Ethan Frome, Necrologic, and Psychological Violence

I

While Orion's cold fires flicker in the starry sky, Ethan Frome, haunted by dead and dying shades, treads across a winter wasteland thirsting for the forbidden love of Mattie Silver, a light he can never have. In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, Ethan Frome finds himself caught between his obligations to his shrewish wife, Zeena, and his love for her younger cousin, Mattie Silver. A psychoanalytic study of the personalities of Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena demonstrates that all three characters engage in self-destructive behavior. According to Lev Raphael, who quotes Carol Wershoven, Ethan Frome "'is a novel about destruction . . . about the warping and distortion of personalities'" (57). Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena reverse the death and love instincts and meld them into a perverse combination of drives that manifest themselves in a neurotic, self-destructive manner. Wendy Gimbel notes that "the rhythmic pattern of the story" is "the tension between life and death" (66). To the characters, however, their actions are appropriate because they follow a logic of death and self-defeat, or what may be identified as a "necrologic."

From the very beginning of Ethan Frome, the reader sees a direct link between Ethan's cold environment and his frozen, emotional state. The extreme New England winter setting of Ethan Frome renders Ethan's village into an Arctic wasteland. The cessation of activity and the sparseness of life in the external environment mirror Ethan's internal, emotional climate, as well. According to the narrator, "He [Ethan] seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe" (Wharton 11). Cynthia Griffin Wolff remarks that "Frome embraces its [the winter's] most frigid elements" (106). According to the novel's narrator, "there was something bleak and unapproachable in his [Ethan's] face" (Wharton 3). However, "bound below the surface" lay "all that was warm and sentient in him" (11). Although Ethan seems frozen and stoic in his outward manner, internally exists something warm and human that is opposite from his external appearance. Thus, Ethan's actions and emotions are obviously at odds with each other, and the reader begins to notice the fragmentation of Ethan's personality. The narrator also recognizes this fragmentation, noticing "the contrast . . . between his outer situation and his inner needs" for both love and control (13).

Further in the novel, the reader begins to develop a sense of what Ethan's inner needs might be. While riding along the countryside with the narrator, Ethan points out his house and comments, "I had to take down the 'L'" (15). Commenting on the "symbolic sense" of the "L," the narrator remarks that "it . . . seems to be the centre, the actual hearth-stone of the New England farm" (16). Since hearth-stone carries connections with family life and home, it seems that Ethan, although he is married, has no fulfilling family life. If the reader evaluates what else "L" could symbolize in light of "L's" association with hearth-stone, one sees that the "L" Ethan refers to represents love, life and lust. Thus, for Ethan, "L" operates as an eros character that signifies an absence of life, family, and love.

Shortly into the novel, the narrator engages in a narrative flashback that occupies the central portion of the novel. In this flashback, the reader sees an Ethan younger than the Ethan at the beginning and end of the novel. This younger Ethan already suffers from a lack of love and family. In short, Ethan's problem throughout the entire novel is that he has no fulfilling relationship with his wife, no notable relationship with either family or friends, and no rewarding career or other activities. Ethan, however, tries to develop a relationship with Mattie. As the narrator says, "Ethan was never gay but in her presence" (26).

It is Mattie who is the eroslogos, the underlying word, shaping Ethan's entire being. As the narrator states, "it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture" (32). However Mattie is also Ethan's necrologos, or his death word. As Gimbel comments, "Mattie exists in an arrested state. That state is the anti-rhythm of death-in-life" (64). Early in the novel, Mattie and Ethan observe a sunset, which includes "intensely blue shadows of hemlock on sunlight snow" (26). Sunlight may be taken as a symbol of life, while the shadows, snow, and poisonous hemlock represent death. Gimbel states that such symbols as "light and darkness . . . are used to externalize states of mind" (65). Thus, the scene features an intermingling of life and death that again corresponds to Ethan's psyche. When Mattie, observing the scene, comments, "It looks just as if it was painted," Ethan finds "that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul" (26).

