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edith wharton review, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2017Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

“Rich in Pathological Instances”

Disability in the Early Reception Theory of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome

Lina Geriguis, Chapman University

Abstract

This article examines how and why Edith Wharton’s representations of disability played a key role in shaping the early interpretive community’s reactions to Ethan Frome. Several reviews converge to demonstrate that Wharton’s preoccupation with atrophic bodies and minds provoked a disenchantment with Ethan Frome after its initial appearance in print in 1911. In the eyes of some reviewers, dis-ability amounted to a controversial feature that made Ethan Frome seem unas-similable within the concept of an ideal novel and self. Contextualizing the novel within its immediate reviews reveals how it engages with the Progressive Era’s take on the “proper sphere” of disabled people both on the literary and cultural land-scapes. The strong responses—even objections—to disability in the 1911 reviews stirred noteworthy discussions about impairment and normalcy, signifying that Wharton’s work not only provoked resistance toward manifestations of unresolved disabledness but also participated in the debates about the acceptability of cul-tural expressions of disability.

Keywords

Ethan Frome, reviews, disability, normalcy, reception theory

“It is to be hoped,” stated one of the first reviewers of Ethan Frome, “that when Mrs. Wharton writes again she will bring her great talent to bear on normal people and situations” (“Ethan Frome” 183). The argument for the exclusion of the disabled is not confined to this review, written for Outlook in 1911; it rep-resents recurrent antipathy toward disability prevalent in several other initial reviews. Although many in the early reviewers’ community believed that Ethan Frome solidified Wharton’s writing career “and allied her with” a “company of

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splendid talents” (“Current Fiction: Ethan Frome” 183), some commentators were skeptical of Wharton’s accomplishments in this text because they found disability to be the framing component and guiding narrative theme and, there-fore, a problematic principal of the story. Multiple similar reactions to Wharton’s preoccupation with atrophic bodies and minds coalesce to demonstrate how the author’s depictions of disability played a key role in shaping the early inter-pretive community’s reactions to Ethan Frome. For some of the novel’s initial reviewers, the subject of disability made Wharton’s work seem unassimilable within the concept of an ideal novel and representations of an ideal self. Hence, this article recognizes the need to devote attention to the study of cultural frus-trations with Wharton’s portrayal of disability and looks at how the question of imperiled normalcy affected the initial criticism of the novel.

Current scholarship on Edith Wharton acknowledges that the contempo-rary reviews can be “[a]pprehended collectively as a corollary text in them-selves” and document in both direct and indirect ways “the development of U.S. culture” (Kunz 80). Such perceptive appraisals of the novel’s critical history broadly assert the pivotal role these reviews do and should play in the reading practices we bring to the novel, but the specific ways the initial reviews under-score the operations of disability in Ethan Frome need further evaluation. Even as modern critics have insightfully acknowledged that unfavorable reactions to Wharton’s novel did exist and were due to “the darkness of the novel’s tone and situation” (Fournier 117), the fact that disability directly figured into the ways that readers discussed the form and the content of Ethan Frome deserves the scrutiny it has not yet received. Among the novel’s initial critics were those who either explicitly or implicitly inveighed against disability as a disruptive—and disturbing—subject, but modern critical assessments of the early reviews have brought into focus a number of other cultural concerns and in the process obscured the significance of reviewers’ disability-focused approach.1 I argue that the ways several reviews problematize Wharton’s use of disability contrib-ute to demystifying the “puzzle” that, according to Helen Killoran, no one has yet solved: “why . . . a novel in which ‘nothing happens,’ produces such inde-scribable horror” (60).

Strong emotional and intellectual reactions—even objections—to disability in the immediate reviews stirred discussions about impairment and normalcy, signifying that Wharton’s work not only provoked resistance toward manifesta-tions of conspicuous disabledness but also participated in the early twentieth-century formations of disability theory. Putting the novel in dialogue with its initial interpretations accentuates the role Ethan Frome played in the debates

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about the acceptability of literary expressions of disability. Such moments of cultural significance receive emphasis in this article and challenge the argu-ment that Ethan Frome fails “to respond to many of the currently prevailing critical approaches” (Killoran 58). I examine how the early reviewers’ impulse to regulate the literary portrayals of (non)normativity situates the novel in the theoretical terrain cultivated by disability studies.2

