highlight the central narrative by putting frames around a picture of Frome that the storyteller develops. In an appendix to her autobiography Wharton acknowledged, “I always saw the visible universe as a series of pictures” (Wharton, “Life and I”). Even during her youth and adolescence she possessed a “visual sensibility” that was “intense.” In her author’s introduction, more specifically, she stresses the “natural” and “picture-making” merit of the narrative device she employs. In like terms she notes the need for fidelity to the “essential elements of my picture.” As outlined in her introduction, her art of composition (what Edgar Allan Poe called his “Philosophy of Composition”) is as much a process of drawing pictures of her deeply rooted, reticent characters as of rendering their speech and conduct.

In this regard it is worth noting that in 1936 Owen and Donald Davis dramatized Ethan Frome in New York, in a production successful enough to evolve into a national theatrical tour. The producers obviously sensed latent potential for the stage in adapting Wharton’s narrative, despite its small cast, its compression, and its clipped dialogue. The author herself had explicitly used dramatic terms to trace the arc of Frome’s career: climax, anticlimax, the acts of the tragedy. Early in the narrative, moreover, Ethan glides on the snow “like a stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze” (p. 15). If occasionally light penetrates through the “screen of snow” (p. 18), the wintry landscape offers a series of layering or veiling effects, similar to the varied uses of theatrical screens or curtains. In a narrative in which the spoken word may receive less emphasis than gesture and expression, characters become “silhouettes” in a “shadowy pantomime” (p. 28). Wharton even alludes in her introduction to the casual novelist’s temptation to resort to “added ornament, or a trick of drapery or lighting.”

It is interesting to note that in a foreword to the dramatization Wharton praised the stage version for avoiding the “grimacing enlargement of gesture and language” sometimes deemed necessary to carry a work of fiction across the footlights. What she hoped would stay with her audience were the “strained starved faces” of her characters. Starting in the novel with her figure of granite outcroppings half-emerged from the soil, Wharton moves from images of stasis and inactivity—the idle wheel at Frome’s saw-mill and the sagging sheds burdened by the weight of snows—to ones of stifled energy. The narrator notes “an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe” (p.16). Such images are part of an elaborate “mise-en-scène” in which Wharton derives varied effects from the narrator’s precise observation of the local setting.

Wharton’s technique is scenographic, and her nine brief chapters following the opening frame constitute a succession of local pictures. Precise details contribute incrementally to a series of intimate pictorial scenes, the point of view framed by a perspective that derives from an observer who comes from a world outside Starkfield, and this focus is eventually constrained by attention to the inner workings of the Frome household. In chapter IV, for example, Ethan imagines the kitchen and its “homelike look,” the consequence of Zeena’s absence and the potential for a night alone with Mattie, and he tries to downplay anything that might ruin “the sweetness of the picture” (p. 40). Similarly, in chapter VI, after his night with Mattie, he expresses relief that he had “done nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture” (p. 56). Each of these “picture-like” scenes occurs within the enclosed setting of Starkfield; most of the chapter-length close-scenes occur inside the Frome farmhouse, and even the arrangement of each room in the house is composed like a simple set within a small theater. Each scene achieves its own effect, each derives its subtle coloration from the winter weather, and scenes and faces are affected by light (analogous to a theatrical spotlight). In each scene Wharton makes use of basic props, the most notorious of which is the broken pickle dish that shatters a happy evening and that ominously prefigures the broken lives of Ethan and Mattie.

In chapter V, the basic inventory of props includes a stove, a lamp, a chair, a clock, a pipe, and a bit of sewing. Rather than stressing light, this central chapter is touched by darkness under a muffled sky, an atmosphere as “dark as Egypt” (p. 52). Assuming that the broken dish will be easily repaired the next morning, Ethan naively