79 pages • 2 hours read
Edith WhartonEthan Frome
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1911A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
While visiting Starkfield’s post office, the narrator—an engineer temporarily working at a nearby power plant—notices a scarred and limping man. Impressed by the man’s “careless powerful look” (8), he learns from the local stagecoach driver that the man’s name is Ethan Frome and that he received his injuries in a sledding accident 24 years earlier. When a strike at the plant forces the narrator to winter in Starkfield, he becomes increasingly curious about Ethan. However, most people in Starkfield seem reluctant to discuss Ethan’s past.
One day, the narrator abruptly finds himself without a ride to the train station. The stagecoach driver, Harmon Gow, suggests that he hire Ethan, whose farm is unprofitable. For the next several days, Ethan takes the narrator to and from the station in his sleigh. Ethan is generally silent during these rides but shows occasional interest in the narrator’s work.
Later that week, a snowstorm shuts down the railroad, and Ethan offers to drive the narrator the full 10 miles to the power plant. The journey takes them past Ethan’s farm, which looks bleak and run-down; Ethan remarks that the railway’s construction eliminated much of the traffic that used to pass the house and attributes his mother’s mental decline and death to the ensuing isolation.
Ethan returns to the plant that evening, but the blizzard worsens as the men approach Starkfield, and Ethan invites the narrator to spend the night at his house. Following Ethan inside, the narrator hears a woman complaining in a monotone voice. He later draws on the night’s experiences to piece together the following narrative.
Prologue Analysis
Ethan Frome is unique amongst Wharton’s major works. Wharton grew up in a well-to-do New York family, and her most famous works (including The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth) tend to take place in a similarly wealthy and urban world. Ethan Frome, by contrast, is set in a remote Massachusetts village, and its primary characters straddle the line of working and lower-middle class.
This contrast makes the novel’s frame story all the more significant. The narrator is well educated, relatively cosmopolitan (his job has taken him to Florida, Massachusetts, and likely elsewhere), and at the very least financially secure. In one sense, this makes him the ideal narrator for Ethan’s story; he’s the kind of person Wharton’s readers would likely relate to and would therefore trust to “translate” the novel’s unfamiliar characters and scenes for public consumption. The narrator himself implies as much when he remarks that Gow “developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted” (10)—the implication being that Gow is too unsophisticated to recognize or draw out the story’s true significance.
The clear classism of this idea raises the question of just how reliable the narrator is. As he himself acknowledges, the story he’s telling is highly subjective and exists in multiple versions: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story” (8). In cobbling together these narratives into a single storyline, the narrator also injects his own concerns and speculations; he “sense[s] that the deeper meaning of [Ethan’s] story [i]s in the gaps” (10), and he fills in those gaps with a narrative that speaks to him. Specifically, the story the narrator tells flows from his identification with Ethan, who briefly studied engineering and who strikes the narrator (and probably Starkfield’s other residents) as intellectually superior to his station: “Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs” (14-15).
What the narrator finds “poignant” is not just Ethan’s personal tragedies, but also the idea that he represents a class of people who, through no fault of their own, have been left behind by industrialization. The Prologue frequently alludes to the changes modernization and urbanization have brought to Starkfield generally, and to the Fromes in particular—for instance, the financial and psychosocial impact of being left off the rail-line. This socioeconomic backdrop remains significant throughout the rest of the novel.
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By Edith Wharton
