Ethane Frome
...tched their white tents…and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter”(9). Wharton compares the weather in this region to an army laying siege to the village of Starkfield. Imagery such as “sunless cold” and “starved garrison” create a strong picture of the desolate, poor and lonely place Starkfield becomes during winter. Other imagery, such as “wild cavalry,” reinforce the warlike feeling of the passage; they make readers think of the horrors and death brought by battle. Together, the metaphors and imagery in this passage show us just how helpless Starkfield is against the brutal elements of winter, and why its residents are so lifeless during this bitter season. Wharton uses her imagery in this passage to show that the people of Starkfield are truly helpless against the forces of winter, and they must surrender to this powerful season in order to survive. Nature, not man, controls the lives of the residents of Starkfield. All of Starkfield is devastated by the long cold winters it must endure, but the Frome family feels the lash of the frigid cold the hardest. This family is completely at the mercy of the bitter New England winters, and Wharton demonstrates this fact in many places in many ways. One of the most effective, however, is the usage of winter imagery to describe Ethan Frome: “He seemed a 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...I had the sense that his loneliness was…the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters ”(14). Wharton directly compares Ethan to the dreary frozen land which has been ravaged by the fierce winter, the same way Ethan has. Imagery such as “mute,” “melancholy” and “frozen” is used to reinforce, in the reader’s mind, the ...