Ethan Frome

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married his wife of seven years, Zeena, who is a bit older than he, following the death of his mother, in an unsuccessful attempt to escape the silence, isolation, and the loneliness of the life of Starkfield. The setting for is winter. Edith Wharton , the author, chose winter because it symbolizes the emotional, physical isolation, cold, darkness and death that surround Ethan. Similarly, the name of the town Starkfield is symbolic of Ethan’s life. Stark depicts the many harsh winters causing unproductive, spiritless, and devastation to the people of Starkfield. One citizen may have said it best, "Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters" (5). The reader can take this statement one of two ways; that his livelihood has been taken away after the number of winters he has endure in Starkfield, or that his appearance is that of a weather beaten man. "There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face" (3). The key word in that quotation is bleak, that is a word used quite ...

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home "presents of a link with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment" (11). One can compare the destruction of the "L" on his home to his actual life, as the narrator states " this connection of ideas, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome’s words, and to see the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body" (11). The devastation of winter can destroy both a man’s will to live and the buildings which were build to protect him from that environment. As the narrator explains, " I had a sense that his [Ethan] loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had it in the profound accumulated ...

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