NORTHEAST REGION

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Maine New Hampshire Vermont Massachusetts Connecticut Rhode Island New York Pennsylvania New Jersey Maryland Delaware

OUR NORTHEAST

Diverse landscape Ports and harbors

Seafood Seafaring / Entry

Hospitable, friendly people Kind of…

Rich history Birth of America

NEW ENGLAND AS A REGION

LITERARY NEW ENGLAND Often:

Bleak Gothic Religious Full of imagery Focuses on the sensory People are much like the landscape

WHAT MAKES NEW ENGLAND LITERATURE APPEALING TO MANY PEOPLE?

EDITH WHARTON

AND ETHAN FROME

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EDITH WHARTON Born Edith Jones into an upper-class New York City family in 1862.

Privately educated by governesses and tutors, both at home and abroad.

At an early age she displayed a marked interest in writing and literature, a pursuit her socially ambitious mother attempted to discourage.

Her husband did not appreciate her writing, embezzled money from her to spend on another woman, and was abusive and mentally unstable.

THE MOUNT

EDITH WHARTON CONT. According to Claudia Roth Pierpont of

The New Yorker magazine, Wharton’s marriage was “a disaster: intellectually, emotionally, and above all sexually.”

She writes that “after what seems to have been one or two attempts at grappling with their mysterious bodies, Teddy and Edith lived together in celibacy for twenty-eight years.”

They finally divorced in 1913, when divorce became more socially acceptable.

EDITH WHARTON CONT. Wharton was advised by her doctor to take up writing fiction more seriously in order to relieve tension and stress.

Wharton found temporary solace in her surreptitious affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton, which coincided with the collapse of her marriage.

It was in the wake of this affair and her ensuing divorce that Wharton wrote many of her most successful and endearing works.

ETHAN FROME Ethan Frome (1911) is one of the few pieces of Wharton’s fiction that does not take place in an urban, upper-class setting.

Interestingly, Wharton based the narrative of the novel on an accident that occurred in Lenox, Massachusetts. She traveled there extensively and had come into

contact with one of the victims of the accident.

ETHAN FROME CONT. Wharton found the notion of the tragic sledding crash to be irresistible as a potential extended metaphor for the wrongdoings of a secret love affair. Extended metaphor: one where there is a single

main subject to which additional subjects and metaphors are applied. Example: All the world's a stage and men and

women merely players.

ETHAN FROME CONT. According to Pierpont, Wharton believed this novella “marked her coming-of-age as a craftsman.” Novella: a written, fictional, prose

narrative normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. Examples:

o Jack London's The Call of the Wildo John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Meno George Orwell's Animal Farmo Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orangeo Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany'so Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange

Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

ETHAN FROME CONT. When Ethan Frome was published in 1911, some reviewers and readers were skeptical that Wharton could write realistically about poor farmers.

Wharton responded that she wanted to show life as it really was in the poor villages of New England.

She felt that many other writers had romanticized the poverty and toil that people in these towns faced.

DO YOU THINK THAT PEOPLE CAN WRITE ABOUT WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW? EXPLAIN.