Ethan's comment contains a certain degree of irony. Logically, any words that speak to one's soul are profound. Yet, Mattie's words do not seem profound, but rather banal, or, at the most, childishly poetic. On the other hand, perhaps Mattie is the only person Ethan has watched a sunset with. To some degree, at least, the sunset affects Mattie and evokes a response from her. Still, Ethan seems to give her response more weight than it is entitled to. Either way, the question persists: what does Ethan hope to gain from this relationship?

Mattie functions as an object for Ethan to project his desires onto. Gimbels notes that "Mattie's passivity allows her to becomes whatever others need her to be" (75). For example, Ethan observes the manner in which Mattie, at a dance, interacts with the other dancers. He "notice[s] two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him" (26). Until now, Ethan believes that he has some sort of effect on Mattie. He "was never gay but in her presence," and, apparently, he thinks she is only gay in his presence as well (26). But this illusion shatters when Ethan realizes that "the face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset" (26).

This is an important analogy because a window that has caught the sunset reflects the sunset, or functions as a mirror. Ethan desperately wants for Mattie to feel something so extraordinary for him that she would reserve certain looks and gestures for only him. As the narrator explains, Ethan "attach[ed] a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone" (35-6). Later, Mattie and Ethan engage in everyday conversation, and "the commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established intimacy" (67). Thus, Ethan projects his own wishes onto her, but he cannot sustain the resulting delusion.

Beside using Mattie as an object for his wishes, Ethan also believes that Mattie's presence will restore the family life he presently lacks. The narrator reports that "the coming to his [Ethan's] house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth" (25). Although Ethan hopes that Mattie's presence will light the symbolic hearth fires (25), it is Ethan who actually lights these literal fires (27). Since fire carries associations of both life and destruction, the reader realizes that Ethan alone is responsible for his own life and his own death. Only Ethan can save himself, just as only Ethan can destroy himself.

The reader soon learns that Ethan hopes Mattie will do more than supplement his lack of family; Ethan holds fantasies of marrying Mattie. Although she is "forgetful and dreamy, . . . ha[s] no natural turn for housekeeping . . . and [is] not disposed to take the matter seriously," he "had an idea that if she were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant instincts would awake" in her (27).

Ethan also hopes Mattie will fulfill some of his more basic desires as well. The reader's initial image of Mattie consists of Ethan's observation of her at a dance. Ethan, watching Mattie dance, observes her "panting lips" and, with the description, Ethan's account take on a sexual sense (23). He describes "the exhilaration of the dance" in which "the dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians to keep up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing their mounts on the home-stretch" (23). The rhythm and quickening pace of the dance resemble a sexual climax. As Freud reports "whips . . . are familiar to us as phallic symbols" (414). Ethan observes the dance, like a voyeur, outside of a window.

Besides being an object of sexual interest, Mattie serves another function for Ethan, as well: she is an object for Ethan to control and manipulate. For example, "the sight" of Mattie dancing with the very successful Dennis Eady "made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears" of Mattie leaving him (27). In response, Ethan hides from Mattie and lets her wonder where he is at. Ethan's hiding serves several purposes. One purpose may be to see if Mattie will wait on him. The second purpose behind Ethan's hiding is to punish Mattie for dancing with Dennis, who represents a sexual threat to Ethan. As Ethan says, "You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to dance the last reel with Dennis" (36). Ethan's punishment of Mattie is not so much a response to Mattie's actions as it is a response to his own feelings of insecurity. "Again he struggled for the all-expressive word," (37) the logos, to express his fear of Mattie leaving. Instead of talking with Mattie, he instead orders her to "Come along" (37). Later, after commanding Mattie to finish supper, "his soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her" (64). One may speculate that, when Ethan controlls Mattie, Ethan becomes sexually excited, since Ethan recounts that, when controllng Mattie, "he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery, except when he was steering a big log"--an phallic symbol--"down the mountain to his mill" (64).

Thus, a pattern develops in which Ethan, in response to his own fears, attempts to control a person or situation. One may agree with Jean Frantz Blackall who claims, "Ethan's idea of love is nurture," but this idea needs clarification (146). Ethan wants an "other" to nurture him and fulfill his desires, but he does not nurture the other in return. It does not seem as if Ethan truly loves Mattie. Ethan himself speculates that "it seemed unworthy of the girl that his thoughts of her should be so violent" (57). So, Ethan uses Mattie as on object upon which to exercise his own neurotic actions.

