Ethan Frome Chapter Questions

Prologue

Today’s Vocabulary

  • Taciturn: silent by nature; habitually uncommunicative or reserved in speech or manner
  • Reticence: the state of being reserved especially with regard to speaking freely
  • Capitulate: to surrender, especially under agreed conditions; to give up
  • Wan: pale; indicative of low spirits; suggesting ill health or unhappiness
  • Innocuous: unlikely to offend; harmless in effect
  • Melancholy: feeling or causing sadness
  1. What does the name Starkfield suggest about the setting? How does Harmon Gow corroborate this later?
  2. How can one have a “careless powerful” look? Discuss the paradox of this description.
  3. What is symbolic about the fact that Ethan checks each step “like the jerk of a chain”?
  4. Find evidence of the use of dialect. Why do you think Wharton chooses to use dialect?
  5. What is the stereotype of an engineer? How is the Narrator/engineer atypical? Can the reader therefore trust what he tells us? Why did Wharton have the Narrator say that he "...began to piece together this vision" (rather than "version") of Frome's story?
  6. What is significant about the missing L-structure on the farm? What places do Harmon Gow and Mrs. Ned Hale occupy in the story?
  7. Setting: “Guess he’s [Ethan] been in Starkfield too many winters.” Harmon Gow says this to the narrator. What does this suggest about the cause of Ethan’s situation?
  8. What extended metaphor does the narrator use to describe winter in Starkfield?
  9. What else do we find out about the narrator in this prologue and are there any similarities with Ethan?
  10. Discuss the symbolic importance of the fork in the road that is encountered when Ethan takes the narrator to his house.
  11. Look at the description of Ethan’s home “… in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.” What impression do we get of the house?
  12. Why do you think Edith Wharton uses of three lines of dots (an ellipsis) at the end of the prologue?

Explain how the following quotation is significant to this section of the novel? What does it reveal about the character, conflict, or theme?

“He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that’s twenty-four years ago come next February.”