In today’s assessments of the novel, much analysis has referred to its medical-ized drama, which scholars have examined by focusing on Wharton’s engage-ment with illness as a “metaphoric signifier of social and individual collapse” (Mitchell 16). For instance, in multiple readings, physical pathologies have been aligned with moral punishment;3 “crippling accidents” have been treated as synonymous with “metaphors of failed sexual drives”; “spinal injury” has been viewed as “a failure of will” (Bauer 136). Gender-driven discussions, ana-lyzing how sickness shaped the “woman’s ‘proper sphere’” (Herndl 178), have insightfully drawn connections between the cultural struggles in which femi-ninity and disability are interlinked. Because most modern interpretations of Ethan Frome have explicitly focused on disablement as a symbolizing strategy, they have inadvertently pushed disability into the gothic shadows of the plot as an allegorical phenomenon that references matters of emotional and finan-cial starvation, “symbolic castration” (Wolff 398) and “doomed love” (Benstock, “Edith Wharton, 1862–1937” 39). By metaphorizing disability, these readings have both magnified and minimized the signs of physical variance to meta-physical concerns, often privileging the significance of symbolic allusions over the physical experiences of infirmity or incapacity themselves. Such criticism has insightfully directed our attention to a variety of social concerns associated with disability as a somatized form of morality, but the connection that some reviewers made between physiognomical and narratological experiences of dis-ability merits further examination.

Reviewers’ analyses of disability demonstrate how the novel engages with the Progressive Era’s attitude toward the “proper sphere” of disabled people both on the literary and cultural landscapes, within the boundaries of the nar-rative and the horizons of the readers’ expectations. Studying the way the first reviewers explained the functions of disability opens up new critical avenues in which we can recognize how disability in this text launched narrative experi-ences that were entangled with the early twentieth-century views on disability as a visual, physical, and ideological anathema. Focusing on the perceptions of disability held by early reviewers, this article examines the process during which, to use Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theory, “the reader” is thrown

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“into a confrontation with the character that is predetermined by cultural notions about disability” (Extraordinary Bodies 11).

While some among Wharton’s contemporaries and among modern scholars have believed that Ethan Frome played a significant role in “the emergence of the modern novel” (Fournier 119), in more than one initial review the issue of disability propelled a charge leveled against Wharton as a novelist. For instance, a reviewer writing for the Hartford Daily Courant argued that Wharton’s figu-rations of disability define yet also limit the subject matter of Ethan Frome. “The novel,” stated the reader, “is not a study of life or character or locality. It is an unflinching tragedy of banalities, dyspepsia, and spinal injury—purely physical” (“Reviews of New Books” 185). In this interpretation, disability is an aesthetically reductive force; the reviewer understands the novel’s preoc-cupation with physicality as having robbed the text of more complex portray-als of humanity expected in a novel. Wharton, the given argument suggests, has elided disabled corporeality into the drudgery of a reductively somatic experience.

Similarly, London’s Saturday Review postulated that Mattie’s paralysis and Ethan’s deformities have compromised the narrative’s success. Like several other reviews of the time, it interpreted disability as a narratological compo-nent that deeply unsettled readers. Associating the disabled with a mistaken—even intolerable—ingredient of the story, it questioned Wharton’s strategy at the novel’s conclusion: “The error is in the end. There are things too terrible in their failure to be told humanly by creature to creature” (“Ethan Frome” 185). To this reviewer, disability produced a textual excess: Wharton, in other words, made her readers stare at more than they were equipped to face or confront. Disabled physiognomy caused “aesthetic nervousness”4 by becoming “an ‘alien’ terrain” that forced the reader to come up against “that which is believed to be off the map of ‘recognizable’ human experiences” (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis 55, 5). Responding to the narrative turn in which, after their disabling crash, Ethan and Mattie “must live horribly on, mutilated and losing even the nobility of their passion in the wreck of their bodies,” this commentator insinuated that unresolved, unremedied bodily deficiencies at the end of the novel made the story too preoccupied with loss, deprived the narrative of the humane, and by implication lessened Wharton’s ability to cement the validity of her literary accomplishment (“Ethan Frome” 185). This reviewer’s point of view is consistent with a recurrent reading strategy shared by those who affiliated the absence of normalcy with the impairment of the text’s quality.

