features of the landscape offer a means of reading human character; but Wharton extends her interpretation of Frome’s physical bearing, including “his brown seamed profile” (p. 13), to reflect hidden energies and concealed emotions. Although critics have suggested that Wharton overdoes her descriptions of inscrutable New England faces, this pictorializing of physical features is essential to the unfolding of her dramatic story, especially with regard to her female characters. Thus Mattie’s face, when lifted in Ethan’s direction, “looked like a window that has caught the sunset” (p. 23). The morning after the dance, her face is “part of the sun’s red and of the pure glitter on the snow” (p. 36). In contrast, a pale light from a lamp “drew out of the darkness” Zeena’s “puckered throat ... and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face” (p. 33). Similarly, light makes Zeena’s “face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth” (p. 39). Just as Zeena had raised a lamp against the black background of the kitchen, Mattie’s light brings out her distinguishing features: her “slim young throat,” “a lustrous fleck on her lips,” “her eyes with velvet shade,” and a “milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows” (p. 47).

Upon her return from the Flats, Zeena, the hypochondriac and wasting wife, has a new “mien of wan authority” (p. 61). Her voice, moreover, has a new tone, neither whining nor reproachful but resolute. Zeena’s high-boned face, thin figure, and gray hair have caused several critics to see her as a witchlike character. As the narrative progresses toward its closing chapters, this figure of apparently wasting energy assumes greater power over Ethan: “She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. It was the sense of his helplessness that sharpened his antipathy” (p. 66). In the early chapters of Ethan Frome, Wharton uses faces as images in which to read the history of past suffering and disappointment. As she moves to the closing frame, facial expressions and gestures signify the long years of endurance that await the inhabitants of the Frome household after the smash-up. Zeena acts like “one singled out for a great fate” (p. 61), and Ethan envisions Mattie’s future as fulfilling the fate of so many working girls he had seen during his days in Worcester: “There came back to him miserable tales he had heard at Worcester, and the faces of girls whose lives had begun as hopefully as Mattie‘s” (p. 68).

The female protagonist of Summer, Charity Royall, comments on the lack of development in her isolated village: “Things don’t change at North Dormer: people just get used to them.” If the break between the opening frame in Ethan Frome and the storyteller’s narrative offers an abrupt shift from the present time to the period of Ethan’s youth, the effect of the temporal change in the closing frame is exactly the opposite. The series of “scenes” and “pictures” that the narrator has rendered give a clear impression of the extended effects of the smash-up on the lives of his three characters. Clearly Wharton’s local art has taken the reader beyond what Ruskin would have called the “surface picturesque,” eliciting perhaps a vague melancholy in the face of the inevitable erosion of time. In chapter V, Ethan undergoes a “momentary shock” when he imagines that the absent Zeena’s presence is so palpable that she nearly erases that of Mattie: “It was almost as if the other face [that is, Zeena‘s], the face of the superseded woman, had obliterated that of the intruder” (p. 51). This image anticipates the shocking vision of Zeena’s face that comes into Ethan’s consciousness just as the sled, in its fatal descent, bears down on the elm: “But suddenly his wife’s face, with twisted, monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal” (p. 93). Suggesting a more complicated and expressive set of feelings than that offered by surface pictures, the faces of Wharton’s characters eventually reflect a suffering that has been long endured, as if in a changeless environment marked by hopeless routine. In the closing frame, Zeena has “pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing, and her narrow lips were of the same sallow colour as her