79 pages • 2 hours read
Edith WhartonEthan Frome
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1911A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 9-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Ethan returns to the farm and finds Mattie crying because she thought she wasn’t going to see him again. He helps send her trunk ahead to the train station, assuring her that he’ll personally drive her there that evening. He reiterates this at lunch over Zeena’s objections and then goes into Corbury on business.
Ethan returns at three o’clock and finds Mattie in his study. As they settle into his sleigh, he tells her they have time for a ride and drives to Shadow Pond. The pond was the site of a church picnic the prior summer, which the couple now reminisce about; during the picnic, Mattie lost her locket, and it was Ethan who found it.
Mattie eventually says they ought to leave, and the pair head back towards Starkfield. Ethan asks Mattie about her plans, growing concerned when she says she’ll find a job; he urges her to stay with relatives instead, but Mattie says no one would take her. When Ethan says he would help her if he could, she produces the note he began writing to Zeena; she realizes that running away is impossible but says she’s fantasized about it since the day of the picnic. Ethan reiterates how much he wishes he could care for her, jealously saying he’d almost rather see her dead than married to someone else. Now in tears, Mattie agrees that she’d rather die than leave him because he’s the only person who’s treated her well.
As they drive past School House Hill, Ethan recalls their plan to sled there. He asks Mattie if she’d still like to and finds an abandoned sled when she agrees. After their first ride down, Ethan begins to put the sled back where he found it, but Mattie interrupts, asking tearfully if this is where he saw Ruth and Ned together; the couple then embrace, kissing and saying goodbye.
The clock strikes five, and Mattie realizes she’s supposed to be at the train station. When Ethan questions, “What’s the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one now?” (90), Mattie exclaims that she wants to go back down the hill, but this time, she wants Ethan to hit the elm. Ethan at first dismisses the idea, but Mattie’s desperate pleading proves persuasive. However, he insists that they reverse positions on the sled so that he’s seated in front; Mattie worries that this position will impede his steering, but he wants her holding him as they die.
On the way downhill, a sudden memory of Zeena causes Ethan to swerve. He rights the sled enough to strike the tree but regains consciousness some time later. Confused and in pain, he hears what he first believes to be an animal but then realizes is Mattie whimpering. As he groans that he thought they’d “fetched it,” he remembers his horse needs feeding.
Epilogue Summary
Back in the present, the narrator enters the Fromes’ kitchen and sees two women. One is tall with “pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing” (95), and the other, who’s seated in front of the fire, is small, dark, and paralyzed from the neck down. Ethan goes to stoke the fire, which the woman in the chair complains has nearly died; the narrator recognizes the woman’s voice as the one he heard from the hallway. As Zeena begins setting the table, Ethan introduces the narrator to his wife and to the seated woman: Mattie Silver.
The next morning, the narrator returns to Mrs. Hale’s. She’s surprised to learn where he spent the night and opens up more about the Fromes; the doctor is practically the only visitor they receive, outside her own rare visits. She also confides that Mattie and Ethan were brought to her house directly after the accident; Ethan was later moved to the minister’s house, but Mattie stayed, and Mrs. Hale helped nurse her. Eventually, Zeena had both Ethan and Mattie brought back to the farm, where she’s cared for them ever since. Mattie’s injuries have embittered her, however, and she and Zeena argue frequently. This pains Ethan so much that Mrs. Hale believes it would have been better if Mattie had simply died: “[I]f she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues” (99).
Chapter 9-Epilogue Analysis
Ethan and Mattie’s attempted suicide encapsulates the questions Ethan Frome raises regarding free will. Though clearly the most consequential decision Ethan makes in the novel, it doesn’t read as a choice; Wharton so heavily foreshadows the crash that it seems foreordained, and the actual proposal to commit suicide comes from Mattie, with Ethan deferring to her “sombre violence.” The means of suicide is significant as well. It’s not Ethan but gravity and the hill’s slickness that propel the sled, evoking an image of someone carried relentlessly forward by forces beyond his control. These same forces also cause the sled to swerve off course, foiling Ethan and Mattie’s suicide; Ethan flinches when he remembers Zeena—a social obligation that “thrust[s] itself between him and his goal” (93).
Once again, however, Ethan’s powerlessness is freely chosen. Rather than sitting in the back, where he would be better able to steer, Ethan insists on switching places with Mattie: “‘Get up,’ he ordered her. It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat, repeating vehemently: ‘No, no, no!’” (92). The gender dynamics of this passage further underscore what Ethan is doing: Throughout the novel, he takes pleasure in the sense of masculine authority Mattie elicits from him, but at this critical moment he uses that authority to relinquish power and control.
Even then, Ethan does in a perverse sense succeed in realizing his goal: He doesn’t have to part from Mattie. Her presence becomes unbearable, however: “In the summertime, on pleasant days, they move Mattie into the parlour, or out in the door-yard, and that makes it easier...but winters there’s the fires to be thought of; and there ain’t a dime to spare up at the Fromes” (98). Neither the narrator nor Mrs. Hale specifies exactly what makes Ethan’s situation so painful, other than Mattie’s general “sourness.” However, it seems likely that Mattie’s transformation into a second Zeena gives the lie to the unique connection Ethan thought they shared; latently, Mattie was someone other than Ethan believed.
The Epilogue therefore brings the novel’s interest in perspective full circle. The narrator frames his conversation with Mrs. Hale in these terms, with each participant seeking confirmation of their opinions in the other:
Mrs. Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though trying to see how much footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed that if she had kept silence till now it was because she had been waiting, through all the years, for some one who should see what she alone had seen (97).
However, the very suggestion that Mrs. Hale is seeking this confirmation is itself an assumption on the narrator’s part and could simply be projection. By drawing attention to this mental process, the novel once again questions how deeply it’s possible to know anyone.
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