The Wicked Witch and Snow White Essay

Zeena’s very nature allows Ethan to vilify her in his descriptions in the novel. From his perspective, she is selfish, cold, and apathetic to the feelings of Mattie and himself. Ethan depicts her as a vain, callous villain. From the bias of Ethan’s perspective, Zeena represents all Mattie Silver, Ethan’s love interest, goes agains, creating a dichotomy/antithesis/juxtaP between the two foils as Mattie feels freeing

     My favorite character in this book would have to be Peter. He was a little bit of a tough guy yet timid, but wasn’t afraid to fight for his siblings lives. Peter was the oldest amongst his brother and two sisters and was most likely the brains and brawn of the bunch. In this story, Peter has to fight off a wolf to test his courage or, in Aslan’s words, win his spurs. He returns victorious and is knighted by the lion called Aslan. His brother Edmund, a very mischievous boy and a bother to his sisters Lucy and Susan, looks up to Him though he never admits to it. Peter was definitely the highlight of this book.

Edith Wharton, author of the novel Ethan Frome, speaks through her narrator to tell the ironically realistic tale of a poor, wishful New England farmer, who quickly realizes that his desire for happiness is futile. Ethan Frome’s acquaintances in town describe him as a man who has lived in the small town of Starkfield, Massachusetts for “too many winters,” yet Ethan is only fifty-two years old (Wharton 10). As the narrator relates the “tale of unremitting isolation, loneliness, intellectual starvation, and mental despair,” it is obvious that Ethan’s suffering is something “neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put there” (Faust 817; Wharton 13). The misery from which Ethan suffers is the heartbreak over the unaccomplished dreams of his past. In Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, the author examines the effects of reality on the fulfillment of the dreams of the characters and the narrator through social conventions, isolation, and fatalism.

In Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, setting is an important element. The setting greatly influences the characters, transportation, and activities.

After her and Ethan Frome’s wreck though, she becomes what Zeena was and experiences what she went through. She becomes that resentful and despaired person, that the younger version of Mattie is majorly differentiated from. At the end, irony is displayed because Zeena seems to regain some of her health and beauty while Mattie lost all of hers.

In //Ethan Frome// Edith Wharton uses Mattie and Zeena as foil pairs to illustrate the inevitability of isolation corrupting and embittering the victims of its hold. Mattie and Zeena both start out as kind and thoughtful individuals, but as they are forced into isolation on the farm, they inevitably end up becoming unbearable hags despite their previous energy. Both Zeena and Mattie initially arrive energetically as help for Ethan because the primary woman of the house is ill before Ethan falls in love with them. Originally, Zeena is kindly and able to "understand [Ethan's] case at a glance" (29) just as Mattie also came "without a sign of discontent escap[ing] her" (25) regardless of having to deal with the hard life. Wharton sets up Mattie and Zeena's pasts as almost identical to first establish that they both were equally thoughtful before they became trapped in Starkfield; however, Zeena realizes after marrying Ethan and becoming imprisoned on the farm that she cannot leave, but rather is now a captive of the farm's isolation. Once Zeena has married Ethan, they had originally planned on selling the farm and abandoning it, but after the farm proved to be unsalable, Zeena found "life on an isolated farm was not what she had expected" and soon afterwards "developed the 'sickliness'" that is depression from the isolation of the Starkfield farm (30). Despite Zeena's

|nurse and they can't afford to keep both girls. Mattie has no place to go. Ethan stands up to Zeena and insists that he take her to the train. On the way to the |

Elizabeth Ammons writes in her essay “Ethan Frome as a Fairy Tale,” that “Ethan Frome is designed to be read like a fairy tale” (Ammons 138). Although the novel itself is bleak and a little dark, we still recognize the characters as ones from the fairy tale Snow White. In the novel Mattie Silver comes to live with Ethan and Zeena. Mattie takes care of Zeena along with the household chores. When Mattie and Ethan begin to fall for each other Zeena notices. The silent tension in the house grows greater and greater every day Mattie is in the house. In a search for their fairytale ending the two try to take their own lives, little did they know it would lead to nothing but misery. In her novel Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

In the novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, the minor character Mattie Silver serves as a foil towards the main character Ethan Frome. Throughout the novel, Ethan is a man who faces many challenges in his path causing what little happiness he has to vanish therefore illuminating the work as a whole. One may realize the faults of Ethan’s ways through theme, symbolism and irony.