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In other words, pathologies in Ethan Frome seemed to have pathologized not only the narrative itself but also the readers’ experiences of it. Disintegration of normal bodies disturbed the harmony of transactions between the reader and the text: “Having read the story, we wish we had not read it,” concluded the writer for the Saturday Review (“Ethan Frome” 185). This reader saw Ethan Frome as a “marred” work of literature and judged the author’s use of “exagger-ated terror” (185). In the given assessment, the story’s tragic ending, condensed into disabled corporeality, functions as “something at which we cover the eyes” (185) and thereby breaks the continuity of normalcy. The episode in mind is the disabling crash and Wharton’s detailed description of Ethan and Mattie’s immobilized or impaired bodies—spectacles that return the reader’s gaze to his own materiality marked by the impulse of shielding his own sight from dis-turbing sensations. The moment at which the reader wishes to look away marks the way Wharton’s perspective unsettles the reader’s normalizing gaze and, in the process, translates disability into an uncontainable narrative constituent. Binding disability to tragedy, reviewers expressed discomfort with the novel’s catastrophic ending, for it left them facing the disarrayed somatic semantics in the form of “the drudgery between two cripples” (“Current Fiction: Ethan Frome” 184). Those writing in the tone of the aforementioned commentaries positioned Wharton as having exposed the unacceptable.

Unease about Wharton’s treatment of disability relates to reviewers’ ques-tioning of the author’s use of genre. The New York Times review, for example, doubted that Ethan Frome was a great novel, for Wharton “prefers to present life in its unsmiling aspects, to look at it with the eye of the tragic poet, not with the deep sympathy, smiling tenderness, and affectionate tolerance of the greatest novelists. Thus, she never shows life as it is, as the great novelists do” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 181). The argument about the distorted and different lives that Wharton has represented refers to the “haggard and witchlike figures” whose presence rendered the story “cruel” (182). Akin to the reviewer who advised Wharton to “bring her great talent to bear on normal people and situations” (“Ethan Frome” 183), this writer leads us to extrapolate from his argument that “great novelists” would be inclined to feature grand—that is, able-bodied—lives, not “the victims [who] lie stretched upon the rack for twenty years” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 182).5 Such readers distilled disability to a confining component of the work and were hesitant to synthesize it into the normative plot of the novel. They alloyed the “rude and violent event” at the end of the story with “torture” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 182). In fact, unsatisfied with the fact that injured corporeality had shaped Wharton’s

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conclusion, some reviewers responded to disability as an aspect of the story that should have been omitted. In doing so, such readers insisted on veiling dis-ability with normalcy: “Had Mrs. Wharton allowed her creatures to die as they intended Ethan Frome would be high indeed among our shorter tales” (“Ethan Frome” 185). Death, the latter argument can be read, would have left the reader with the memory of Mattie and Ethan’s able-bodiedness and would have fos-tered a narrative of higher literary merit.

The novel itself considers but also destabilizes the acceptability of doing away with the anomalous. Wharton’s narrative evokes the possibility of dis-ability’s erasure when one of the villagers imagines the world as a better place without the paraplegic Mattie: Mrs. Hale laments Mattie’s survival by admit-ting that “it is a pity she [lived]” (EF 178). However, soon after introducing this scenario the story punctures the absolutism of such a resolution: the priest is “shocked at” the idea that the Fromes would have been relieved if Mattie had died (EF 180). While some of the initial reviews echo Mrs. Hale’s point of view, the sentiment registered from the minister’s perspective in the novel’s conclu-sion questions it. For this reason, Wharton’s text evokes but also resists the anti-disability tone that links several reviews; the narrative both records and calls into question the cultural pattern of conceptualizing disability as a threat to individual and communal harmony.

