79 pages • 2 hours read
Edith WhartonEthan Frome
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1911A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Twenty-four years earlier, Ethan is walking through Starkfield’s streets, enjoying the cold, still night air; having briefly studied engineering, Ethan remains fascinated by science and the natural world. He reaches the church, where he’s gone to pick up his wife’s cousin Mattie, and peers inside at the dance that’s winding down.
For the final reel, Mattie is partnering Denis Eady, the womanizing son of the local grocer. Ethan grows irritated as he watches the couple and questions whether the connection he feels to Mattie is one-sided; Mattie seems to share his love of nature and learning, and over the year she has lived with the Fromes, Ethan has come to treasure their conversations. He recalls that his wife, Zeena, once mentioned the possibility of Mattie and Denis marrying and broods over this; Zeena has always been critical of Mattie’s housekeeping, but Ethan suspects that she now may be jealous of Mattie and looking for reasons to dismiss her. One seemingly stray remark Zeena made about his shaving habits especially troubles him: “It was a fact that since Mattie Silver’s coming he had taken to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he left her side in the winter darkness, and he had stupidly assumed that she would not notice any change in his appearance” (25).
Chapter 2 Summary
Mattie emerges from the basement, and Ethan watches anxiously as Denis offers her a ride on his sleigh. She hesitates but declines, ducking out of the way when Denis tries to pull her up.
Ethan approaches Mattie as she begins walking home, startling her; she thought Zeena, who was sick all day, might have insisted Ethan stay home. The pair are standing near School House Hill, where Starkfield’s residents go sledding, and when Ethan notices Mattie looking at the slope, he asks if she’d like to sled the following evening. She eagerly agrees, even though two of her friends—Ruth Varnum and Ned Hale—almost struck a large elm tree sledding there recently. When Ethan asks whether Mattie would fear a crash with him, she claims she “ain’t the kind to be afraid” and walks off (30).
Confused by Mattie’s moodiness, Ethan catches up with her and awkwardly mentions Denis, hinting that Mattie might wish to marry. Mattie wonders aloud whether Zeena is dissatisfied with her; she doesn’t want to leave the Frome household and seems hurt by the thought that Ethan might want her to. Ethan pulls her closer as they pass by the Frome family plot and responds:
‘I guess we’ll never let you go, Matt,’ he whispered, as though even the dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by the graves, he thought: ‘We’ll always go on living here together, and some day she’ll lie there beside me’ (32).
The pair reach the house; a dead vine reminds Ethan of a mourning streamer, and he finds himself imagining Zeena’s death. Meanwhile, Mattie searches fruitlessly for the key that Zeena usually leaves under the doormat until Zeena herself lets them inside, explaining that she couldn’t sleep. Ethan initially says he intends to stay downstairs working, but a warning look from Mattie persuades him to follow Zeena to bed.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Questions of perspective remain important as Ethan Frome’s main narrative begins. Because his feelings for Mattie are illicit, Ethan has no direct means of learning whether Mattie feels similarly:
The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him, and feared; now he was sure she did not, and despaired (30).
Since the story unfolds through Ethan’s eyes, it mirrors this focus on Mattie’s demeanor and expression; during the dance, for example, Ethan is crushed to see Mattie throw her head back laughing—a gesture “which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him” (23).
What Ethan is searching for isn’t simply romantic reciprocation; rather, he hopes (and intermittently believes) that Mattie understands him on the deepest of levels. Thanks partly to his education, Ethan feels estranged from most of Starkfield, but he desperately wants to find someone whose interests, attitudes, and feelings resemble his own: “He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. […] He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege” (23). His marriage to Zeena makes his loneliness more acute. Zeena isn’t even unlike Ethan so much as completely inaccessible to him; she’s prone to “long intervals of secretive silence” (24), and when she does speak, she usually communicates via insinuation. Her apparently offhand remark about Ethan’s morning routine—”I guess you’re always late, now you shave every morning” (25)—is typical of the way she reveals what she’s thinking (in this case, that she knows Ethan wants to look polished for Mattie).
Of course, the fact that Ethan’s perspective dominates the story again raises the issue of reliability. Zeena is a deeply unsympathetic character even though her plight as an unwanted spouse is objectively sympathetic. Likewise, it’s difficult to gauge how accurate Ethan’s perceptions of Mattie are. If nothing else, they betray the gendered assumptions of the era; the passive-aggressive power Zeena wields over Ethan threatens his sense of masculinity, so Mattie’s more deferential demeanor is reassuring. Similarly, Ethan’s “idea that if [Mattie] were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant [domestic] instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the county” may simply be projection (24); Mattie has shown no real interest in or aptitude for housekeeping, but Ethan associates her with the idealized domesticity that’s notably missing from his own marriage.
Related Titles
By Edith Wharton
