envisions a “scene” that was “just as he dreamed of” earlier in the day. Within the context of Wharton’s complex, multiple ironies, Ethan has conjured up a dream of “complete well being,” a “sense of being in another world, where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no change” (p. 51). This dreamlike atmosphere is undercut by Zeena’s absence, represented by her empty rocking chair. Rather than a clichéd pretty picture, this scene leads to momentary disorientation in the guise of Ethan’s vision of Zeena’s countenance, usually “framed” (p. 51) by the patch-work cushion, but now obscuring and then obliterating the gaze that he had fixed on Mattie’s pretty face. The scene takes place in a room with all “its ancient implications of conformity and order” (p. 53), and Ethan’s “return to reality” is punctuated by the “spectral rocking” of Zeena’s empty chair and by his recognition that this was the “only evening” (p. 54) that he and Mattie would ever spend alone together.

In the subsequent chapter, despite Ethan’s best efforts to recover “the same scene of shining comfort as on the previous evening” (p. 60), once again his naive hopes are undermined, this time by Zeena’s return from the Flats. She has returned resolute in her desire to replace Mattie with a hired girl, and the ensuing exchange in chapter VII is marked by recriminations about past events and their straitened circumstances. Ethan is so shocked by the “horror of the scene” (p. 63) that he seeks escape in his “cold dark ‘study’” (p. 72), hoping to avoid any “sequel to the scene in the kitchen” (p. 72). He eventually confronts the reality that Zeena would never “cease to be part of the scene” (p. 75).

Art and cultural historian John Conron notes, in American Picturesque (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), that in local art and literature the lines between setting and character are “elastic” and “breachable.” Via her scenographic method, Wharton has painstakingly developed a narrative in which Starkfield and its surrounding landscape, and her central and minor characters, the domestic space of their homes, their individual histories, and their family histories are all intertwined. For example, Mrs. Ned Hale’s wan refinement is “not out of keeping” (a term derived from landscape aesthetics and house design) with her “pale old-fashioned house” (p. 11). An even more striking example is offered by the Frome farmhouse, clearly part of the scenery but hardly described in such a way to suggest quaintness or refined taste. It is one of “those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier,” and Ethan’s clipped identification—“That’s my place”—only intensifies the “distress and oppression of the scene,” a flash of sunlight exposing “its plaintive ugliness” (p. 16). The identification of house, human figure, and setting could not be more direct or explicit than in the narrator’s characterization of Ethan as “part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface” (p. 13). The identification of man and landscape takes on symbolic resonance when the narrator notices that the traditional “L” of this New England farmhouse, usually representing workrooms and store-rooms at a right angle to the living quarters, has been removed. The house has a “forlorn and stunted look,” and the narrator, linking the lame Frome and other inhabitants of the harsh New England climate with their surroundings, observes “in the diminished dwelling the image of his [Frome‘s] own shrunken body” (p. 17).

If initially Ethan appeared to an observer to be “the most striking figure in Starkfield,” possessed of a “careless powerful look” (p. 8), this figure in motion arouses curiosity not only about the cause of his lameness but about a “depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access” (p. 13). Wharton’s visual education, developed through years of self-study in the painting, art, architecture, and the textured culture of Europe, is here adapted to penetrating the austere, granite-like surfaces of her local setting in Ethan Frome. During the years of refining her acute visual sensibility, she found in John Ruskin (1819-1900), the author of Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-1860), an “interpreter of visual impressions” who did her “incomparable service.” Like her model Ruskin, she explored all the varied ramifications of “expression, character, types of countenance, color” implicit in her deceptively simple characters’ lives.

From such a perspective, Wharton moves logically to a study of facial expressiveness, of the “strained starved faces” of her characters. As already noted,