The essay that I chose to read and analyze focused on the Freudian desires of Wharton and her unconscious mind and how it pertains to Ethan Frome. Author Fedra Asya touches on several different interpretations of Wharton’s writing of Ethan Frome, relating it to her past and connecting it to the principles of Sigmund Freud and his belief in the unconscious mind.
Firstly, Asya suggests that Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as a way to express her wishes for an incestuous relationship with her father. Wharton was closer with her father as a child, having fought with her mother often. Based on Freudian theory and the inferences of Asya, she suggests that Ethan Frome was a semi autobiographical work, Ethan being Wharton’s father and Wharton herself being Mattie. It is thought that Wharton confused love and admiration with incestuous desire, because she hadn’t experienced love before the first version of Ethan Frome was published. Sigmund Freud was very keen on the idea of children lusting after their parents, and he said that it was a common and even normal aspect of the human subconscious mind.
Going further into that subject, Wharton branched out in her subconscious while revising her novella. After having an affair and experiencing lust and desire firsthand, Wharton felt a subconscious “guilt” for have had such desires towards her father. The version of Ethan Frome that we read, where Ethan and Mattie are crippled at the end of the story, was Wharton’s way of subconsciously punishing herself. She “unknowingly” made Ethan (Wharton’s father) and Mattie (herself) suffer for her own thoughts of wanting a relationship with her father. Freud would call this a “punishment dream”.
To me, it is astonishing the verity and correlation between Freudian theories and principles and Wharton’s Ethan Frome. It really makes me look at the novella in a different light and adds another dimension of strangeness and also adds depth and meaning.
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