#Ethan Frome

[thatstudyblrontea]

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862, New York – August 11, 1937, Paris)

#I love this portrait of her so much #Edith Wharton #american literature #english literature #the age of innocence #ethan frome #women artists #women authors #women writers #american writers #american authors #vintage photography

[amberpriceenthusiast]

Really glad that of if I search up “Ethan Frome” on here that it’s just hate

Bc jesu fucking Christ I did not like that book

#ethan frome

[high-school-lit-tournament]

High School Lit Tournament Side C

Ethan Frome: Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.

Never Let Me Go: Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

#high school lit tournament #classic literature #ethan frome #never let me go

[mzannthropy]

Finished Ethan Frome last night. Verdict is, tumtudum, unpopular opinion (first of 2024 and it's not been a fortnight yet), I really liked it! But that might be bc I specifically picked it up bc it was recommended as a book that features a dysfunctional marriage, which is what I was looking for. Plus it's on Gutenberg. And it's short.

I sympathised with Zeena all the way, bc that's just typical of me, never mind how the narrative wants to make me feel, but still I didn't think the narrative favoured the extramarital affair that strongly, to me it seemed that it was just presenting what happened from Ethan's POV, but I was not rooting for him and Mattie. Idk I guess it depends on how you look at things.

It's funny. Daisy Jones and the Six has at its core a very similar love triangle, but not only is the cheating pair the overwhelmingly more popular pairing, it is heavily promoted by all the official media outlets. Including one of the biggest corporations in the world, Amazon.

Anyway what I found more interesting about Ethan Frome was not the love triangle, but the harsh environment and inertia, and the effect these can have on your life.

#edith wharton #ethan frome #parallels #daisy jones and the six #love triangle #books #i know i'm comparing two completely different works #but still. human nature is human nature and it's same everywhere #as miss marple would have said #i need to read more edith wharton now #mypost

[mosscollector]

(...) but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

#edith wharton #ethan frome #happiness #butterfly #inarticulate #winter #woods #love #quote

[nortonliterature]

As the temperatures drop and night falls earlier each evening, staying inside to read is a constant temptation! What work of #classicliterature featuring snowy nights or icy storms are you eying on your TBR this month?

#classic literature #literature #winter reads #winter reading #Frankenstein #Ethan Frome #Anton Chekhov #Anna Karenina #Uncle Tom's Cabin #In Our Time #currently reading #TBR #december TBR #book #books #booklr #studyblr #norton critical editions #norton editions

[whosafraidofvirginiawoolf]

He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that it evoked. 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.

— Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

#ethan frome #edith wharton #literature #quotes #quote

[library--of--alex]

Three books, five weeks. Can I do it?

(from the bottom up: The Hurting Kind, The Secret History, Ethan Frome)

#books #winterbreak #winter reading #winter break #christmas #christmas reading #cozy #cozycore #cozy winter #winter aesthetic #christmas aesthetic #cozy christmas #wintertime #ethan frome #the secret history #the hurting kind #ada limon #donna tartt #edith wharton #christmas tree #mantlepiece #mantledecor #homeycore #hygge #hyggehome #hyggelife #warm and cozy

[hottakehoulihan]

I'm reading Ethan Frome right now for the first time [SPOILERS] and thus far it's some old guy who loveless-married too young because he met a gal who was good at housework and was afraid to do without her and now she's always sick abed and rightly jealous of the young orphan cute clumsy maid they hired to take care of her because Ethan is crushing on her so hard and it seems the maid likes him back.

To Ethan it seems she likes him back.

And I can't tell if this is the author gonna reveal, later, that she's just being a bit sweet to her employer because she has literally nowhere else to go and no real job skills she's not a good maid, or if she's actually trying to seduce him so she can keep him as a meal ticket, or if she actually likes him, or if she's afraid to not play along with whatever it is he hints he wants because she's alone in the world, or what.

I am going to keep going through this "blind", but I'm not sure I'm up for it if the boss gets the ten-years-younger-orphan-helpless-maid and they are mutually in love and he was right to break off his loveless marriage with his invalid wife and ...but no, we know the book will end in some sort of tragedy.

Honestly I'm kind of hoping for a School Days sort of ending. Ethan isn't completely unlikeable, and he's genuinely blind to the fact that his crush might not be 100% requited and maybe the author is too, but...

Ah, and his reasons for liking her are straightforward; she's young and pretty and kind and she likes looking at stars and flowers just like him and this is odd to him because nobody else in his small town seems to openly care about pretty things or the names of constellations or flowers. He sees her and thinks "she just like me fr fr" and I'm like "is this Lolita lite?"

