Pain and Recompense: The Trouble with Ethan Frome

JENNIFER TRAVIS Pain and Recompense: The Trouble with Ethan Frome In an early review of Edith Wharton's novel, Ethan Frome (191 1 ), critic Edwin Bjorkman describes the novel as "so overwhelming that the modern mind rebels against it as a typical specimen of human experience."1 The pain it produces in its reader, he suggests, is so profound the reader must read it as something other than itself; she must abstract the expetience of the characters into a larger social critique : "if it had no social side, if it implied only what it brought of suffering and sorrow to the partakers in it, then we could do little but cry out in self-protective impatience: 'Sweep off the shambles and let us pass on!'" (296). It is the feelings of pain and suffering produced in the novel's readers, indeed, displayed in the novel itself, that led Lionel Trilling some forty years later to dismiss the then widely popular novel by saying, "I am quite unable to overcome my belief that Ethan Frome enjoys its high reputation because it still satisfies our modern snobbishness about tragedy and pain."2 Trilling rejects the novel's public and critical acclaim, at once acknowledging its acute rendering of pain, but nonetheless, remaining unhappy with its effect: "It is terrible to contemplate , it is unforgettable, but the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it" (139). Indeed, like Trilling, Irving Howe maintained that Ethan Frome, "a severe depiction ofgratuitous human suffering in a New England village, is a work meant to shock and depress; it has often been criticized, wrongly, for being so successfully the tour de force Mrs. Wharton meant it to be—that is, for leaving us with a sense of admiration for the visible rigor of its mechanics and a sense ofpain because of its total assault upon our emotions."3 The novel had garnered some Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 3, Autumn 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 38Jennifer Travis praise by critics for its narrative technique, its style, its "mechanics," but the most urgent concerns to emerge, from the novel's reception immediately following its publication into the first fifty years ofcritical dialogue , had to do with the problems of suffering the novel witnessed as well as produced.4 Critical responses shortly following the novel's publication anticipated the discomfort literary critics like Trilling and Howe would later voice: what, the early critics asked, is the effect of pain and suffering in a literary work? Although Bjorkman had praised the novel, exclaiming, "Mrs. Wharton has passed from individual to social art; from the art that excites to that which incites" (299), other reviewers were not as receptive. In the Bookman, reviewer Frederic Taro cautioned: "It is hard to forgive Mrs. Wharton for the utter remorselessness of her latest volume , Ethan Frome, for nowhere has she done anything more hopelessly, endlessly gray with blank despair." Taro, foreshadowing Trilling, questioned the end to which this suffering is put, finally concluding that "Art for art's sake is the one justification of a piece of work as perfect in technique as it is relentless in substance."5 A critic for the North American Review who was more sympathetic, if not with the novel than with Wharton herself, speculated that "there is a certain inexorableness about Mrs. Wharton, as if she herself were constitutionally opposed to happiness, as if she were somewhat compelled to interpret life in terms of pain."6 The problem of representing pain had been a problem for literary criticism not only of Ethan Frome but about literature more generally. Perhaps, as Trilling had suggested, pain was quintessential literary subject matter. More recently, Elaine Scarry has described, in The Body in Pain (1985), what she takes to be the intimate relation between pain and the imagination in this way: "pain and imagining are the 'framing events' within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche."7 If the novel may be considered one tetrain in which pain dwells, perhaps then literary criticism could be described...