Edith Wharton on Ethan Frome

Terribly depressing, even in a tub full of organic orange-scented suds, which you'd think would dispel some of that Western-Massachusetts-in-the-dead-of-winter-and-terminal-sexual-frustration gloom. But no. A really disturbing novel. Like the other gothic on my list (Castle of Otranto), it's fascinated with the terrible emotional things people who should love each other but don't do to each other in houses full of malevolent objects. Instead of Walpole's giant shield and helmet, Wharton's got a broken glass pickle dish (pickle dish pictures here) and a bottle of glue. And some medicine bottles, I guess, and a lot of fur robes for keeping warm in. Wharton's objects don't have the same agency Walpole's do, but they still are crucial to marking the turning points in the narrative—because Ethan and Mattie never have sex (or do much more than kiss three times and try to kill themselves once), they have to be ashamed of breaking the pickle dish instead, which they then hide as a bizarre little reification of their guilty desire for each other. (But it's so SHITTY, just like the shitty office Ethan puts together for himself as the last individuated space in his house of women—the last place where he can be himself. Except that it's got a shitty couch he made himself, and a cushion his wife embroidered for him, and they're both really shitty to show that his life is also shitty. That's what upsets me about Wharton—she's having a lot of fun making their economic and intellectual poverty an emblem of their emotional poverty. Can I pause a moment and call Wharton on making such a snobby move? ... Okay, now I can move on.)

Otranto was about how patriarchy will kill you. (A lot of what I've been reading from the 1760's has been about how patriarchy will kill you—although I mistakenly watched Dead Poets Society last night, and in between getting really cranky with it, I decided it's definitely a story about how patriarchy wants everyone dead. 'S because there are no other available villains in a story that wants to be about the ultimate triumph of good, but has the disadvantage of being set in a world of rich white young men—they already have almost everything, so it's very hard to make them victims. The movie can only do it by making the people they're supposed to grow up to be extremely evil, so that the movie's able to make it seem reasonable, for heaven's sake, when the main character kills himself because he isn't allowed to act in another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In a less ridiculous atmosphere, you'd notice easier that this is a really really stupid suicide narrative...) But Ethan Frome seems to be about how women will kill you, instead. Sure, the women may be dangerous because they're endangered by patriarchal society—but it's Ethan's dead mother's decline that scares the shit out of him in the first place, it's Zenobia's tendency to spend money on vibrators and kidney pills that's most immediately bankrupting the farm, and it's Mattie's idea that Ethan kill them both by steering the sled into the elm tree. Like the victimized female heroines of the sentimental novels I've been reading, Ethan has no agency of his own—he just reacts to what the women around him want. Elaine Showalter has a fairly crazy introduction to the novel in the Oxford World's Classics edition where she talks about the castrating feminine maternal body of the farmhouse, and she's getting at something there, although she does say it in a typically CRAZY way. Anyway. Scary women feel like a new thing in my reading list.