Connection To The Author's Life
Wharton likely based the story on an accident that she had heard about in 1904 in Lenox, Massachusetts. Five people total were in the actual accident, four girls and one boy. They crashed into a lamppost while sledding down Courthouse Hill in Lenox, Massachusetts. A girl named Hazel Crosby was killed in the accident. Another girl involved in the accident, Kate Spencer, became friends with Wharton while both worked at the Lenox Library and it was from Spencer that Wharton learned of the accident. The story of Ethan Frome had initially begun as a French-language composition that Wharton had to write while studying the language in Paris. It is among the few works by Wharton with a rural setting. Another element that contributes to the story has to do with it being told as frame narrative. The telling of the story is told within another story. The audience is first introduced to the narrator's story of meeting Ethan Frome, and then is told the story of the accident and events surrounding it.
Lenox is also where Wharton had traveled extensively and had come into contact with one of the victims of the accident. Ethan and Mattie cannot escape their dreary life in Starkfield. The connection between the land and the people is a recurring theme of the novel. The narrator is amazed by the harshness of the Starkfield winters and through his experience of the winter he comes to understand the character of the people. In her introduction to the novel, Wharton talks of the "outcropping granite" of New England, the powerful severity of its land and people. This connection between land and people is very much a part of naturalism; the environment is a powerful shaper of man's fate, and the novel represents this relationship by constantly describing the power and cruelty of Starkfield's winter.
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