Summary
When I had been there a little longer
. . . I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six
months’ siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Due to a carpenters’ strike, an engineer (the narrator)
spends the winter in the small Massachusetts town of Starkfield,
where he comes to learn the tale of Ethan Frome through various
sources. The narrator’s initial impression of Frome, whom he first
encounters at the local post office, is of a silent and unapproachable
man with an impressive build and posture. Frome is disfigured, and
one of his most prominent characteristics is his scarred face,
which was smashed in an accident almost a quarter of a century earlier.
Curious about the details of Frome’s accident and about
Frome’s isolated rural existence, the narrator begins to press some
of Starkfield’s residents for information. Harmon Gow, a local stagecoach driver,
provides a few specifics but fails to understand and convey the
deeper meaning of the story. Mrs. Ned Hale, born Ruth Varnum, the
middle-aged widow with whom the narrator lodges, proves equally
reticent on the subject of Frome.
When the livery stable horses fall ill from a local epidemic,
the narrator is left without a way of getting to and from the train
station each day for his work. Harmon Gow suggests that the narrator speak
with Frome about catching a ride with him. For a week, Frome wordlessly
brings the narrator to and from the station each day, a journey
that takes nearly an hour each way. One day, after the narrator
inadvertently leaves a biochemistry book in Frome’s carriage, the
two men discover their mutual interest in the field, which leads
to a brief interchange on the progress of science. The narrator lends
Frome the book in hopes of prompting further conversation, but his
hopes prove empty.
A few days later, a driving snowstorm blankets the countryside. The
narrator’s usual train is delayed, so Frome decides to drive the narrator
all the way to his place of business. During the ten-mile journey,
they pass Frome’s farm, and Frome speaks hesitatingly to the narrator
about his changed family fortunes. In silence, they push on through
the remainder of the snowstorm, and when they arrive at their destination,
the narrator quickly conducts his business before they set out for
the return journey to Starkfield. At sunset the storm picks up again,
and Frome’s horse has trouble keeping to the road in the dark. After
a couple of miles of unsure progress, Frome is finally able to identify
his gate through the mist and darkness.
The narrator, who has been walking alongside the horse,
finds himself completely exhausted, and he suggests to Frome that
they have come far enough. Frome agrees, implicitly offering to
put him up for the evening. The narrator follows Frome to the barn
to settle the horse for the evening, and the two men proceed to
Frome’s house, a dilapidated building originally constructed in
the shape of an L but from which one wing has been removed. In the
hallway entrance, Frome shakes the snow from his boots as the voice
of a woman drones from within. Frome then opens the inner door to
the house and invites the narrator inside. As he speaks, the woman’s voice
grows still.
Analysis
The narrator’s suspicion that the deeper meaning of Ethan
Frome’s story lies “in the gaps” between scattered details also
guides us as readers. Wharton creates an enormous structural gap
by beginning the novel near the end of its chronological progression,
and the bulk of the novel serves to fill that gap. Because the telling
of the tale commences near the conclusion of the drama’s events,
Wharton is able to lend a tinge of inevitability to the ensuing
narrative. The fact that all of the story’s events have already
happened imbues them with a feeling of finality and fatality, a
sense that, just as the events cannot now be altered, they could
not then be avoided.
