Ethan Frome: Illness, Cold, and Symbolic Red

Illness and Disability in Ethan Frome

Ethan and those individuals close to him, including Mattie, suffer from sickness or disability. Caring for the sick and the lame defines Ethan’s life. He spends years tending to his ailing mother, and then he cares for his hypochondriacal wife, Zeena. After his and Mattie’s attempted suicide, Ethan is forced to spend his days as a cripple, living with a sick wife and the handicapped Mattie. Outward physical signs reflect inner realities, and the predominance of illness indicates that, inwardly, they are all in states of destitution and decline.

The Impact of Snow and Cold

The imagery of Ethan Frome is built around cold, ice, snow, and hues of white. The characters constantly complain about the cold, and the climactic scene hinges on the use of sledding as a means of suicide. These motifs emphasize the novel’s larger theme of winter as a physically and psychologically stifling force. Like the narrator, we initially find beauty in the drifts, flakes, and icicles. Eventually, however, the wintry imagery becomes overwhelming and oppressive, as the overall tone and outlook of the book become increasingly bleak. The cumulative effect is to make the reader feel that, like Ethan himself, we have “been in Starkfield too many winters.”

Symbols in Ethan Frome

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Mattie’s Red Scarf and Red Ribbon

In the two key scenes when Mattie and Ethan are alone together—outside the church after the dance and in the Frome house on the evening of Zeena’s absence—Wharton emphasizes that Mattie wears red. At the dance, she wears a red scarf, and for the evening alone, she puts a red ribbon in her hair. Red is the color of blood, ruddiness, good health, and vitality, all of which Mattie has in abundance, and all of which Zeena lacks. In the oppressive white landscape of Starkfield, red stands out, just as Mattie stands out in the oppressive landscape of Ethan’s life. Red is also the color of transgression and sin—the trademark color of the devil—especially in New England, where in Puritan times adulterers were forced to wear red A’s on their clothes (a punishment immortalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). Thus, Mattie’s scarlet adornments also symbolize her role as Ethan’s temptress toward moral transgression.