Study Guide to Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Manuali di studio
• Subtopic: Guide di studio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, a fictional novel based on a sledding accident in Lenox, Massachusetts.

As a book of the early-twentieth-century, Ethan Frome contains a new form of fiction, as it contains extensive metaphors, intricately placed by Frome. Moreover, Wharton notably used some of her own personal experiences to convey her themes. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Edith Wharton's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO EDITH WHARTON

EARLY LIFE

Mrs. Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in her parents’ mansion on West Twenty-Third Street in New York City. Her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, connected with wealthy Dutch landowners and merchants of the early nineteenth century, was the granddaughter of an outstanding American Revolutionary War patriot, General Ebenezer Stevens. After the war, General Stevens became a very successful East-India merchant. Edith Wharton’s father, a man of considerable private, inherited wealth, did not follow a career in business. Rather, he lived a life of leisure, punctuated by his hobbies of sea-fishing, boat-racing, and wild-fowl shooting (typical activities for men of wealth of his day). During her first few years, Edith Wharton’s family alternated between New York City in the winter and Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer. (Newport was a very fashionable place where New York City families of wealth might enjoy ocean breezes and participate in a round of tea and dinner parties, the leaving of calling cards, and constant preparations for entertaining or being entertained.)

When she was four years old, her parents took her on a tour of Europe, concentrating on Italy and France. She became as familiar with Rome and Paris as any American child is familiar with his home town. During these early years, the small, red-haired Edith played a favorite game. Not yet able to read, she carried around with her a large volume of Washington Irving’s stories of old Spain, The Alhambra. Holding the Book carefully (sometimes upside down), she proceeded to turn the pages and to read aloud “make up” stories as she went along. Whereas most children of her age would be told the familiar old folk and fairy tales of Andersen, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm, she listened with great delight to tales of the “domestic dramas” of the great Greek and Roman gods of mythology. (Some of the fictional characters in her literary works do resemble gods in distress, followed by some unhappy curse or fate.) One can picture young Edith Wharton in Paris, as she arrives from her dancing-lesson and goes immediately to her grandmother, seated in a comfortable armchair. Through an ear-trumpet at her grandmother’s ear, the seven-year-old Edith would shout Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, much to the old woman’s delight. Edith’s father’s constant reading of travel books was of interest to the child, who was to travel through Europe and America much of her own lifetime. The Wharton family in Paris was saddened by the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War and also by the near-fatal attack of typhoid fever which Edith suffered. The young child rapidly learned to read, speak, and write German, French, and Italian, as a result of the efforts of governesses and the extended family tours of France and Italy.

RETURN TO AMERICA AND BACKGROUND READING

Returning to America after an absence of six years in picturesque Europe, the ten-year-old Edith viewed New York City with mixed feelings. She missed the glamor of Europe; she was distressed with the busy commercial air of much of her home city; she was delighted to join her relatives and friends on a rambling family estate (Pencraig) at Newport. Here she continued her study of modern languages and good manners. She was fascinated by archery club meetings; she pictured in her mind the archery players (“young gods and goddesses”) as characters in unwritten works of fiction. She read much of the prose of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Lewis Carroll, as well as the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear. The proper command of good speech was impressed upon the child by her parents. Returning from the open countryside of Newport to the cramped city of New York, Edith began to read regularly in her father’s library of standard classics. She read many books, including the following: the “principal historians,” such as the Roman Plutarch and the English Macaulay; the foremost writers of diaries and letters, such as the English Pepys and Evelyn, and the French Madame de Sevigne; the English poets, such as Milton, Burns and Byron, as well as Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the English Sir Walter Scott and the American Washington Irving. With these writers as her models and inspiration, young Edith Wharton began to cover huge sheets of wrapping paper with her own prose and verse.

MARRIAGE

Edith’s family and the families of most of her friends were not “in business”: they lived on their incomes (sometimes investments), living leisurely lives of “dining out” or dinner-giving,” with much emphasis on good cooking and sparkling conversation. Once in a while, they attended the theatre; the opera, seldom. When she was seventeen, Edith’s parents decided the time had arrived for her “coming-out” (a series of social activities indicating to the world that she was adult enough to be invited to social entertainments without her parents as chaperones). Soon, she joined her father and mother to another trip to Europe - this time for her father’s health. He died in France, when Edith was nineteen years old, and the grief-stricken mother and daughter returned to New York City. There they moved into a newly purchased house on West Twenty-fifth Street. For several years Edith enjoyed the social life of an average young woman of her wealth and social background; then her girlhood came to an end in 1885 with her marriage to Edward Wharton of Boston. Thirteen years her senior, her husband was a banker from Boston. (His father’s family had originally come from Virginia.) Although Mr. Wharton did not share his wife’s literary tastes, he did, however, enjoy some of her interests, such as animals, outdoor life, and (especially) travel. For a time the couple lived in a cottage on the Pencraig estate in Newport. Each February they began a tour of Europe extending over four months. Edith prepared herself for these annual trips by wide reading, especially of books on architecture. One happy period of four months (in 1888) was spent with friends on a rented yacht, touring the waters of the Mediterranean and the Aegean Seas. One holiday was spent on an excursion through the hills of northern Italy, which were later to form the background of Mrs. Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a historical romance of eighteenth-century Italy. The Whartons bought a house at Newport called “Land’s End.” There, Mrs. Wharton carried out some of her own original ideas about interior decoration-a project which later blossomed out into a book written in collaboration with the decorator-architect, Ogden Codman. This book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), was based upon Mrs. Wharton’s own experimental ideas concerning the decoration of houses, and featured the then new ideas of emphasis on simplicity of detail, right proportion, balance of door and window-spacing, and unconfused lines.