Wharton’s autobiographical reflections clash with those reviewers’ com-plaints that blamed disability for encumbering her story and preferred a denouement without the disabling sled crash. “When I read that great novelists like Dickens and Trollope ‘killed off ’ a character, or changed the conclusion of a tale, in response to the request or the criticism of a reader, I am dumbfounded,” declared Wharton (A Backward Glance 204). She thought that “[t]here should be no greater critical ineptitude than to judge a novel according to what it ought to have been about” (206). During the early years of her career Wharton believed that “every incident, every situation, presents itself to me in the light of story-telling material, and partly from the conviction that the possibilities of a given subject are—whatever a given imagination can make of them” (199). Arguing for inclusivity—and thereby, by implication, confronting those reviews that questioned the suitability of disability as a plot element with which to end the novel—the author objected to the criticism from the literary establishment that dictated what “shall be deemed worthy of attention” (206). She protested the “standardizing” attempts of “the modern critic [who] requires every novelist to treat the same kind of subject, and relegates to insignificance the author who declines to conform” (206). Wharton’s noncompliant stance offers insight into

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her position on Ethan Frome; she resisted the reviewers’ prescriptive narrative strategy to obliterate the disabled in this text and defied the cultural rules about what bodies and texts that represent compromised corporeality should be like. Although her response to criticism in A Backward Glance is not specifically tied to Ethan Frome, it presents a useful explanation of why, in contrast to the crit-ics of her work, the author did not view disability as a fettering literary subject.

By seeing Wharton’s portrayals of disability as a narrative constraint, review-ers implicitly observed the author’s deviation from the British model of novels that characteristically erased abnormality by the end of the plot.6 As Lennard J. Davis has observed, throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries the typical finale to the novel “represent[ed] a cure, a repair of the disability, a nostalgic return to a normal time” (“Who Put the ‘The’ in ‘the Novel’? 330–31). While a departure from the plot in which a victorious and comforting return to normalcy is supplied was not a Whartonian invention, the author’s choice not to provide recuperation from disability at the end of her narrative introduced Ethan Frome into the Western literary tradition as one of the cultural produc-tions that fostered an unapologetic discourse about disability. Wharton’s deci-sion not to restore the major characters to normalcy had deprived reviewers of the expected reassurance of social stability and harmony that comes with the promise of bodily normalcy. Those reviewers who argued that the presence of uncured disability compromised Wharton’s narrative essentially performed the cultural work of policing and codifying the concept of human normalcy and the literary methods that explore it. Linking disability to the reasons that com-plicated Ethan Frome’s status in the novel-writing tradition, reviewers either implicitly or explicitly relied on anti-disability rhetoric to determine the text’s place in the U.S. literary canon.

Wharton’s concern with matters of disability not only filled the pages of the novel and aggravated its reviewers, but was also a recurring motif in the author’s personal life. Scholars have insightfully noted the association between her hus-band’s invalidism and the disability-governed lives in the Frome household.7 As both Wharton and her friends’ letters demonstrate, Teddy’s physical and men-tal ailments consumed the author, fueling and shaping the disability-driven plot of Ethan Frome, in which Zeena’s multiple pathologies reduce Ethan’s life to an unfulfilled existence in a manner similar to the impact of Teddy’s illnesses on Wharton’s life.8 Physically and emotionally, she was thrown into what she described as an arid, exhausting experience while she both tried to take care of him and, whenever she could, fled from him, feeling the “dead weight” of his dysfunctions (qtd. in Benstock, No Gifts from Chance 262). Teddy’s mercurial

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forms of disability can be likened to Zeena’s manipulations of various illnesses.9 Congruence between Wharton’s text and life may also be seen in the author’s wish to have been smashed in a car crash, a provocative fantasy echoing Ethan and Mattie’s sledding accident (Fournier 47).

The resonance between the author’s life and the experiences she delineates in her story reinforces the theme of disability as one of the central and primary rather than peripheral and secondary concerns in her life and work. Wharton preferred to be reticent about the issue of illness in her personal life but ven-tured to explore this question deeply and deftly in her fiction.10 Juxtaposition of Wharton’s marital narrative with the narrative of Ethan Frome brings into focus an important literary and biographical intersection, enabling us to see that the author confronted and centralized in her novel the illness-related expe-riences she hoped to marginalize, and even escape, in her own life.11 Perhaps because these biographical details were unavailable to the first reviewers of Ethan Frome, they found themselves unable to explain why Wharton would be so invested in the disability-driven details of the plot. “She has marred her work with no motive we can discover,” admitted the writer for the Saturday Review (“Ethan Frome” 185).

