these writers in her introduction, Wharton clearly had in mind representatives of the New England local-color genre, who had made the region and its customs a primary focus in their fiction. According to literary historians, the local-color movement was a vigorous force in American letters from roughly 1870 to 1910; but it was sometimes pigeonholed by its critics as a “woman’s genre,” exclusively tied to private domestic matters. Although its primary practitioners—Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), and Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892)—often wrote pungently and critically about their region and its inhabitants, critics, when not questioning the movement’s sentimental tendencies, sometimes reduced the genre to an ornamental or descriptive mode of writing.

Sensitive to the criticism that she was attempting to portray a region from an outsider’s perspective (and thus a less expert one than a native’s), Wharton later took pains to underscore the accuracy of her rendering. As she noted in her autobiography, “ ‘Ethan Frome’ was written after I spent ten years in the hill-region of New England where the scene is laid, during which years I had come to know well the aspect, the dialect, and mental and moral attitude of the hill-people” (A Backward Glance, p. 296). Casting a backward glance on a local-color movement that had perhaps run its course, she aimed to capture a more austere atmosphere than had been presented in the works of some of her predecessors. “For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my time and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett” (p. 293). Wharton clearly wanted to leave her readers with the impression that her portrayal of New England life was based on patient observation and careful study. Several years before Ethan Frome, in fact, she published The Fruit of the Tree (1907), a long novel of marital and class tensions in a New England mill town. In order to assure accuracy in that novel, she visited the mills in North Adams in western Massachusetts.

Wharton tended to measure her literary achievements against those of male writers; in her introduction, she further distinguished her efforts from previous treatments of New England by discounting her role as a mere recorder of the more superficial or external features of her setting. She thus emphasized the steps in the construction of Ethan Frome—that is, her role as a conscious literary craftsman. She noted that her initial conception derived from an academic exercise intended to polish her proficiency in the French language. Developed in Paris in 1907, the French sketch of “Ethan Frome” contained three characters (the male was named Hart) and achieved a length that encompassed two scenes, or vignettes, that survived in the published version. The fragment contained a triangular relationship among a husband, his sick wife, and the wife’s niece, to whom the “Ethan-character” is attracted; but it lacked the structure that would give focus as well as depth to the narrative. Wharton eventually hit upon the device of a storyteller, but she did not choose one steeped in the lore and history of New England. Rather than a character like the herbalist and healer Mrs. Todd in Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a native authority on the region’s legends and values, Wharton chose someone from outside New England to narrate the story—a looker-on, an observer.

In her desire for “roundness”—Wharton seemed to resort recurrently to the terminology of the “plastic arts” or visual media—she would supplement the narrator’s perspective with those of her minor characters. The fresh, acute perspective derived from the narrator’s growing insight and awareness would compensate for what he lacked in inside background knowledge of the Frome household. While the device of an observer might lend “an air of artificiality” to a tale of sophisticated characters, Wharton noted, this defect might be mitigated if the narrator brought a sophisticated perspective to a tale of simple people. Her narrator would thus serve as a kind of intermediary between the reticent and reserved villagers and Wharton’s readers, giving “voice” to characters nearly inarticulate or resigned to silence.

Wharton’s use of an observer eases the reader’s entry into Ethan’s story. In the opening of the novel the narrator recaptures his first arresting glimpse of Wharton’s central character, when he had been struck by Frome’s physiognomy and bearing. Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage between