Ethan Frome Background Information

1
Ethan Frome Background Information

• English III
• Advanced Composition Novel
• Mrs. Snipes

2
Table of Contents

• Part I Biographical Sketch of Edith Wharton
• Part II Historical ContextVictorian Era
• Part III Realism Naturalism as Literary
  Movements

3
Part I Biographical Sketch of Edith Wharton

• Edith Wharton was born Edith Jones, into an
  upper-class New York City family in 1862.
• She was privately educated by governesses and
  tutors, both at home and abroad.
• At an early age she displayed a marked interest
  in writing and literature, a pursuit her socially
  ambitious mother attempted to discourage.
• She received a marriage proposal at a young age,
  but her prospective in-laws ended the engagement
  because they felt the Jones family was too
  snobbish.
• Then, in 1885, after another broken engagement,
  Edith married Edward Wharton, an older man whom
  the Jones family found to be of a suitably lofty
  social rank.

4

• According to Claudia Roth Pierpont of The New
  Yorker Magazine Whartons marriage was a
  disaster intellectually, emotionally, and above
  all sexually. She writes that after what seems
  to have been one or two attempts at grappling
  with their mysterious bodies, Teddy and Edith
  lived together in celibacy for twenty-eight
  years. They finally divorced in 1913, when
  divorce became more socially acceptable.
• The temptations of illicit passion constitute an
  undeniable focus of Whartons fiction, and many
  have pointed to Whartons unhappy marriage as an
  explanation.
• Wharton was advised by her doctor to take up
  writing fiction more seriously in order to
  relieve tension and stress.
• Wharton found temporary solace in her
  surreptitious affair with the journalist Morton
  Fullerton, which coincided with the collapse of
  her marriage.
• It was in the wake of this affair and her ensuing
  divorce that Wharton wrote many of her most
  successful and endearing works.

5

• Whartons fiction was especially effective at
  piercing the veil of moral respectability that
  sometimes masked as integrity among the rich.
• In her fiction, conforming to social norms is
  constantly at odds with a rejection of
  conformity.
• She can be viewed as a critic of moral
  recklessness who wanted individuals to consider
  each moral decision on its own terms.

6

• Wharton, who in 1924 became the first woman to
  receive an honorary degree from Yale University,
  viewed Victorian society with ironic detachment.
• She recorded in her writing the suffering of
  characters caught up in the grip of shifting
  economic forces and restrictive codes that often
  encouraged selfish behavior in the name of
  respectability.
• From the perspective of an upper-class initiate,
  she observed the shift of power and wealth from
  the hands of New Yorks established gentry to the
  nouveau riche of the Industrial Revolution.
• Wharton considered the newly wealthy to be
  cultural philistines and drew upon their lives to
  create many of her best remembered fictional
  characters and situations.

7

• Whartons first true critical success came with
  the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905.
• This novel tells the story of Lily Bart, a
  society woman whose fortunes decline. Unable to
  provide for herself, unwilling to marry for
  money, and unable to marry for love, she falls
  into poverty and social alienation before dying,
  perhaps as a suicide.
• Her other novels include The Custom of the
  Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920),
  for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in
  1921. She also wrote several short stories and
  even a book about decorating houses.

8

• Ethan Frome (1911) is one of the few pieces of
  Whartons fiction that does not take place in an
  urban, upper-class setting.
• Interestingly, Wharton based the narrative of the
  novel on an accident that occurred in Lenox,
  Massachusetts, where she traveled extensively and
  had come into contact with one of the victims of
  the accident.
• Wharton found the notion of the tragic sledding
  crash to be irresistible as a potential extended
  metaphor for the wrongdoings of a secret love
  affair.
• According to Pierpont, Wharton believed this
  novella marked her coming-of-age as a craftsman.