Wharton’s discomfort with, even shame about, her husband’s invalidism may be linked to the early twentieth-century reading public’s discomfiture with characterizations of disability in Ethan Frome. The backlash, in some reviews, against Wharton’s exposure of disability stemmed from and reproduced coeval public sentiments on the fear of and bias against disability. In fact, the manage-ment of disability in the novel’s reviews resonates with the social strategies that advocated for the strategic containment of the disabled. Contextualized, the early reviews evoke an array of cultural practices formed to disqualify, mar-ginalize, or eliminate disabled bodies to preserve the comfort asserted by the illusion of able-bodiedness at which, as implied by one reviewer’s words, “we do not cover the eyes” (“Ethan Frome” 186).

Anxiety about the absence of “normal people” in Ethan Frome relates to the legislative and medical strategies of social control that sought to homog-enize Americans into a nation embodying normalcy. Situated in the context during which “the quest for health,” and thereby able-bodiedness, “became a national obsession” (Herndl 156), Ethan Frome exposed the lives of New Englanders who fit the category of the socially fearful for potentially marring the American vision of perfect health. Placed into the hands of readers who were surrounded by the rhetoric of constructing “an American America,” Ethan Frome entered the realism of the early twentieth-century United

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States in which American ideals translated into American abilities (Nielsen 100–103). Institutionalization and forced sterilization of the disabled, along with immigration laws seeking to restrict admission of immigrants with dis-abilities, created a discriminatory climate, justified by the goal of preserv-ing American families from “defects” and constructing an exceptional nation of able-bodied and able-minded citizens.12 The novel’s focus—a community “rich in pathological instances” (EF 72)—concretized the presence of conven-tionally unassimilable bodies and lives and thereby substantiated the national problem. As the rhetoric produced in the contemporary reviews indicates, within coeval social arrangements the disabled Fromes constituted an ideo-logical threat that would have jeopardized the construction and validity of American ideals.

Some commentaries on Ethan Frome synchronized disabilities with “an assault to the eyes,” a concept that ties into the contextual legislative dis-course on the prohibition of offensive public appearances, subject to the “ugly laws” that were designed to police “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed” (qtd. in Schweik 4). Connections arise between such legislation and those reviews that discussed Ethan Frome by fragmenting the characters’ bodily realism into varying degrees of the unsightly. Across several reviews, Wharton’s characters were reduced to “haggard and witchlike figures,” “gaunt,” “wreck[ed],” “repugnant,” “hag-ridden,” “slattern,” punished, “broken,” “warped,” “twisted,” imprisoned, “invalid,” “flat,” “barren,” “alien,” “radical,” supernaturally terrifying, and ruined identities (Tuttleton et al. 181–86). This litany of disability-defining descriptors ascribes to the novel identities in disarray. The reviewers’ desire for the removal of the Fromes’ disintegrating and distorted selves from the novel’s plot produced a type of rhetoric that coincided with legislatively authorized public demands to regulate into “permanent invisibility” (qtd. in Schweik 87) the disabled who seemed to the public eye “too loud in its patterns,” “vulgar,” and “dysfunctional” (Schweik 89).13 At a time when the discourse against the “unacceptable appearance” of the disabled governed “[b]odily management in public” (Kasson 112, 4),14 reviewers of Ethan Frome found its engagement with disability unnerving because it brought to public view those members of society that were to be contained within a private or institutionalized space. Leaving a cultural imprint beyond the reception of the novel, a constellation of reviews promoted an attitude that, as Garland-Thomson has put it in relation to modernity, “deemed disability an improper object to look at” (“Seeing the Disabled” 338).

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The association between disability and shame prevails not only in several reviews but also in the novel itself. Wharton’s narrative fashions the Fromes in self-isolation from the rest of the community: after the disabling accident, Ethan does not “even like his oldest friends to go” to their house (EF 175). The institutionalization of the disabled propagated by the medical discourse of the day is not necessary in Ethan’s case, as the very lifestyle defined by disabil-ity means being marginalized in the social landscape of the town. They are enclosed in their house most of the time, except for those rare occasions when Mrs. Hale and the doctor come to visit (175). The chore of tending to the sick in Ethan’s household has parenthesized his public role and visibility. The nar-rator limns Ethan’s lonely farmhouse as a “diminished dwelling” and likens it to the farmer’s “shrunken body” (21). Linking their disabilities to social death, Mrs. Hale bewails the fact that the Fromes have become “all shut up there’n that one kitchen” (179). Such forms of self-exclusion from social contact sug-gest that the Fromes have internalized the culturally discriminatory dictates on disability. The segregation of the Frome family has resulted from an ideological dictum that preferred to keep the disabled immured. Calling such realities to mind, the reviewer for the Hartford Daily Courant described the narrative as “the story of the isolated Fromes” (“Reviews of New Books” 185).

