Ethan Frome Essay -- Essays Papers

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome written by Edith Wharton in 1905 is a novel about the dilemmas of a poor New England farmer named Ethan Frome, his wife Zeena, and Zeena's cousin, Mattie Silver. The first person narrator, an engineer, comes to the town of Starkfield and becomes curious about the crippled, taciturn Ethan Frome. The tragic consequences of Ethan's unhappy marriage and forbidden love are revealed in a flashback to twenty-four years before the narrators arrival in Starkfield. In 1992, a movie was made of Ethan Frome which kept this plot in tact but included a number of changes in how the story was narrated and in some of the details about the characters and the plot. Some of the changes were effective; others were not so effective. Some of these changes didn't even make that much of an effect on the way the movie was compared with the book. One of these changes would have to be that the narrator was an engineer in the book and in the movie he was a minister. This change was not that big of a deal. This seems like it wouldn't really make that much of a difference. In the movie they didn't go into that much detail about before the accident so it mad no difference if the narrator was an engineer or a minister. Either way it would have made no difference if he was a bartender or an exotic dancer. It may or may not have made the story a little more interesting, but who really cares what the narrator's occupation is. Some of the changes in the book seemed to m...