When Zeena leaves for an overnight visit to seek treatment for her various complaints and symptoms in a neighboring town, Ethan is excited to have an evening alone with Mattie. Passing the graveyard, he thinks in an intense moment of foreshadowing that, "We'll always go on living here together, and some day she'll lie there beside me." It also becomes clear that Zeena has observed enough to understand that he has these feelings and that she resents them. It quickly becomes clear that Ethan has deep feelings for Mattie. Mattie is given the occasional night off to entertain herself in town as partial recompense for helping care for the Fromes, and Ethan has the duty of walking her home.
In Chapter I, Ethan is waiting outside a church dance for Mattie, his wife's cousin, who has for a year lived with Ethan and his sickly wife, Zeena (Zenobia), in order to help out around the house and farm. We then embark on the "first" chapter (Chapter I), which takes place twenty-four years prior. The narration switches from the first-person narrator of the prologue to a limited third-person narrator. Just as the two are entering Frome's house, the prologue ends and the framed story begins. A severe snowstorm during one of their journeys forces Frome to allow the narrator to shelter at his home one night. Because people seem not to wish to speak other than in vague and general terms about Frome's past, the narrator's curiosity grows, but he learns little more.Ĭhance circumstances arise that allow the narrator to hire Frome as his driver for a week. He learns that Frome's limp arose from having been injured in a "smash-up" twenty-four years before, but further details are not forthcoming, and the narrator fails to learn much more from Frome's fellow townspeople other than that Ethan's attempt at higher education decades before was thwarted by the sudden illness of his father following an injury, forcing his return to the farm to assist his parents, never to leave again. Curious, the narrator sets out to learn about him. in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain". Frome is described by the narrator as "the most striking figure in Starkfield", "the ruin of a man" with a "careless powerful look. This is Ethan Frome, who is a lifelong resident and a local fixture of the community. He spots a limping, quiet man around the village, who is somehow compelling in his demeanor and carriage.
The framing story concerns an unnamed male narrator spending a winter in Starkfield while in the area on business. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same name. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Ethan Frome is a 1911 book by American author Edith Wharton.
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