Reviewers’ inspections of the Frome household suggested that disability had not only isolated but also trapped and entangled Ethan in more than one way. Some highlighted how Ethan’s life was subjected to limitations because of his ailing and aging parents, who have “chained” Ethan “to the soil” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 181). (The narrator tells us that Ethan’s father “went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts,” while his mother “couldn’t move around” due to rheumatism, “got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby,” remaining mostly speechless and claiming that she could hear voices [22, 13, 69].) Others thought of Ethan as tethered to Starkfield by his sickly wife and, after the accident, by her paralyzed cousin. The continuity of disability as a matter that infiltrated the new family Ethan creates, for instance, was pointed out by Frederic Taber Cooper, who, when writing for The Bookman, equated Ethan’s troubles with his “invalid wife” and explained disability as part of the “blank despair” of the novel in which the last generation of Ethan’s family is “doom[ed] . . . to a life-long punishment, she [Mattie] with a broken back, he [Ethan] with a warped and twisted frame, tied beyond escape to the slow starvation of the barren farm, and grudgingly watched over by the invalid wife [Zeena], scarcely more alive than themselves” (“Ethan Frome” 186). In a similar tone, another reviewer appeared horrified by

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the unstoppable progression of disability-related problems, summing them up into a “[r] etribution” that had assumed “the shape of two haggard and witchlike figures—the gaunt wife [Zeena] and the wreck of the girl [Mattie]” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 182).

In some reviewers’ eyes, the troubles of Ethan’s invalid family amounted to a dreary “burden”—a cumbersome affair caused by the incapacitated women he had to tend to routinely (“Ethan Frome” 186). Cooper’s assessment in the latter review conveys a sense of economically minded nervousness penetrat-ing the prevailing social critiques that situated the disabled under scrutiny as a potential public burden. Compressing the description of the Fromes into “victims [that] lie stretched upon the rack for twenty years” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 182), the New York Times Book Review associated com-promised able-bodiedness with immobility and lethargy, invoking a paral-lel between disability and dependency, a social concern widely understood “as a disservice to a nation” (Snyder and Mitchell 37). Some reduced both Ethan’s aging parents and their ailments to a tragic burden. By taking care of his disabled parents, the argument went, Ethan became the “incarnation of the tragedy of youth and strength wasted in the service of useless age” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 181). To such critics, disability determined the Fromes’ passivity and unproductiveness and thereby evoked the common conception that the disabled were at risk of becoming a “public charge,” a fear that had circulated on the United States’ social landscape since the nation’s beginnings.15

Questions about Wharton’s use of disability in some of the initial reviews resonate with the harshness of the cultural climate from which they emerge, and yet the reviewers’ approach is not without empathy-driven nuances. Among the reader-response emotions that shaped the experiences of the first interpre-tive community studying Ethan Frome was not only contempt, but also pity. When lamenting over Ethan’s troubles, reviewers, like the one featured in The Nation, pitied him as a man who had been tormented and wronged and who despite his goodness had been treated parasitically (“Current Fiction: Ethan Frome” 184). “No hero of fantastic legend was ever more literally hag-ridden than was Ethan Frome,” believed those who saw him as unfairly doomed (184). In the examination of the novel for the Saturday Review, another commentator speculated that Ethan and Mattie’s trip down the hill and toward death ended in a kind of “misery of circumstance which may sadden, but uplift, the reader” (“Ethan Frome” 185). Framing his reading posture with feelings of compassion and pity, the Bookman’s reviewer deemed Wharton’s standpoint as merciless

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and inexcusably harsh. He found “it hard to forgive the author for” telling the story with “utter remorselessness” (“Ethan Frome” 186).