Edith Wharton’s brief, yet tragic novella, Ethan Frome, presents a crippled and lonely man – Ethan Frome – who is trapped in a loveless marriage with a hypochondriacal wife, Zenobia “Zeena” Frome. Set during a harsh, “sluggish” winter in Starkfield, Massachusetts, Ethan and his sickly wife live in a dilapidated and “unusually forlorn and stunted” New-England farmhouse (Wharton 18). Due to Zeena’s numerous complications, they employ her cousin to help around the house, a vivacious young girl – Mattie Silver. With Mattie’s presence, Starkfield seems to emerge from its desolateness, and Ethan’s vacant world seems to be awoken from his discontented life and empty marriage. And so begins Ethan’s love adventure – a desperate desire to have

Zeena was taking care of Ethan’s mother and he fell “in love” with her while she was taking care of his mother. It is said that “Her efficiency shamed and dazzled him. She seemed to posses by instinct all the household wisdom that his long apprenticeship had not instilled in him” (29). Ethan proposed to Zeena because he didn’t want to be alone, it is said in the novel that “He was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm, and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him” (29). It is unclear whether Zeena possessed a love for Ethan as Ethan claimed to of have for her. In the end of the novel Mattie is looked at as the annoying one, and he starts to care for Zeena because she is not the one inept to do household chores.

Edith Wharton uses Mattie to express isolation and being lonely. She comes to the country with ribbons in her hair and more joy in herself. She wanted to free Ethan from the terrible society he lived in. Life in Starkfield is bleak and boring. No one comes outside or enjoys themselves. This is mainly why Ethan wants to escape the barren and poor neighborhood. Ethan is also isolated as well. He opposes society mainly because he cannot be with the one he loves and he doesn’t want to ruin his marriage to Zeena as well. When Zeena falls ill, she goes to the doctor for a couple of days and returns only to find her expensive china now ruined. Angry, she tells Ethan that she needs more hired help and plans to send Mattie away. Upset, Ethan did not know what to do . He decided to write a letter to Zeena telling her to run the farm and be by herself. However, he

In Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome, one major critical theory revolves around the psychological criticism. The novel revolves around this critical theory because Wharton wanted the reader to observe how the setting becomes dependent on the emotional state of the character and vice versa. Throughout the novel, Wharton makes changes to the environment to represent Ethan’s fondness for certain characters. On the contrary, Wharton displays how the setting directly influences Ethan’s mental state. As the reader perceives this influence that each character has on Ethan Frome, they can develop an understanding of the relationships established in the novel. This critical theory will be expressed throughout the literary analysis paper, specifically in the Novel Summary section and Literary Criticism sections. The following text will analyze the drastic changes in the environment and compare it to Ethan’s mental state.

Like a stepmother, she takes in Mattie, who is a younger relative, after her parents pass away. Also, just like the evil stepmother in Snow White, she tries hard to keep the girl from flourishing. Zeena never encourages Mattie and is constantly frowning upon her by giving her complaints similar to “‘that pie of your always sets a mite heavy, Matt’” (Wharton 108). Furthermore, Zeena’s cat, like in many fairy tales, serves as her external personality. When Zeena is away, leaving Ethan and Mattie home alone, the cat “jumped up into Zeena’s chair, rolled itself into a ball, and lay watching them with narrow eyes” as the two make awkward motions towards one another (Wharton 78). The cat sits in Zeena’s chair and looks intently at them just as if it were Zeena herself. In addition to the witch, Ethan Frome also illustrates a naïve princess-like maiden with the character Mattie. Just like Snow White, Mattie has beautiful dark hair, rosy red cheeks, and stunningly pale skin. Her hair is “soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun” (Wharton 127). She still acts joyful even though her situation is rough. Her bliss shows as Ethan sees her with “ laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points in a maze of flying

After filming the fairy tale update for the original story of Snow White, I finally realized how much the technology at a certain point in time can affect very basis of a story. The importance of the surrounding technology runs so deep that it even becomes a topic of discussion today. Just as an evolutionist Supreme Court Justice would interpret the Constitution based on how the amendments pertain to today’s society, fairy tale updaters should alter their stories to better reflect how the situations would look like in this society. This was definitely the sentiment my group followed to create our updated tale. Instead of building a story in a completely made up world where half of the plot was based on the viewer’s strength of imagination,