Sunday Morning! “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton

Literature is filled with so may stories of bad and mismatched marriages that one starts to wonder if writers ever live happily ever after. Some bad marriage stories, like Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, are fairly caustic and acidic, and a little funny. Others, like John Williams’s Stoner are deeply sad and humane. Many, like Proust’s famous mésalliance, end tragically. But it’s very hard to think of one that just ends with the couple deciding to go to counciling.

Maybe all marriages are a little mismatched, the good ones just a little, and the bad ones very much. Some couples really do seem to grow fonder of each other every day, and then there are the rest of them that muddle through, or they don’t. And we’ve all ecountered those couples who seem to have run out of whatever love they had for each other long ago and stay together as a sort of drawn-out revenge plan.

One thing is certain: if you stay with the same person long enough, one day you will wake up and find they have become someone quite different from the person you first fell in love with, and then you will have to decide whether or not to stay with them.

Edith Wharton decided to leave her husband when leaving was barely an option. It was a surprising end to the marriage; after all, she was born well and she married well, so it should have been a success. She was born in New York City to a wealthy real estate family, the Joneses; it’s likely they’re the ones we’re supposed to “keep up with.”  She had tutors and governesses, traveled Europe at an early age, becoming fluent in German, French, and Italian, and spent her summers in Newport. She was a debutante and a member of the Gilded Age Society she would later size up in novels like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. As a young woman, though, she was forbidden to read novels before she found a suitable marriage partner.

She seemed to have found one in Edward Robbins Wharton, a Boston Brahmin, with whom she could buy large houses with their own names, and travel Europe, something they both liked to do. However, “Teddy” suffered from accute depression, which grew into a debilitating disorder- likely bipolar in nature. Edith herself spent some time taking the “rest cure,” while he spent much of her money and did bouts in sanitariums. He also had affairs, but she too had a three-year affair with the journalist William Morton Fullerton, kept secret for years after her death. And by all accounts, it was here that she first experienced sexual happiness, a near-fatal affliction for WASPs. And so, after 28 years of marriage, Wharton reluctantly divorced her husband, who was now completely mentally unhinged. It had to be done. Nevertheless, this was the sort of thing that simply was not done.

Her character, Ethan Frome isn’t so lucky. He can’t leave his wife, Zeena, and he is trapped on the family farm in the small town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. At one point, we are told, he tried to gain an education, as had Wharton, but his father’s illness brought him back to the beloved family home, never to escape. New England’s climate can be severe, its winter snow a heavy burial shroud. The green shoots of hope barely come through the ground before they’re frozen again. People seem to conserve their motion and emotions alike for the warmer months.

One of those grand sweeping Enlightenment ideas that we’ve since abandonned, and maye should not have fully rejected, come to think of it, was the Baron de Montesquieu’s “meterological” theory of climate, which held that climate and geography shape the character of societies: people from hot climates tend to be passionate and hot-tempered, while those from cold climates tend to be a bit tight-lipped and emotionally arid. The climate of Middle-Europe (such as France) gave people an ideal temperment, in the Baron’s opinion.

Taken in a strong form, in which geography-is-destiny, the idea poses all sorts of problems. But, there really does seem to be a difference in how people in, say, the Mediterranean region express themselves from how your average Northerner does. Canadians are notably polite; I’m not sure anyone would call them “warm.” Italians could burn the house down. But, living in a region known for seasonal depression, I can see why New Englanders have a similar reputation for chilliness; most of them I’ve known had all of the emotional range of Andy Warhol. One becomes “tight-lipped” while trying to stifle an urge to scream obscenities at winds that hurt your face.

Certainly, there’s not much love in this house. Zeena doesn’t really seem to even like her husband, Ethan. The two of them came from fairly hardscrabble backgrounds and, as the poor do, they married more out of necessity than love. Now, she is bitter and neurotic, afflicted by a number of psychosomatic ailments. And she seems driven to make him as miserable as herself. At times, the one-dimensional unpleasantness of the character bothered me, frankly. But, I can imagine that Teddy Wharton was fairly unpleasant when he was losing his mind and draining Edith’s funds. And here, as in Wharton’s life, the general misery of the situation serves primarily to set up a moral dilemma.

Enter the moral dilemma: the Frome’s bring on board Zeena’s young cousin, Mattie, to help around the house. She is kind, courteous, and vivacious where Zeena imagines herself to be near death. She is caring and joyous where Zeena is brittle. Naturally, Ethan falls in love with her. The nature of these types of moral dilemmas is to set up the thing that one ought never do as the thing all of us would be most likely to do. The story reminded me of a more austere E.C. Comics story- of course, they will do wrong and will be punished for it. I was mostly surprised, and a little disappointed, that nobody brouught out the axe with murderous intentions.

Finally, the great act of marital betrayal comes: when the two of them are alone, Ethan nearly touches the girl’s hand! I liked that he was sufficiently repressed that this minor body language triggers his decision to leave the marriage. Zeena’s imaginary illness worsens, and she decides to send the girl away, seemingly to hurt him. He dreams of lighting out for the territory with this young woman, but hasn’t the funds to be free. He hasn’t the funds to fix the farm or his wife either. He’s stuck.

And there are some people who really can’t leave places that are bad for them. Every small town has a few middle-aged people who “know everybody” and basically haunt the local bar and bitch. There is a love for place, to be sure, but that love too can grow toxic. It’s harder to break up with your life than your spouse.

So, the story is basically an American Gothic; nobody’s getting out of here, dead or alive. And it ends in the most tragic way imaginable in that they all stay together, much the worse for wear. Many readers in 1911 found the ending too grim for their tastes, but I’ve seen worse in real life. Still, I would have preferred that someone had gotten out the axe.

At the least, the short novel makes a strong case for hell being much colder than expected.

So, what are you reading, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or enduring this weekend?