II

Perhaps Ethan controls Mattie as a way to compensate for the lack of control and fulfillment he experiences in his marriage to Zeena, or, perhaps, Ethan's desire for Mattie results from an inverted Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex results from a boy's sexual rivalry with his father in competition for the mother's attention (Fromm 399). Erich Fromm reports that "although some rivarly with [the] father exists, the main source of deep antagonism lies in the rebellion of the boy against patriarchal, oppresive authority" (399). Therefore, the Oedipus complex need not be gender specific: any source of rigid, opressive authority, such as Zeena, can function in the same role as "the father." Ethan and Mattie are cousins, and Zeena, much like "the father," taboos the incestual longings of Ethan and Mattie. According to Gimbel, "in Zeena's mind they have been incestuous children" (83). His own mother, Zeena, and now Mattie have been or are the real or fantasized mothers that Ethan expects to admire and nurture him. Thus, Ethan "jumps" from one mother to another. Gimbel believes that, after the death of Ethan's mother, Zeena assumes the role of Ethan's mother (72), and "Ethan, as a desperate child, receives Mattie Silver in the same spirit in which he once greeted Zeena" (Gimbel 74). Ethan does not want an adult relationship; he wants a mother, and, like a child, Ethan wants to control her. Eventually, "each [mother] turns her terrible aspect towards him . . . and the search for a substitute begins" (77). Gimbel concludes that "the cycle" for the mother by the infantile ego appears to be endless" (78). Ethan has lost any control he once may have had over Zeena. As the narrator states, "as long as he could ignore and command, he had remained indifferent. Now she had mastered him and he abhorred her" (Wharton 87). Ethan ignores Zeena as a defense mechanism against her constant complaining. The narrator claims that Zeena complains that "Ethan 'never listene[s].' The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy" (54).

One of Zeena's recurring complaints concerns her health. According to Ethan, "within a year of their marriage, she developed the 'sickliness,'which renders her unfit to help with any of the farm chores (53). Instead, Zeena constantly complains about her health and makes periodic visits to various doctors who sell her useless, expensive remedies (47). According to the narrator, Ethan believes "she [is] already an old woman" at only thirty-five years of age (48). She is also Ethan's necrologos. In fact, her very name creates a chill for Ethan (61). Zeena contributes in no way to the support of the Frome household and, instead, constantly complains of sickliness (54). To Zeena, however, this is a fair arrangement, since, according to her, she lost her health nursing Ethan's mother.

Zeena's sickness, besides excluding her from working, serves a second purpose. Her sickness gives her an identity. According to the narrator, her "sickliness" "had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances" (Wharton 53). Upon marrying Zeena, Ethan wants to move to a large city. Zeena, however, refuses to move because, as the narrator reports, in a larger city "she would have suffered a complete loss of identity" (53).

Even though Zeena remains "wholly absorbed in her health" and unreceptive to change, (47) she eventually accepts Mattie, who gives her "more leisure to devote to her complex ailments" (45). At first, however, Zeena "grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique ways of attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency" (27). Later, Zeena returns back to her initial feeling of distaste for Mattie. She makes small, cutting comments to Ethan, such as "I guess you're always late, now [that] you shave every morning" (29). Presumably, Zeena insinuates that Ethan shaves every morning in order to impress Mattie. Zeena's feeling of what might be jealousy probably do not result from any sort of love for Ethan. Most likely, she fears that, with Mattie's arrival, Ethan will continue to spend more and more time with Mattie until he no longer has time to listen to Zeena's hypochondriacal complaints.

For whatever reason, there exists a lack of communication between Ethan and Zeena. Neither character discusses any issues or problems in a direct and open manner. The narrator states that Zeena's communication consists of "letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences" (29). Fromm describes this type of behavior as "mental sadism, " which "may be disguised in many seemingly harmless ways: a question, a smile, a confusing remark" (318). In contrast, Ethan says nothing at all to Zeena, and, perhaps, uses his silence as a weapon. Or, as Raphael claims, "shame over a lifetime of dissapointments . . . silences him" (284).

