Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Illness and Disability
Ethan and those individuals close to him, including (by
the end of the novel) Mattie, suffer from sickness or disability.
Caring for the sick and the lame defines Ethan’s life. He spends
the years before the novel begins tending to his ailing mother,
and then he has to care for his hypochondriacal wife, Zeena. Finally,
after his and Mattie’s attempted suicides, Ethan is forced to spend
the rest of his days disfigured, living with a sick wife and the
handicapped Mattie. Outward physical signs reflect inner realities
in Ethan Frome, and the predominance of illness
in the characters’ physical states indicates that, inwardly, they
are all in states of destitution and decline.
Snow and Cold
The imagery of Ethan Frome is built around
cold, ice and snow, and hues of white. The characters constantly
complain about the cold, and the climactic scene hinges on the use
of a winter sport—sledding—as a means of suicide. These motifs work
to emphasize the novel’s larger theme of winter as a physically
and psychologically stifling force. Like the narrator, we initially
find beauty in the drifts, flakes, and icicles. Eventually, however,
the unremittingly wintry imagery becomes overwhelming and oppressive,
as the overall tone and outlook of the book become increasingly
bleak. The cumulative effect is to make the reader feel by the end
of the novel that, like Ethan himself, we have “been in Starkfield
too many winters.”