9

• Settling in Paris in the early 1910s, she became
  one of many American expatriates who rejected
  American society and its contradictions.
• Among such artists as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
  Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, she became a
  close associate of the novelist Henry James, a
  fellow American of similarly intense and
  indecipherable moral sensibility.
• Like her friend, whose writings strongly
  influenced hers, she was concerned with the
  subtle interplay of emotions on a society that
  censured the free expression of passion.
• Her understanding of conflicting values in this
  artificial milieu often gives her work a tragic
  intensity.

10

• In 1937, after nearly half a century of devotion
  to the art of fiction, Wharton died in her villa
  near Paris at the age of seventy-five.
• She remains one of Americas most cherished
  novelists.

11
Quotes by Edith Wharton

• There are two ways of reflecting light to be
  the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
• True originality consists not in a new manner
  but in a new vision.
• The only way not to think about money is to have
  a great deal of it.
• I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal
  coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo,
  and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain,
  and diversified elements of misery, than the
  marriage tie.
• How much longer are we going to think it
  necessary to be American before (or in
  contradistinction to) being cultivated, being
  enlightened, being humane, and having the same
  intellectual discipline as other civilized
  countries?

12
Part II Historical ContextVictorian Era

• In English literature, this was the period
  covered by the reign of Queen Victoria from
  1837-1901.
• During these years, England experienced the apex
  of its ascendancy as a world power, having
  established an empire on which the sun never
  set.
• England became the first nation to become truly
  industrialized, which turned out to be a mixed
  blessing, creating as it did massive social
  problems brought about by urban slums and social
  dissension.
• Though this era originated in England, its
  influenced were felt in America, as well.
• In literature, the social upheaval proved grist
  for the mill of novelists who probed the
  connections between the individual and his or her
  rapidly changing society.

13

• Distinguished thinkers of this time included
  Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Charles
  Darwin.
• With the industrialization of America came the
  development and expansion of railroads and
  isolated communities became accessible.
• Urban slums brought a rise in prostitution to an
  age that was sexually repressed. Pornography and
  erotic literature was also burgeoning at this
  time in history, yet society was outwardly
  prudish. For example, one could not say leg in
  public!

14

• The Industrial Revolution also established
  distinct classes a wealthy aristocracy, the
  nouveau riche, and a lower class that was largely
  exploited as a result of this Capitalistic boom.
• Women and children began to make up part of the
  working class in urban area.

15
Part III Realism Naturalism as Literary
Movements

• Realism is, in art and literature, a term
  covering a broad range of views centered on the
  attempt to depict life as it is usually
  experienced, without recourse to miraculous
  events, larger-than-life characters, or
  supernatural intervention.
• In a realistic text, the emphasis is on the way
  things are for ordinary people, whose behavior
  and speech mirror their social position and
  cultural attitudes.
• In this sense, realism is opposed to romance,
  which represents life as we would like it to be,
  or to other anti-realist approaches such as
  expressionism and impressionism.
• A key feature of realist literature is its
  emphasis on the authors objectivity.
• Another characteristic was the notion of
  determinism, the view that individual free will
  is, if not completely illusory, radically limited
  by cultural, environmental, and historical forces.

16

• Naturalism was a late 19th century movement in
  literature and art that grew out of realism.
• The basic effort of naturalism lay in the attempt
  to produce a scientifically accurate depiction of
  life even at the cost of representing ugliness
  and discord.
• The foremost spokesman of the naturalist school
  was Emile Zola, who believed that the artist must
  bring the scientists objectivity to the
  depiction of his subjects.
• The motives and behaviors of characters are
  determined by heredity and environment.
• The artists task is to reveal the role of these
  factors in the lives of the characters.

17
Examples of Literature from this Period

• Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, The Age of
  Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• Willa Cather, My Antonia
• Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie,
  A Girl of the Streets
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

18
Source Information

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Nina
  Baym, Ed. New York W.W. Norton Company, 1998.
• Lathbury, Roger. Realism and Regionalism
  (1860-1910) American literature in its
  historical, cultural, and social contexts. New
  York Facts on File, Inc., 2006.
• Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and
  Thematic Terms. New York Checkmark Books, 1999.