The situation reaches the breaking point when Zeena, due to worsening health, announces that a new, more capable girl shall arrive to take Mattie's place (82). Of course, it is not her health but her jealousy that necessitates replacing Mattie. When Zeena says her health is worsening, Ethan feels caught "between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed" (81). However, when Ethan finds out that Zeena intends to get rid of Mattie and replace her with a paid servant, "wrath predominated" (83). Ethan's shame and wrath fuels the "first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years together" (83). Raphael believes, "Ethan tries to shame Zeena into keeping Mattie" (288). In response, Zeena justifies Mattie's banishment (Wharton 87). Zenna's banishment of Mattie unleashes a lifetime of repressed rage and anger in Ethan.

Just as Ethan projects his hopes onto Mattie, he now projects all of his bitter disappointment onto Zeena:

All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in this woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. (88)

Unexpectedly, Ethan merely takes a step forward, stops, and walks out of the room. Ethan does nothing because, as Gimbel points out, "victory for the child [Ethan] brings release into the adult world," which Ethan cannot bear (81). Later, when Mattie prepares to leave the Frome household, Ethan makes up his mind to do something, "but he did not know what it would be" (Wharton 103).

III

Ethan's conflict reaches its apex on the sled ride he and Mattie take together just before she is to leave Starkfield. On the way to the train station, Ethan says "I'd a' most rather have you dead" than leave (Wharton 117). Mattie responds, "Oh, I wish I was" (117). Soon after, "Some erratic impulse prompts" (118) Ethan to suggest that he and Mattie take a sled ride. Ethan's "erratic impulse" is what Freud identifies as the death instinct/drive, or Thanatos complex. Fromm defines the death drive as "the passion to destory" and the life instinct as the "the passion to love" (22). Terry Eagleton, summarizing the death drive, states, "the final goal of life is death, a return to that blissful inanimate" womb-like "state" provided by the mother "where the ego cannot be injured" (161). Mattie and Ethan sled down the incline once, and Mattie suggests that they sled down again, collide with a large elm, and commit suicide. Ethan now has Mattie's suggestion to reinforce the desires of his own death drive as well as a "hated vision" of returning to a disapproving wife (Wharton 122). He hopes that in death, he "shan't feel anything," or that his ego will be beyond injury (122).

According to Fromm, Freud identified the life or love instinct, the Eros complex, as the polar opposite of the death drive (29). Together, the death and love instinct constitute the "two fundamental passions in man" (29). In terms applicable to Ethan, it seems that since he cannot fulfill his love instinct by having a relationship with Mattie, he will instead carry out the desires of the death drive and, in doing so, free himself from the hurt sustained from the unsatisfied love instinct. Or, Ethan's death desire may result from an unsatisfied incestual longing. First, just as Ethan controls Mattie, one may attmept to control another as a means by which to satiate the incestual desire (Fromm 404). Fromm explains the manner in which one's desire for incest becomes deathly desire:

If [one's] life provides such relatively satisfacotry solutions as success in work, prestige, etc., the destructiveness may never be expressed overtly . . . If, on the other hand, he experiences failures, the malignant tendencies will come to the fore and the craving for destruction . . . will rule supreme. (404) As Gimbel points out, "the basis for incestuous desire" is the hope of becoming a child once more (88). Since Zeena has closed off any other option, "for Ethan and Mattie, that return is possible only through death" (89).

What Ethan does is to reverse the conflicting life and death instincts and meld them into a perverse combination of drives that manifest themselves in a neurotic, inappropriate manner.

A consideration of the character types involved sets up a foundation for understanding this reversal. Ethan fluctuates between two extremes of character, submissive and controlling, in his attempt to create an integrated and balanced personality. He plays the split roles of both masochist and sadist, enduring his wife's ill treatment of him and, at the same time, enjoying his command over the less-assertive Mattie. For example, before the first sled ride, Ethan orders Mattie to "Come!" (Wharton 118). The narrator finds that "the note of authority in his voice seemed to subdue her" and, accordingly, Mattie "seated herself obediently" on the sled (119).

The decision to collide with the elm represents a reversal of the death and life instincts. Carl Jung writes that "an ancient tree or plant represents symbolically the growth and development of psychic life" (152). Thus, Frome's suicide attempt may represent an assertion of control, but it a negation of life. Symbolically, Ethan's collision with the elm, both phallic symbol and earth/mother symbol, represents a shattering of his own manhood and the final rejection of both patriarchal and matriarchal power and potential.