Didn't have much more to say here. Just leaving this note to myself so I can remember it when I'm much farther in the book and things are utterly different; I like reading people's genuine impressions of stories they're reading for the first time. So here's mine. ==========================================

Edit from later. I've finished the book, so, obviously, more

[SPOILERS]

So wife goes on a road trip to see a doctor. Ethan's giddy to be alone with his crush. Maid is excited and gets down the super good china plate that is technically off limits, and at dinner they almost hold hands in the heat of passion and it's so torrid that the plate breaks well actually that was the cat's fault but anyway. And they talk about the date he'd suggested, taking maid girl sledding with him, but they don't do it yet because time's limited.

Wife returns; turns out she needs months of bedrest and so she's hiring a better housekeeper. Ah, also the orphan maid was wife's moderately distant family and so has nowhere else to go but wasn't hired at all. But wife is hiring someone new and maid will just have to move on and figure something out. Wife is pretty satisfied with this; she's getting her husband back and re-establishing control of her home. ...and that plate that got broken was a wedding present, and so she has even more reason to fire the girl anyway.

So, maid is doomed. There's no other work in the area that she's physically capable of doing (apparently maid was sickly too? In a less-implied-to-be-malingering kind of way.) They're not very close to any area that has work. And she's got no other distant in-laws even.

Ethan wants to save the day and not be defeated and considers eloping and/or divorce, and is as sure as anything that the maid girl would be happy to go with him, but he's so broke he can't do it; even if he sold everything there'd be not enough money to get him anywhere with work either. He actually tries to beg money from people but times are tough everywhere and he's already skint, his pockets are already to let, his credit's no good, and to his credit at least he won't lie to take money to hurt the few people who are kind to him.

So. He's defeated, and his wife is smug, but by damn at least he'll be the one to drive maid-girl to the train station to go to the big city and look futilely for work and lodging. It takes him some unaccustomed straightforward conflict with his wife but they drive off. ...and pass by the sledding place and Ethan's like "well, wanna sled before we get to the train station?" and they do and she has fun and is breathless that the dead-man's-curve at the bottom where you have to dodge a huge tree was scary. ...and then asks him to take her again but this time they can hit the tree and lover's-suicide because she knows what misery awaits her in town and she knows he's super into her.

This book actually didn't start with Ethan's point of view, by the way. It started with some guy slowly getting to know the downtrodden, permanently-injured, and impoverished Ethan from the outside, piecing together his story, and telling us this tale. So, we kinda knew maybe that this foreshadowed impact with the tree is gonna happen. And it does. They do the thing. And, whups, they both live.

Book fades out with Ethan now having two women in his house; the maid is now paralyzed and has a constant whine to her manner, wife has had to start doing housework, and Ethan's unprofitable farm was always too much work for him but now he's far more in need of any ability to earn an extra dollar, and it takes him far longer to do so as he limps and shuffles along. ...so it's been many years since he's had time to learn about stars or flowers. Privately, many people think it would have been better if the sledding accident had been fatal (though nobody knows it was intended to be so except Ethan and the maid).

------

I still haven't looked for any analysis of what this story was meant to be to readers. Was it cautionary, or just sensational? We got a warning at the beginning that this was a story that would end up with Ethan sad and damaged at least, so we knew it would be at least partly a tragedy. But I'm sure there's more, in the context of when the story was published and what else was out at the time, that it was intended to accomplish (perhaps a blunting of lazy stories that end in super romantic grand gestures or something?) I'll look that stuff up the next time I wonder about it, but I think there's some value in unseasoned and sincere takes on classic stories, and so, for your degustation, that was mine.

I forgot I said that about "School Days" above, but now I think this story could be very amusingly adapted into a cutesy Higurashi-style anime. It'd be fun to see audiences get all squee about the implied breeding pair and then see how it all works out.

It's kind of awful, though; the wife was written to be read as a terrible person. Wife's infirmity is, according to the doctors and her family, a result of how she helped take care of Ethan's infirm mother and so he OWES her. ...and this is all I think an example of her malingering, playing the implied-as-common Munchausen card for attention and drama, and generally bullying and manipulating her husband into compliance. This is kind of a shitty way to write the wife, and I have no idea if the author (didn't pay attention then, and not at home with book now) is a man or a woman but there's some internalized and unconscious misogyny going on here I think.

The maid being written to, once paralyzed, be an annoyance that brings no joy to anyone and can do almost nothing useful around the house is...probably the point, so it is a little less contempt-of-women in origin. The maid falling in love with Ethan, which didn't feel believable to me, was probably way more believable in context of the sensibilities of the time.

-----

A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that the author was a Pulitzer-prize winning woman (prize was for a different book) and seems to have been pretty great actually but her family was crap. Awful wife from Ethan Frome was probably the author using her mother as a character. So that's a thing. Author did this a lot; people have said it's a sort of revenge the author was getting on an unpleasant family.

