Ethan Frome

The rise of the novel as a major literary form was closely intertwined with 19th-century realism, an artistic movement that sought to depict human life and society as they actually are. Realist literature particularly avoided the Romantic era’s centering of subjective emotional experience, grounding itself instead in the Enlightenment era belief that humans could perceive and describe the world around them in accurate, objective terms. This would remain the dominant view in the United States and Europe until early-20th-century events—most notably World War I—gave rise to the more fractured and alienated perspective of Modernist literature.

However, changes in literature were evident even by the late 1800s. In some instances, this shifting meant challenging realism’s quasi-scientific bent, but in others, it involved doubling down on it. This was the case with naturalism, a subgenre of realism that examined human experience using the new scientific and sociological theories developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries—most notably Marxism, Darwinian natural selection, and Freudian psychoanalysis. The result was often pessimism regarding the possibility of human agency; whereas realist writers tended to depict characters as free individuals acting within a society, naturalist writers tended to depict human action as entirely determined by social and scientific forces.

The French novelist Émile Zola is usually credited with pioneering naturalism, and the most famous works associated with the movement come from continental Europe. However, naturalism significantly influenced several early-20th-century American writers, including Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. Wharton arguably belongs in this category as well. Her work in many ways resembles that of the realist novelist Henry James, with whom Wharton had a long and close friendship. At the same time, Wharton was well-versed in the era’s scientific and sociological literature and cited both Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who famously applied evolutionary ideas to social inequity, as influences. (Singley, Carol J. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Oxford University Press, 2003.) Novels like Ethan Frome consequently straddle the line between realism and naturalism; readers may interpret Ethan’s situation either as a consequence of his own choices or as the product of inescapable social forces.