Ethan, however, views suicide as a way to preserve his and Mattie's relationship, or at least the possibility thereof. As the narrator reports, "all [Ethan's] life was lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of it being otherwise" (30). At the same time, suicide, while a desperate act of control, is also the ultimate submission to external and, more importantly, unknown forces. Thus, the reader finds a blending of masochistic and sadistic impulses. For Mattie, suicide also provides a way to control her environment, a way to insure that she will never be cast out from the Frome household. Or, if one wants to consider other subconscious motivations, perhaps Mattie desires to commit suicide as a way to insure that she will never return to the Frome household.

However, the crash has disastrous effects far different from their intentions. Mattie finds herself back in the Frome household which, although secure, can hardly qualify as pleasant. Ethan now has the extended burden of watching Mattie become the undesirable mirror image of Zeena, with her hair "as grey as her companion's, her face as bloodless and shriveled" (Wharton 127). In contrast, according to Mrs. Hale, the Fromes' neighbor, Zeena takes care of Ethan and Mattie after the crash.

IV

Thus, at the book's end, we are left to wonder just what Ethan's intentions were on the final sleigh ride. Most likely, Ethan purposefully crashes the sled. In fact, during their descent, Ethan actually adjusts the course of the sled,"kept it straight and drove down on the black projecting mass" (125). Earlier, when he and Mattie pass by an enclosure containing the Frome graveyard, Frome imagines the dead saying, "we never got away why should you?" (38). Rather than evoking fear, "the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability" (38). In fact, Ethan has a vision of living in Starkfield with Mattie and eventually lying beside her in the graveyard (38). Ethan concludes that "he was never so happy as when he abandoned himself to these dreams" (38). Also, Ethan rationalizes, death "was better than parting" (124). Again, Ethan has a delusion. If death is better than separating from Mattie, Ethan must think that he and Mattie will somehow reunite in death. Maybe Ethan is suffering from a guilt-complex resulting from his mother and father's deaths. Perhaps Ethan intended to hurt and punish both himself for his extra-marital intentions and Mattie as the object of those intentions.

For whatever reason(s), in an incredibly sadistic act, Ethan makes a choice to collide with the elm and, instead of destroying himself, only adds to his pain. Ethan and Mattie survive the crash, and, oddly, the crash seems to have alleviated Ethan's anger. In fact, after acting out of anger, Ethan now acts from compassion, the opposite extreme of hate and death. Apparently, some small animal has also been caught in the crash. Although Ethan is injured, "the thought of the animal's suffering was intolerable to him," and he thought "he might get hold of the little creature and help it" (125). The experience, however, seems not to produce any lasting change in Ethan's behavior.

Ethan's last act of self-destruction is not the attempted suicide sleigh ride, but rather his decision to live on in the aftermath of the crash. As Raphael claims, "Frome is chained to an even darker fate . . . because he doesn't escape into death" (284). Ethan returns to his former (non)life with the extra physical pain of his disabilities and the added mental anguish of actually watching Mattie, Ethan's necrologos, slowly turn into Zeena. Thus, we are to give special attention to Mrs. Hale's declaration that if Mattie "ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived" (132).

By the novel's end, two things are clear. First, Ethan's eroslogos and his necrologos appear to be the same word--mother. Second, at the start of the novel, the narrator sees Frome as "the bronze image of the hero," (Wharton 11) but by the end of the novel, Frome is not even human. He is the dark, still light of the undead.

Works Cited

Blackall, Jean Frantz. "The Sledding Accident in Ethan Frome." Studies in Short Fiction 21.2 (1984): 145-6.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. 1983.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Avon, 1965.

Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Connecticut: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973.

Gimbel, Wendy. Orphancy and Survival. Ed. Annetter Baxter. Landmark Dissertations in Women's Studies. New York: Praeger, 1984.

Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell, 1964.

Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Raphael, Lev. Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Shame: A New Perspective on Her Neglected Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. New York: Signet, 1987.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Cold Ethan and 'Hot Ethan.'" Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992. 97-114.