FIRST PUBLICATIONS AND LITERARY FRIENDS

Mrs. Wharton’s first publications were poems, accepted and published by the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, who also helped make arrangements to bring out in print The Decoration of Houses. With the publication in Scribner’s Magazine of her first short story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” she began her long publishing career in fiction. When, to her delighted surprise, a publisher decided to bring forth a collected group of her short stories under the title The Greater Inclination (1899), she suddenly began to have a “real personality” of her own: she was no longer just one of the idle, cultured rich; she was an acknowledged individual, all on her own, and in print. She need not care that in Boston (her husband’s home town) she was considered to have more fashion than intelligence, whereas in New York (her home area) some thought her to possess more intelligence than fashion. Putting this intelligence to work, Mrs. Wharton went to Rome in the winter of 1903, where she began a serious study of Italian villas. The result of this study was a work entitled Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), featuring watercolors by the well-known American painter and illustrator, Maxfield Parrish. Although Europe held much interest for Edith, she had, at least, found a spot in America where she could realize her greatest happiness and contentment. The place was near Lenox, in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. After selling the Newport house, the Whartons built a large, rambling country house, which they called “The Mount.” For over ten years (for six or seven months a year), she found ample room and time for gardening, writing, and making excursions throughout the neighboring hills. (Ethan Frome was inspired by the people and natural setting she observed near Lenox.) The early part of each winter she spent in New York City. There, as well as in Lenox, she met and talked with some of her artistic friends, such as William Dean Howells and Henry James (the novelists), Charles Eliot Norton (the famous American educator, editor and author), and Clyde Fitch (the popular American playwright). During frequent trips abroad, she was friendly with Thomas Hardy, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and George Meredith (literary artists), as well as the renowned portrait-artist, John Singer Sargent. After Mr. Wharton’s health began to fail, the couple traveled often in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sicily, and northern Africa, to avoid the coldness of the New York winters.

From 1907, Mrs. Wharton spent most of her time near Paris, where she entertained fashionable and literary society and a few visiting Americans (such as Theodore Roosevelt, during his 1909-1910 world tour). When she traveled to London, she made a special point of seeing as much as possible Henry James, who had taken up residence there. Life in Paris flowed quietly along for Edith Wharton, as she enjoyed stimulating conversations with both intellectual and fashionable Parisians, such as Jacques-Emile Blanche (the famous French painter and literary artist) and Madame de Fitz-James and the guests in her salon (a drawing room used as a gathering place of noted persons, usually under the patronage of some distinguished woman). Enjoying numerous complimentary comments about her novel The House of Mirth (1905), Mrs. Wharton produced several volumes of short stories. Then she began composing and writing, with the “greatest joy” and the “fullest ease,” Ethan Frome. (Mrs. Wharton began the composition of Ethan Frome in Paris in French, to have practice in keeping up-to-date with French idioms.) Along about this time, she participated in some very pleasurable experiences. She continued to socialize with her literary idol, Henry James. She thrilled to the dancing of the superb ballerina, Isadora Duncan, at the Paris Opera. She was inspired by the Imperial ballet from St. Petersburg, under the direction of Diaghilev, the famed Russian ballet producer. She experienced a great sense of excitement over Marcel Proust’s first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. These new joys were somewhat dimmed by sad events. Each summer had seen the return of the Whartons to their glorious summer place, “The Mount,” in Lenox, Massachusetts. Over a period of years, Mr. Wharton’s health gradually began to fail due to neurasthenia (a condition marked by general physical weakness, depression and bodily disturbances). The summer place was sold, for Mrs. Wharton was not able to care for it all alone.

FRANCE AND THE WAR EFFORT

Back in France, during the early days of World War I, Mrs. Wharton saw the suffering of the sick and the homeless. Almost immediately, she began to do Red Cross work; she even provided a place for women who could sew clothing for the needy. To excite American interest in the plight of the French, she made six trips to the battle lines and then wrote an account of the hospital needs of the wounded. A woman with a tender heart for the sufferings of others, Mrs. Wharton and her many helpers cared for thousands of war refugees and several large groups of the young and the aged, as well as maintaining four sanatoriums for women and children who were victims of tuberculosis. Her heroic war efforts were recognized by France in 1915 when she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Belgium, in 1916, made her Chevalier (knight) of the Order of Leopold. To help obtain money fo...