The ableist cultural climate informed the early reception of the novel with-out precluding the recognition of the innovative perspective on disability the novel offered. At least one reviewer, in this case, writing for The Nation, implied that among the sociocultural accomplishments of Wharton’s novel is the revelation that the disabled are part of the national narrative and selfhood: “It is the piteous and intolerable conception which the Greeks expressed in the medusa head that Mrs. Wharton has dared to hold up to us anew, but the face she shows us is the face of our own people” (“Current Fiction: Ethan Frome” 184–85). In the environment where most reviews registered the impulse to otherize and exclude the disabled, this review presented a shift in perspective by declaring that Wharton’s Ethan Frome has reintroduced us to ourselves. The Nation’s reviewer recognized that the ideological work Ethan Frome performs is both conventionally controversial and culturally integra-tive: by making “the spectacle of so much pain . . . yield so much beauty,” Wharton familiarized disability as a paradoxical yet common part of collec-tive humanity (184).

Indeed, among the things that Wharton “hold[s] up to us anew” are the universal qualities of disability. Featuring the principal characters as only “temporarily able-bodied,” the novel routinizes disability and invites us to think about how “being disabled, or having the potential to become dis-abled, is an aspect of identity and embodiment that all human beings share” (Hall 6). The members of the Frome family embody various forms of (non)normativity and thus pluralize disability as a common component of the human experience: Ethan’s parents end their lives in bodily and mental ail-ments; multiple health concerns govern Zeena’s daily life; Ethan is scarred and crippled; Mattie becomes paralyzed and prematurely aged. In fact, the novel indicates that no one, whether in the Frome household or the town of Starkfield, is exempt from vulnerability and susceptibility to illness, for they all comprise “a community rich in pathological instances” (EF 72).16 To the disappointment of some early reviewers, Ethan Frome unveiled the disabled as major characters, breaking with the literary strategy that often limited disability to secondary figures, minor plot elements, or temporary condi-tions.17 Navigating the landscape of somatic and psychogenic heterogeneity, the novel domesticated the disabled and brought to the surface the question of cultural diversity, as it revealed “the face of our own people” (“Current Fiction: Ethan Frome” 185).

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lina geriguis, Ph.D., is a lecturer in English at Chapman University. Her teaching areas include courses on Edith Wharton, Multicultural Literatures of the United States, American Realism and Naturalism, American Gothic, and Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. Her recent article publications and current research projects explore questions of disability, environment, race, and ethnicity in Edith Wharton as well as other U.S. and British writers’ works. She serves as a book review editor for Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Pacific Coast Philology.

Notes

1. See Springer 13; Killoran 49–60.2. Current critical perspectives on disability in contemporary reviews of Ethan Frome

remain limited to Heidi M. Kunz’s perceptive (yet only cursory) observation that one reviewer’s recommendation to Wharton to “bring her great talent to bear on normal people and situations” is “a problematic point in the process when deviation from perceived norms provokes negativity” (76). The limited attention Kunz has given to this issue is understand-able, as disability is out of the scope of her primary focus.

3. See Bauer, Herndl, Killoran, Springer, Wolff.4. I borrow Ato Quayson’s term “aesthetic nervousness,” which I find particularly rel-

evant and helpful to explain the tension between the reader and the text.5. The readers’ uncertainty, even confusion, about which genre Ethan Frome belonged to

was not always directly related to disability issues, but it became a recurrent question across several reviews. For instance, the novel’s reviewer for Outlook identified it as a “short long story” (“Ethan Frome” 182); the New York Times commentator reasoned that “[i]f Ethan Frome is not a great novel—it is, indeed, hardly enough to be called a novel at all, though it far oversteps short-story limits—it is, at least, an impressive tragedy” (“Three Lives in Supreme Torture” 182); in a 1911 advertisement, the book was listed as a “New England novelette” (“Confidential Book Guide” 1180).

6. Ethan Frome’s status as a novel was questioned not only in the U.S. periodicals but also by the British press.

7. That Wharton’s “husband’s deteriorating health gave her a powerful reason to iden-tify imaginatively with her most famous protagonist” is substantially explained in Suzanne J. Fournier’s study of Ethan Frome (52). Similarly, Shari Benstock offers a perceptive obser-vation that by 1911, Wharton, exhausted from having to deal with a “husband in the throes of mental illness . . . felt as tied to Teddy as Ethan Frome was to his bedridden wife, Zeena” (No Gifts from Chance 247). Cynthia Griffin Wolff agrees with the aforementioned assess-ment of the link between Wharton’s fiction and biography in asserting that Ethan Frome “grew in part out of the grotesque irony of Teddy’s illness” (213).

