that the only reason Ethan married Zeena is because he didn't want to be left alone on the farm in winter. Ethan thinks that he wouldn't marry her if his mother had died in spring instead of winter because the winters in Starkfield are very

The author says that “he had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty...even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion”(32). This quote proves my point that Ethan did not want to be lonely and depressed all the time, it's just he had no one to talk to about his interests like nature. When Mattie, Zeena's cousin, comes into the lives of Ethan and Zeena, she was “a bit of hopeful young life...lighting of a fire on a cold hearth”. Since Ethan has been isolated from actual social life for so long, anyone that's not from Starkfield is interesting to him. Ethan compares her to a fire on (probably his) a cold heart meaning he's been in this cold and lonely place for so long, he doesn't even care who comes into his life as long as there's someone he can interact with that's not Zeena. But Mattie was different because she was interested in natural beauty as well and that shocked Ethan because he thought he was the only one. This was the reason he “falls in love” with her. The author says that there were “sensations... which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills...the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the art of