Summary
For a moment such a flame of hate rose
in him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her.
He took a wild step forward and then stopped.
“You’re—you’re not coming down?” he said in a bewildered
voice.
See Important Quotations Explained
After hanging up his coat, Ethan calls to Zeena but receives
no reply. He goes up the stairs and opens her door, revealing a
nearly dark room. Still wearing her traveling clothes, Zeena sits
silently at the window. When Ethan informs her that supper is ready,
she says she has no appetite. Zeena cuts short Ethan’s attempts
to make small talk by announcing that she is much more ill than
he thinks. She tells him that in the interest of preserving her
health, she has engaged the services of a new hired girl, who will
arrive the -following afternoon.
Ethan becomes angry at this unforeseen expense, and a
raging war of words ensues between him and Zeena. After a bitter
haggle regarding Zeena’s condition, in which she insists that she
lost her health nursing his mother, Ethan resolutely declares that
he lacks the funds to employ a hired girl. But, in so doing, he
is caught in his own lie about the advance he had been planning
to collect from Andrew Hale. When Zeena points out Ethan’s inconsistency,
he is somewhat shaken. Zeena then further agitates Ethan by announcing
that Mattie has burdened the household for too long and will have
to leave. With Mattie’s board freed up, Zeena explains, they will
be able to scrape together enough money for a hired girl after all.
Just at that moment, Mattie calls up from the landing
to announce that supper is waiting. Zeena replies by declining her
supper, and Ethan sends Mattie downstairs, promising to follow shortly.
Turning back to Zeena, Ethan lamely attempts to defend Mattie. Zeena
refuses to listen, proclaiming that with the hired girl’s arrival,
Mattie must depart. Ethan fumes with hatred, but he stops himself
from expressing it. Instead, he retreats from the bedroom as Zeena
prepares to lie down for the night.
In the kitchen, Mattie brings a meat pie to the table,
and she and Ethan once again sit down to supper alone. Ethan assures
Mattie that everything is fine, but his disgust makes him unable
to eat, and his dark mood produces a new wave of anxiety in Mattie.
As she questions Ethan further, he rises from his seat and moves
around the table to her side. With a trembling perplexity, Mattie
leans toward him. As if to resolve matters, Ethan takes her into
his arms and kisses her fully upon the lips. She remains in his
grasp for a moment and then draws back to make sense of the situation.
With a violent outburst, Ethan declares that Mattie must
not go. Confused at first, Mattie soon catches his meaning and realizes
that Zeena intends for her to be replaced. After sitting in silence
for a while, they forlornly begin to discuss Mattie’s bleak prospects
for future employment. Filled with indignation, Ethan exclaims that
he means to protect Mattie from dismissal and expulsion. No sooner have
the rebellious words erupted than Mattie raises her hand in warning—Zeena
comes in and quietly takes her seat at the table between Ethan and
Mattie. Citing her need for nourishment despite her lack of appetite,
Zeena starts eating her meal. Ethan sits motionless and Mattie attempts
to make polite conversation. The cat rubs up against Zeena, and
she strokes it and feeds it a scrap of meat.
After finishing her meal, Zeena rises from the table to
find some old stomach powders. Mattie begins clearing the table,
and Ethan muses that he will go outside to watch the nightfall.
At the door, he meets an indignant Zeena on the verge of tears,
holding the shards of the pickle dish in her hand and demanding
an explanation. When pressed, Ethan blames the accident on the cat.
Rushing to Ethan’s defense, Mattie explains that she had taken the
pickle dish down to decorate the supper table. Zeena reprimands
Mattie for her sneakiness and declares that she should have turned
her out long ago.
Analysis
The increasing gravity of Zeena’s illness—or at least
what she claims is the increasing gravity of her
illness—invests her with a ruthless authority in these scenes. Wharton
compares Zeena’s discussions of her sickness with the behavior of
someone chosen for “a great fate.” Zeena doesn’t see her ailment
as a curse; she acts as though her ability to live with suffering
proves her “elect” status, her virtue, and fortitude. She casts
herself as a noble martyr, telling Ethan that although anyone else
would need an operation given her condition, she is willing to struggle
on without one.
Zeena’s placement of herself in the role of a martyr is
certainly Ethan’s greatest obstacle in his attempt to keep Mattie,
but even without Zeena claiming the higher moral ground, Ethan would
be out of his depth. Zeena calls the shots because Mattie is her
relative, not Ethan’s. Likewise, the domestic realm is Zeena’s concern,
not Ethan’s. Zeena’s dominance within the household becomes obvious when
Ethan, seething, has a sudden urge to strike at her but then inexplicably
reverts to a state of passive bewilderment and meekness, retreating
downstairs. Similarly, Zeena’s well-timed entrance into the kitchen
forces Ethan back into silence just as he has finally managed to
reveal his true feelings to Mattie.
Certainly, Ethan realizes that Zeena, a chronic hypochondriac,
is exaggerating the severity of her illness in order to gain the
upper hand in their relationship. Nevertheless, he remains powerless
to oppose her. The self-possessed Zeena so carefully crafts her
statements that, though they may be lies, Ethan cannot disprove
them. Ethan, on the other hand, lacks grace and articulateness.
He clumsily allows Zeena to catch him in his own lie about the lumber advance,
and then proves unable to cover his tracks. As Wharton squarely
notes, Ethan is no good at lying, and his natural streak of honesty
is a factor in his eventual inability to realize his own dreams.
The broken pickle dish that Zeena discovers at the top
of the china closet symbolizes the shattered Frome marriage. Mattie
is partially responsible for the breaking of both the pickle dish
and the marriage, having handled them carelessly, and Ethan cowardly hides
the broken state of each. Significantly, though, it was the cat that
actually destroyed the dish. Throughout the narrative, the cat is associated
with Zeena, so the cat’s destruction of the pickle dish suggests
that Zeena must share responsibility for the failure of her marriage.
Zeena uses the dish as an excuse to vent anger that in fact stems
from the disintegration of the relationships around her. She mourns
for the destruction of the dish because she cannot openly mourn
the collapse of her marriage and happiness.
Meanwhile, the reader is left uncertain of Mattie’s feelings, because
Zeena’s arrival cuts short Mattie’s conversation with Ethan after
he kisses her. We assume that she feels the same passion that Ethan
does, but her words do not betray anything. Instead of discussing
the kiss, she immediately turns the conversation to Zeena and the
possibility of her own departure from the household.
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