Ethan Frome

Just got finished reading Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton, 1911). Enjoyed it a lot.

As in the other stories I've read by Edith Wharton, we see a character with lots of conflict. The inevitable prospect of a loveless life, as contrasted with the fantasy of an unattainable love object. And that love object blocked by not one, but many, many barriers -- moral, economic, social, etc. What I really like about Wharton's stories is how clearly she lays out the utter impossibility of the protagonist's situation on many levels.

The particularly interesting thing about this read is that I don't think I had the experience that Wharton meant me to have. The book is structured as a story within a story. The framing story is a first person narrative by a visitor to Ethan Frome's town, some 25 years after the main action takes place. The rest of the story is a 3rd person limited omniscient narrator from the point of view of Ethan, himself. Now, unfortunately (or not), unbeknownst to me, the framing story is laid out in the introduction. I am ashamed to admit it, but I rarely read introductions, and never at all before reading the story. An introduction usually has too much information about the story, so that if I were to read it first, it would spoil the suspense for me. However, in this case, the introduction is not an introduction in the usual sense, and actually forms a part of the narrative. As a result, I blithely read the entire rest of the story, and enjoyed the whole thing until I got to the last half of the last chapter, where all of the sudden we're back in the framing story in the first person with some unknown "I". I was terribly confused. I wondered whether the free online version I had just read was poorly edited, and missing some text. I did a little research, and that's when I figured out that I should have read the intro, and promptly went back and read it. Ooooohhhhh...now I get it.

I hate to second guess an Edith Wharton, but frankly, I think I liked it better as a novel the way I read it. I don't believe that the tension I experienced at the end of the story would have been there, had I known from the introduction a few critical facts about the outcome. Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I don't really see that the framing story is buying very much except that it makes it possible to confirm Ethan's tragedy from an independent point of view. It's not just Ethan whining -- it's true: his life was rotten; even the neighbors think so. Personally, I don't think that's necessary, but maybe I'm missing the point.

This is the third book I've read by Edith Wharton, after The House of Mirth and Age of Innocence. I think I still like The House of Mirth best.