Friday, March 10, 2006

On Ethan Frome

These are some remarks on Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I do not care if you as the reader hates it; on this I encourage comments on the novel.

And you can stop sighing now, it will be OK, Frome was not that bad.

As one knows, I feel compelled to write on and about most if not everything I read, and if it is a classic piece of literature or philosophy or something that moves me. I would like to make some general remarks about Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton.

While I am somewhat of a literary elitist, I found Ethan Frome to be quite an interesting novel. The plot is original and I took some comfort in Wharton’s style. I am well aware that this is not the typical Wharton novel, yet nonetheless it was interesting. In terms of the plot, my main critique of the work is the excessive amount of characters for the short text. The text is only about 120 pages or so, if that, in the standard paperback book. The plethora of characters was superfluous in such a short work, if Wharton had extended the text, and given more time to discuss in more detail episodes of the characters it would have been more acceptable. For example, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I am planning on resuming reading quote soon, has quite the lot of characters, but he incorporates them into each part much better than Wharton does. Each character does not serve as specific a purpose in Ethan Frome. All of the characters mentioned (Harmon Gow is debatable) are used and are important to the story.

To continue this idea, it is important to bring up the entity of drama. In many plays there are a large cast of characters for a text that takes about the same amount of time to read as Ethan Frome. In the last play of Edward de Vere, usually referred to as “William Shakespeare”, that I read, Twelfth Night, there are approximately ten characters or so who play a specific purpose. Possible the only insignificant characters are Curio, and the second officer who appears only once. Yet to have one officer called to break up a fight of three people is slightly unrealistic, so two fits better. Yet the second officer has only one line and drifts off into obscurity after his brief appearance. Yet the dynamic of the play would greatly change were it not for all of the characters; no character can be spared besides the ones mentioned. However, drama a very different animal than the novel, but I deemed it worthy of an example.

To elaborate on the concluding remarks on Ethan Frome this play was clearly a comedy. I agree with the self-proclaimed honorary and esteemed Mr. McEachan (don’t crucify me if I misspelled that) that Wharton wrote it as a tragedy but read it ten years later and realized that she had in actuality written a comedy. Ethan Frome will not go down as one of the premier classics of American literature, but I believe it is at least in the top 75 if not the top 50 of the greatest American novels (for the record I would love to compose that list). I must say that I agree with critics in the lack of a theme of the novel. There is no concrete theme, and I believe that Wharton may have written it as an outpouring of the pent up anger and pain of her troubled personal life. Regardless, it is high literature in terms of plot depth, and there are themes, symbols and motifs, and it can be read critically, but the lack of a theme and the overall brevity of the work downgrade it. In conclusion, I am glad that I read the novel, even if it is not Wharton’s best work.

Note these are only some concluding remarks on Ethan Frome; expect more criticism and analysis to come.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

U sir r a mastermind. I just read Ethan Frome for a high school summer reading prodject and part of the assignment was to find two critiques, which has inevitably lead me to your blog. I appreciate your blog so thanks!

12:06 AM  

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