Starkfield
I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter. Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer, and the enemy in command of almost all the lines of access between the beleaguered villages…1
An engineer on assignment overwinters in a village in the Massachusetts countryside. He meets at the post office a "ruin of a man," crippled on his right side by a long-ago accident, who nonetheless exudes a "careless powerful look." The hint of tragedy piques his interest. And thus the tale begins…
Twenty years ago, "before the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery," Ethan Frome was a young married man with a farm and sawmill outside the village of Starkfield. Already burdened by the long illnesses of his parents, now deceased, and an ailing wife seven years his senior, his sole source of happiness is his wife's bright young cousin, Mattie Silver, who has come to live with them after the death of her parents. Otherwise, his youthful dreams of finding a place in the wider world have been vexed.
His attraction to Mattie is more than a passing infatuation. He treasures the nights when he gets to walk her home from dances in the village church, and he is fiercely jealous of the attention that Denis Eady, a fiery young Irishman, bestows upon her. He sees in her the chance of an escape from his suffocating life, and he perceives that "one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder… and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul."2
But Starkfield, plunged every winter into six months of cold isolation, is an unhealthful place for a budding romance.
Zeena
Once or twice in the past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia's way of letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences.3
The (unnamed) narrator hears from the old stagecoach driver that "Most of the smart ones get away" from Starkfield.4 As he learns more of Ethan's life, he wonders, "how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome?"5
Zenobia – Zeena – is Ethan's wife. She came to his farm originally to nurse his sick mother. After her death, Ethan – dreading the prospect of isolation at the farm – asked her to stay. Later he reflected that had it not been winter he would not have asked. Regardless, they married. Ethan understood that they were to sell the farm and move to a larger town.
These plans did not come to fruition: "She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity."6 The farm went unsold. Zeena retreated into sickliness, and then into silence. And so Ethan and Zeena have spent seven years together on the farm, scraping out a living from the barren earth, an existence enlivened only by Mattie's coming.
Zeena's apparent frailty masks a cunning mind. She is not oblivious to her husband's attraction to Mattie, his wishful thinking notwithstanding. When she returns from a visit to a town doctor with a diagnosis of "complications," she orders Mattie to leave the house. The spare room is now to be occupied by a hired girl for the housework. Ethan objects, but since Mattie is Zeena's cousin and not his, he has no right to insist on her staying.
Ethan
They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow… For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom.7
The day of Mattie's departure is the day of Ethan's accident – foreshadowed from the very beginning, but shocking in its violence nonetheless. He is left crippled but, perhaps not mercifully, alive.
Fate governs the lives of the Starkfield villagers, and not even Ethan's gifts are enough to escape it. The long, lonely dark winter days broke his mother's health, thrust Zeena upon him, and finally constricted his own horizons to a shadow of the life that he had imagined for himself.
One night that he walked Mattie home, he looked on the family graveyard and felt, instead of the oppression of a preordained future, that "all desire for change had vanished."8 In the end, he got what he wanted; as Mrs. Hale, the narrator's landlady, remarks, "I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."9
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Originally published in 1911. Quotations and page numbers from the 2005 Penguin edition.
p. 4
p. 17
p. 20
p. 3
p. 4
p. 38
p. 26
p. 26
p. 99