Ethan Frome

Published in 1911, Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's masterpieces and her most famous novella. It is, a perfect example of the way in which Wharton's painstakingly detailed portrait of a community and its landscape proves that the environment decides an individual's ultimate fate. In Ethan Frome, Wharton captured seamlessly the cold, hard, fatalistic bareness of the New England landscape and the bleak, slow, hopeless existence of the individuals who inhabit it. As socially gifted and outwardly happy as Wharton may have seemed, however, both the political conditions surrounding the nation and the private traumas that affected her own life can help to explain how she created such a cynical, fatalistic piece of fiction.

The America at the turn of the century was radically different from the America of the 1930's. Prior to the nation's involvement in World War I, many Americans were optimistic and honestly believed that world peace could be a reality. Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations was the perfect example of how Americans thought that they could change the world, through compromise and negotiation. However, when the war went into full swing during the 1910's, this optimism had faded as millions of soldiers and innocent civilians were brutally killed. As a result of the violence and cruelty that soon came to define World War I, Americans quickly became disillusioned and fatalistic. Wharton was not immune to this pessimism, a feeling that pervades Ethan Frome. In fact, Wharton was one of many American expatriates who fled to France during the war because of their disillusionment with American society.

Unlike her other novels, Ethan Frome describes a small, economically stagnant community in which the citizens seek financial stability instead of intellectual advancement and social position. However, even in this seemingly bleak setting, Wharton focuses in the story on the idea of forbidden love because she, as a result of her own unhappy marriage, was fascinated with the complications of unfulfilling marriages, and stimulating, exciting extramarital affairs.

Like Ethan, Wharton was also involved in an extremely unhappy marriage with a sickly, needy spouse and often dreamed of finding an escape in the name of love. In fact, just as Ethan finally finds comfort in Mattie, so too did Wharton carry on an affair with a journalist named Morton Fullerton because she sought intellectual excitement.