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1Author:  Wharton review: Cooper, Frederic TaberAdd
 Title:  "Ethan Frome." In: The Bigger Issues and Some Recent Books.  
 Published:  1996 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: It is hard to forgive Mrs. Wharton for the utter remorselessness of her latest volume, Ethan Frome, for nowhere has she done anything more hopelessly, endlessly grey with blank despair. Ethan Frome is a man whose ambitions long ago burned themselves out. He early spent his vitality in the daily struggle of winning a bare sustenance from the grudging soil of a small New England farm. An invalid wife, whose imaginary ailments thrived on patent medicines, doubled his burden. And then, one day, a pretty young cousin, left destitute, came to live on the farm, and brought a breath of fragrance and gladness into the gloom. Neither Ethan nor the cousin meant to do wrong; it was simply one of those unconscious, inevitable attachments, almost primitive in its intensity. It never was even put into words, until the day when Ethan's wife, perhaps because of a smouldering jealousy, perhaps because the motive she gave was the true one, namely that the girl was shiftless and incompetent, sent her out into the world to shift for herself. It is while driving her over to the railway station that Ethan consents to the girl's wish that just once more he will take her coasting down a long hill, that is a favourite coasting place throughout the neighbourhood. It is a long, steep, breathless rush, with a giant tree towering up near the foot, to be dexterously avoided at the last moment. It is while he holds the girl close to him on the sled, that a ghastly temptation comes to Ethan, and he voices it: How much easier, instead of letting her go away, to face unknown struggles, while he remained behind, eating his heart out with loneliness—how much easier merely to forget to steer! One shock of impact, and the end would come. And to this the girl consents. And neither of them foresees that not even the most carefully planned death is inevitable, and that fate is about to play upon them one of its grimmest tricks, and doom them to a life-long punishment, she with a broken back, he with a warped and twisted frame, tied beyond escape to the slow starvation of the barren farm, and grudgingly watched over by the invalid wife, scarcely more alive than themselves. Art for art's sake is the one justification of a piece of work as perfect in technique as it is relentless in substance.
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