ABSTRACT
In her Introduction to Ethan Frome, one of Edith Wharton’s infrequent statements about her own purposes as a writer, she addresses the question of how she can represent inarticulate persons realistically. She is speaking of the hill people of western Massachusetts, like Ethan Frome and his wife Zeena in that work and, again, like Charity Royall in Summer, Wharton’s other principal fiction set in the Lenox environs. Such people, she says, are inert as stones, uncomplicated, reticent, simple. Much of the narrative space in Ethan Frome is devoted to recording moments of silence that overlie feelings of anger, of love, of longing aspiration. Yet we know of these feelings because Wharton utilized an educated narrator and a frame story to account for his presence in the community. In her Introduction she reports her friends’ admonitions as to the artificiality of insinuating the narrative frame (xix–xx). Yet she doggedly insists on the appropriateness of the device to her purpose. By this means she could render Ethan’s inner life in a language inaccessible to Ethan himself without violating her premise of verisimilitude, that he be a wordless man, and one lacking in perspective, i.e., in “scope enough to see it all” (xxi). 1
