Ethan Frome Character Analysis

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“Ethan Frome” is a novel published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts and tells the story of a man with a history of thwarted dreams and desires, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage. He has to decide if he is willing to succumb to the life he is leading, which makes him miserable, or seek his own happiness without caring about the consequences of this decision. Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged…show more content…
In this novel each characters existence and their mentality is somewhat created from interactions with each other which mixed with their own personality traits makes them more dependent on each other; in some way they are “feeding” of each other’s emotions and receiving something that they lack. It can be assumed that in the novel the author showcases an aspect of dependent personality disorder which is characterized by a long-standing need for the person to be taken care of and a fear of being abandoned or separated from important individuals in his or her life. [2] To people who suffer from this disorder, making a decision is virtually impossible. When some of these people come together, they rely on each other to help them with decision-making. Unfortunately, the co-dependency created by this situation frequently makes it impossible for these people to separate. In fact, they often become so interdependent that subconsciously they increasingly act in ways that will maintain the status quo. (Morris) In Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome, the three major characters are so dependent on each other that no matter what they try, they remain stuck together. To underscore this point, Edith Wharton uses both language and diction to illustrate each of the three major characters' basic inability to make their decisions and their resultant co-dependency on each
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