Guest Blogger: Braedon W.
Acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize winner Edith Wharton obviously knows what it takes to write a good novel. Several times this week I have heard my fellow classmates talking about how good the book was or how they were looking forward to reading more. I also found this to be true for myself when I was reading this weekend. After reading through chapter 8 on Sunday, I stopped to think about why this book is able to capture everyone’s attention so easily. It is not the main character, as the story is told through the perspective of a very boring, unanimated Ethan Frome who scarcely communicates in more than a two word grunt. I found that Edith Wharton uses the settings around the characters and unusual details to keep capturing our attention throughout the novel.
When the narrator introduces a character in Ethan Frome, she describes the lighting and its effect on unique details in their appearance to shape the reader’s attitude toward them. She portrays Zeena as a sick, constantly complaining character that Ethan is stuck with and obliged to take care of. When Zeena is first described standing in the doorway, she is put up against a dark background being “tall and angular” while the light “drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins.” These descriptions of Zeena along with several others throughout the story make the reader feel negatively towards Zeena.
The descriptions of Mattie often put her in the softer light of a lamp or fireplace, introduce us to the color red in a landscape otherwise described in grayscale, and use comparable passages to shape our attitude about her. When Zeena is gone and Ethan finds the door locked Mattie answers “She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upwards, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.” This description through Ethan’s view point uses very positive diction to portray Mattie as embodying youth and innocence.
This stark contrast and definition in the way the characters are described helps create a good vs. evil scenario in our minds throughout the novel. It also makes what would be a very boring book about nineteenth-century New England into a novel that keeps you interested in reading more.
posted by erdecker @ 12:28 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Good points in the blog Braedon!
did you also notice how even the setting changes with the characters as well? Whenver Zena is there, everything turns gray; but with Mattie the same setting turns somehow beautiful...
I believe this not only subconsciously sets up the reader to prefer one over the other, but it also illustrates what's going on in Ethan's head. He percieved one thing (the setting) in two different ways, showing that this entire story is not only from mostly his point of view, but perhaps even biased.
-Marina Mossaad
Great point Braedon! I never even noticed that. Your point on the lighting makes a lot of sense on how the author uses it as a literary technique to help support her emphasis on using the enviroment/surroundings to capture the interests of the reader. He also uses different lighting outside such as the time when Ethan and Mattie were walking home at pitch dark, which helps convey the way Mattie sees Ethan's feelings for her which is dark, unseen, and unknown to Mattie at that time on his true motives.
Ramon F Banzon
I like the contrast you pointed out. But I find it amazing how easily Wharton turns Mattie into Zeena part II. The framing is brilliant- Mattie is already in the state that we find her at the end, even as we are beginning the book, but Wharton stops the story and rewinds anyway.
She spends all this time, as Braedon points out, making Mattie OMG amazing. And then she completely destroys this quality with the smash up at the end.
Brilliant.
Also remember, that in a literal sense, Mattie is practically a Zeena 2.0 - they are first cousins.
By making Mattie seem so much like Zeena, but without any of the bad qualities such as declining health, it makes it sound like Ethan is regretful of getting the wrong one. It's just like going to the store and buying an iPhone 3GS, and then Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone 4 on the next day.
And both will end up with cracked screens and dead batteries eventually.
- Thomas
The narration does a lot to make the novel's characters black and white, but I wonder about how much of that comes from the fact that the narrator isn't directly involved in the plot. When you think of your perception of people, you usually have a more clear-cut, stereotypical view of people you don't know as well. This is because you may not have been around them long enough to see the sides of them that they tend to show less. I question the good vs. evil nature of the characters because the reader really only knows of them through town gossip. The only time we recieve a direct account from the narrator is when the charaters are older.
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