8. Wharton found it “increasingly difficult to endure the effects of her husband’s illness” and often complained about how Teddy’s health problems disrupted her work schedule and productivity (Benstock, “Edith Wharton, 1852–1937” 36).

9. In her letter to Morton Fullerton, Wharton expressed skepticism about the truth-fulness of Teddy’s illness. Interpreting his ailments as a form of performance, she had

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discerned that he had become perfectly well (and terrified!) when she posed the divorce question to him (Wolff 399).

10. Wharton felt threatened by and was ashamed of “ominously ill” and “cerebrally compromised” Teddy (qtd. in Benstock, No Gifts from Chance 204). Wharton’s biogra-phers have suggested that one of the reasons Wharton took a long time to divorce Teddy was because she feared that he might commit a suicide, just like his father had done (Lee 364).

11. Wharton’s biographers have demonstrated that the author felt extremely frustrated by yet continuously put up with Teddy’s prolonged mental and physical struggles. She did refer to her husband’s illness in her letters and often described how it disrupted and interrupted her work schedule, but she also mostly preferred to downplay Teddy’s troubles (Benstock, No Gifts from Chance; Lee; Wolff).

12. In A Disability History of the United States, Nielsen offers an in-depth account of the anti-disability climate of the Progressive Era (100–130).

13. Schweik offers an in-depth study of the “ugly laws,” which has informed my discus-sion of the “unsightly” in Ethan Frome.

14. For example, a Chicago city ordinance, issued in 1911 (the date coinciding with the time of the initial publication of Ethan Frome) states bluntly that “[a]ny person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object is hereby prohibited from exposing himself to public view” (qtd. in Snyder 182). Similarly, in San Francisco, an ordinance in 1867 sought “to Restrain Certain Persons from Appearing in Streets and Public Places” (qtd. in Schweik 86).

15. As early as colonial days, the legislative actions in Massachusetts excluded the “lame, impotent, or infirm persons incapable of maintaining themselves” as unwelcome aliens by complicating their immigration (qtd. in Nielsen 75). In 1821, marginalization of those “under guardianship” culminated in taking away their right to vote in Massachusetts—a social act of policing that contributed to the tradition of disenfranchising people with dis-abilities (Nielsen 76). By the waning decades of the nineteenth century, “immigrants to the United States had to prove that they would not become a public charge” (Rose 189) because of laws that interdicted immigration to any “person unable to take care of himself and her-self without becoming a public charge” (in 1882) or “likely to become a public charge” (in 1891) (qtd. in Baynton 914).

16. Wharton’s novel mines the details of disabled lives not in isolation but, as many scholars have already shown, in relation to class, gender, and ethnic differ-ences. To name a few of the most influential studies: “Edith Wharton’s Sick Role” examines how “illnesses were defined within contexts of gender and class”; the authors of the article argue that “Zeena’s attempts to take on the role of the female invalid” signal her “attempt to claim a middle-class status” (Lagerwey et al. 128, 129); Herndl’s sophisticated analysis of Ethan Frome discusses how poverty was linked to poor health and examines illness in the context of gender politics prevalent in the turn-of-the-century United States; and Elizabeth Ammons offers an insightful reading of how Ethan Frome tacitly participates in the turn-of-the-century anxieties about immigration, race, and ethnicity.

17. Garland-Thomson has argued that “[d]isabled literary characters usually remain on the margins of fiction as uncomplicated figures or exotic aliens” (Extraordinary Bodies 9). Davis, for example, asserts that “[i]f disability appears in a novel, it is rarely centrally rep-resented. It is unusual for a main character to be a person with disabilities” (Enforcing Normalcy 41).

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Works Cited

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Bauer, Dale M. “Wharton’s ‘Others’: Addiction and Intimacy.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol J. Singley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 115–45. Print.

Baynton, Douglas C. “Immigration: Law and Policy.” Encyclopedia of Disability. Ed. Gary L. Albrecht. Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006. Print.

Benstock, Shari. “Edith Wharton, 1862–1937: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol J. Singley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 19–51. Print.

———. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. London: Hamilton, 1994. Print.

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Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

———. “Who Put the ‘The’ in ‘the Novel’? Identity Politics and Disability in Novel Studies.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 31.3 (1998): 317–34. JSTOR. Web. 16 Mar. 2016.

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Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.

———. “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York UP, 2001. 335–74. Print.

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