Favorite Theme In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton’s Favorite Theme
Edith Wharton often wrote about people who were trapped by the moral strictures of society and were thus unhappy: she herself spent more than twenty years in a loveless marriage in which she had become involved in order to please her parents. How does Ethan Frome reflect this favorite theme of the author? How and in what ways would you describe the Protagonist as being trapped by the Society in which he lived? These are the questions I am going to answer for you and we will have some direct quotes from the book. In the book Ethan Frome Ethan is at a crossroad in his life. He is trapped by the moral strictures of society. In the book it says “ He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.”
What is says, is if he could leave her he would deceive …show more content…
I like the question, but I think this can be two questions. First I am going to answer the how then the what. He was trapped because he had to quit college to take care of his father’s work. Then soon after his father died, he was left to tend to his mother that got sick. The weather trapped him into marrying Zeena. In the book it says “and before he knew what he was doing, he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in the spring instead of winter.” Later in the book he is trapped again. Mattie is being forced to leave and Ethan doesn’t like this. He is in his study alone thinking about leaving Zeena for Mattie. He starts to write a letter to Zeena, but here is where the trapped part comes in. He knows if he does leave, she being sick can’t take care of the mill. Thus the people in town will not have
Edith Wharton often wrote about people who were trapped by the moral strictures of society and were thus unhappy: she herself spent more than twenty years in a loveless marriage in which she had become involved in order to please her parents. How does Ethan Frome reflect this favorite theme of the author? How and in what ways would you describe the Protagonist as being trapped by the Society in which he lived? These are the questions I am going to answer for you and we will have some direct quotes from the book. In the book Ethan Frome Ethan is at a crossroad in his life. He is trapped by the moral strictures of society. In the book it says “ He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.”
What is says, is if he could leave her he would deceive …show more content…
I like the question, but I think this can be two questions. First I am going to answer the how then the what. He was trapped because he had to quit college to take care of his father’s work. Then soon after his father died, he was left to tend to his mother that got sick. The weather trapped him into marrying Zeena. In the book it says “and before he knew what he was doing, he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in the spring instead of winter.” Later in the book he is trapped again. Mattie is being forced to leave and Ethan doesn’t like this. He is in his study alone thinking about leaving Zeena for Mattie. He starts to write a letter to Zeena, but here is where the trapped part comes in. He knows if he does leave, she being sick can’t take care of the mill. Thus the people in town will not have