Guest Blogger: Jeanne D.

In class the other day, we got together with a group and discussed some of our findings in Ethan Frome. My group decided to analyze the relationships between the characters. Ethan and Mattie have a very interesting relationship- she doesn’t even know or seem to notice that Ethan has a thing for her until he finally starts kissing her cloth, and eventually kissing her. We begin to see how Ethan is falling for Mattie when he goes to pick her up from the dance. He waits in the shadows for Mattie and watches to see if she flirts with Denis Eady. He is a very jealous man, even jealous of the cat! On page 72, when the cat rubs against Mattie’s legs, she nearly trips saying “Why puss! I nearly tripped over you!” It goes on to say that Ethan ‘felt a sudden twinge of jealousy’. Mattie doesn’t realize that Ethan has fallen for her, because when he asks if she’s planning on moving out soon (getting married), she takes it as Zeena wanting her to leave and she starts crying and freaking out. Ethan is too love-sick to notice.
Ethan and Zeena are married, but don’t really seem to like each other. Ethan only marries her because she could talk and laugh, unlike his mother. Once she got sick, she stopped talking though. Zeena seems suspicious that something is going on with Ethan- she stays up when he comes home from picking Mattie up from the dance. She notices that he is shaving as well. She seems as if she has an idea of what is going on, but she never really expresses it. Although we always consider Ethan to be stricken with Mattie, he keeps seeing images of Zeena. When Mattie sits in Zeena’s chair, Ethan sees Zeena’s face on Mattie’s body. When Ethan and Zeena are about to kill themselves, Ethan almost dodges the tree because he see’s Zeena’s face.
Mattie and Zeena don’t seem to get along at all. Mattie doesn’t do much housework, which seems to make Zeena sicker. Mattie tries to please Zeena so that she doesn’t get kicked out of the house, since she has nowhere to go. At the end of the book, Zeena is ready for Mattie to leave. This of course, never happens.