For the love of the pickle dish

Review of: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

My junior year of college, my brother was in his junior year of high school. He was in Honors 11 English, just like me, with the same teacher and everything. One night I received a phone call from my mom;

“So, your brother just got assigned the next book for Honors.”

 

“Yeah, what is it?”

“It’s Ethan Frome.”

“Oh God, he’ll hate it.”

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton is probably the first book I recognized as “real literature.” I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird and my fair share of Billy Shakes and things like that, but this was REAL LITERATURE about MATURE themes like love and heartbreak and pickle dishes.

Don’t get me wrong, when I started Ethan Frome I was into it. The forbidden love and all appealed to my high school self. But before getting halfway through the book is when my problems began.

*Summary Contains Spoilers*

The book is told in an extended flashback by the narrator who gets snowed in at the Frome household. During the course of the snowy eve the narrator learns all the details of tragedy that struck the household 20 years before.

Basically you’ve got Ethan and his wife Zeena, they live on a farm in Starkfield, Massachusetts.  They don’t particularly like each other and only got married because Zeena cared for Ethan’s mom on her deathbed so to repay her Ethan saved poor Zeena from spinsterhood.

Zeena is very ill for one reason or another and her young cousin Mattie comes to live with them to help out. Ethan has a crush on Mattie and is super stoked when Zeena says she’s going out of town overnight to see a new doctor.

Thus we commence the greatest description of sexual tension ever written.

Mattie prepares dinner and sets a special table, including Zeena’s “favorite” pickle dish. The dish is shattered when the cat knocks it over. Mattie is upset, but Ethan brushes it off not wanting to ruin his perfect evening. Then they sit by the fire and Ethan enjoys his pipe and Mattie sews. Ah, it is almost as if they were married and all Ethan wants is to confess his love to this beautiful young girl. But before he gets a chance she goes to bed and nothing happens.

Nothing. Happens.

The fact that nothing happened after pages and pages of rising tension is annoying enough, but my problems started before this. The bottom line: Mattie is a child of neglect and Ethan is the first person who has ever paid attention to her. As I read the book I couldn’t help but feel horrible for Ethan because all I could think was they Mattie didn’t really love him romantically as much as she loved him as a father figure.

Can you say hello daddy issues?

The next day Zeena comes home and of course notices the broken pickle dish right off the bat. I don’t know about you, but when I come back from a night away the first place I look is high on the shelf where I keep breakable crap I haven’t looked at since it was given to me as a wedding present.

But that’s just me.

Zeena tells Ethan her health is fading fast and they need to hire a better equipped girl to help around the house and Mattie’s getting the boot. Ethan puzzles and puzzles over ways Mattie can stay but all his plans fall through. Later on, when he’s taking Mattie to the station to catch a ride to her next gig she comes up with the perfect solution to fix all their problems.

They get on a sled and careen down a hill into a tree in an attempted suicide pact. Those daddy issues will kill you, man.   

Ethan is injured and Mattie is paralyzed. They both go back to the farm and Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena live out the rest of their lives together.

Which leads me to wonder: If she’s spent over 20 years caring for an invalid and a paraplegic then how sick was Zeena in the first place, really?

Report Card:

I take some issue with this being a school book because I don’t think it’s universal. I knew my brother would hate this book; what 17 year old boy wouldn’t? It contains nothing teen boys are interested in. As a teen girl I could latch on to the forbidden romance and the danger of discovery and the spitefulness of cats. But other than that, I have little empathy for these characters. 

I will say that had I read this book in college rather than high school I may have had a different opinion about it. Had we spent less time talking about our feelings about spiteful cats and more time analyzing the actual text I would have liked it better. That being said: death by sled is just silly. 

As John Mayer would say: “Fathers be good to your daughters”…or else they have too much baggage and kill themselves with sleds. Ethan Frome gets an A for the build-up of tension, but overall I give it a C.