Ethan Frome

A novel about despair, love, selfish constitutions, sorrowful lives, and unhappy matrimony. A work so very faithful to life in all its indifference to Man's existence. An intense book, the pages of which flirt continuously with the absurdity of Man's position in the universe, and his more or less pointless agony.The plot presents us with three individuals whose lives and fates are closely intertwined: Ethan Frome, his wife Zeena, and her cousin Mattie Silver. The couple though young is very unhappy, mainly on account of the hypochondriac wife, who condemns her husband to the life of an elderly pair with nothing but imaginary ailments and constant grumbling. Into such a gloomy household, the young and blooming Mattie Silver enters in the position of a hired girl with the very touch of spring at the end of her fingertips. Consequently, Ethan falls in love with all that went missing from his life; with the feminine coquettishness, with the lively youth, with the care, with the smiles, and with the girl herself. Hark! he is already married and like the helpless passenger on a sinking ship, he is left behind on account of the captain's neglect. Zeena is the one who stirs the vessel. If it were not for her obsession with illness, and her self-imposed status as invalid, Mattie would have never crossed the threshold only to fall in love with Ethan and make him fall in love with her in return. There is no way out of this disastrous situation. Ethan considers deserting his wife but two main difficulties prevent him from carrying Mattie away. The first is his meagre finances; the second, the norms and conventions of the era. This was not the first time that Wharton had written about the controversial manner in which divorce and separation were regarded in her time. That a marriage had failed and the pair involved in it are miserable did not matter in the least. In the stiff social system of the day, people were simply expected to go on with their tattering unions. What was really outrageous was to break free from such agony in the way Ellen Olenska had done in [b:The Age of Innocence|53835|The Age of Innocence|Edith Wharton|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388248423l/53835._SY75_.jpg|1959512]. The novel is realistic to the level of pessimism. It is also brief and goes straight to the point. Thus, we are not kept waiting for long until the lovers chance upon a morbid resolution to end their suffering and remain in the hold of one another for eternity and a day. Their plan fails and the lives of the three are condemned to a slow agonizing existence filled with inertia and suffering.