Themes as consensus-of-readers would have it is that this book is duty-vs-desire and also meant to highlight the unfairness of the culture towards women, and that women have no real alternative to becoming bitter pills as they did in the book when constrained in the way culture does.

Oh, and Ethan was apparently quite handsome; I hadn't really remarked on that but it may have been important to getting the maid's interest. Also, the maid was scarred and had her hip badly and permanently broken but not actually paralyzed. Just to correct my misreading.

This "tale", for the author was careful to make it clear it was a tale and not a novel, was intended to have a moral, and if it felt a bit heavy-handed, well, I suspect (nothing about that in the Wikipedia article anyway) that it existed in a field of similar stories where the overwhelming passions of romance and tragedy often ended with a contrived beauty instead of, arguably, a contrived ugliness. Gotta hand credit to Ethan Frome for, at least, not doing the former. It was a good counterpoint, and I do not suspect I'll be tempted to pick this book up again, but I'm not regretting reading it.

Cheers.

#Ethan Frome #Boox

[stickthisbig]

I will be 37 next month, and the thing that has been chasing me since I graduated from high school, literally 20 years ago, is that I am the only person who loved Ethan Frome.

Here's what you need to do to love Ethan Frome:

1. I need you to be depressed. Oh my god, just so intensely depressed.

2. I need you to love someone who will never, ever, ever love you back.

If you don't fit both of these criteria, you will not understand Ethan Frome. It's not like "you don't know what it means, man", it's that you will be completely unable to meet the characters on their own terms if you can't get on that level. For this book specifically, if you don’t get it, they’re absolutely ridiculous, and the story falls apart. It's like how Catcher in the Rye has an age limit; when you are past that threshold, you will not be able to enjoy the book, because you've grown out of it.

When I was a teenager, I was incredibly depressed. Like we don't need to get into that, because it's not entertaining, but god just so depressed. I also, for years and years, was wretchedly, all-consumingly in love with this guy who never loved me back and was never going to. That's also why I loved Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Age of Innocence, and The Scarlet Letter. These were books written to be consumed by someone like me.

It's just that most of my peers weren't horrifically depressed.

Ethan Frome isn't by any means a bad book; instead, it's an indictment of one-size-fits-all learning. Yes, we should probably all learn the same math. No, literature isn't like that. There are very good reasons to be conversant with the Western canon, but all anybody fuckin' knows about Ethan Frome is it's that really depressing book nobody wants to read but everybody has to.

Insisting on that pedagogy sucks, and we don't have to do it. In the same class, we also did independent study, and I read As I Lay Dying. I love As I Lay Dying, and I'm glad I didn't have to read it with an audience, because that book's a comedy written about and for very cruel, very Southern people. Most people who are 16 can't hack that book, and because nobody is required to read it, people don't use it as a site of their frustration with reading.

But god I loved Ethan Frome. It was exactly what the fuck book I needed when I got it. No regrets.

#ethan frome

[misanderousmisfit]

I need to make whole post about how everyone who read Ethan Frome in high school and hated it with a passion, needs to re-read it as an adult.  The book is genius. It is also fucking hilarious as hell.  I stan Zenobia “Zeena” Frome and her red pickle dish.  Queen.

#Ethan Frome #I too thought it had no happy ending #but Zeena was the triumphant after all #You don't have to be depressed to like this book #You have to be sick and twisted #and have lived through the 2020 pandemic #If you ever have guy who you suspect of emotionally cheating on you with a cousin #tell them to go and take a sled ride

[faeriegutz]

i hate ethan frome.

bro like stop being creepy

#im tired of this man #like BRO i get it ur obsessed with mattie #now shut up #youre making my whole class uncomfortable #ethan frome

[lude-n-lascivious]

omg Ethan Frome!! I once had a lit professor look the class dead in the eyes and say "never read Ethan Frome unless you hate yourself and want to suffer." I've heeded that advice

It was the most pointless and depressing book I’ve ever read.  To this day I haven’t figured out what the point of it was. 

#inbox #ethan frome #worst books

[darkreeds]

ethan frome is a loser. mans reminds me of myself in 7th grade but more creepy and with more cringe masculine energy.

#ethan frome #lit #literature #classics #classical literature #chaotic academia #darkacademia #punkacademia #booklr #books and reading #bookblr #books #reading #reads

[shortstackfan]

Going to try rereading this book. I hated it when I read it at 17 for my AP English class. However I want to see if my hatred stemmed from spending months dissecting it. I honestly don’t remember reading any other books for my AP English class…

#books #bookworm #reading challenge #currently reading #goodreads reading challenge #booklur #ethan frome #edith wharton #ap english #reread

[mosscollector]

And there were other sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow.

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

#edith wharton #ethan frome #silence #joy #colours #winter #love #clouds #quote