Ethan Frome

Mary V. Marchand (Essay Date 2001)

SOURCE: Marchand, Mary V. "Cross Talk: Edith Wharton and the New England Women Regionalists." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30 (2001): 369-95.

In the following essay, Marchand explores the gendered nature of the style and theme of Ethan Frome, contrasting the novel's representation of women's culture with the literary aesthetics and feminist politics of early twentieth-century New England female regional writers.

To read through the contemporary reviews of Edith Wharton's work is to be struck by the contradictory assessments of her attitude toward her female characters. It is not unusual to find among reviews of the same novel praise for Wharton's "sympathetic delineation of her heroine's character, her acute analysis of women's minds," and the complaint that these "pictures of American women for harshness of uncharity are difficult to parallel."¹ Equally open to dispute, apparently, was the gender of...