nce Mattie’s ’plight’. She had to go to Starkfield because as the narrator says on page 91, ’What chance had she, inexperienced and untrained, among the million bread- seekers of the cities?’ Communications were less developed than today or even than the time on narration, when ’winter shut down on Starkfield’ everyone was isolated. There was no telephone, radio, television, buses or cars. If you needed to contact someone it had to be by foot or horse and Ethan ’[had] been in Starkfield too many winters’ so the season, added to Ethan’s plight. Even when the railroad had been introduced it had left them ‘side-tracked’ because before ’there was considerable passing’. This left Ethan and his family even more alone and desolate from the rest of the country. The second factor is the place the novel is set in. The name Starkfield is suggestive of deprivation and lifeless souls, all contributing to Ethan’s hardship. The main season in the novel is the ’enemy’ of winter. Edith Wharton uses the climate to match the feelings of people in Starkfield, walking with a ’sluggish pulse’. Wharton uses a military metaphor on page seven, ‘Storms of February had pitched their white tents About the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support’. As I was saying before, the presence of Ethan in Starkfield for the whole of his life has added to his plight. The metaphor is showing how the residents of Starkfield, they are defeated by the winter, allowing the reader to understand why Ethan stayed. The narrator wonders, ‘how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome’. Ethan Frome is a...
