Oral Presentations and Performances: Session II
Project Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Brady Harrison
Faculty Mentor’s Department
English
Abstract / Artist's Statement
My project examines Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome through the lens of purgatory. I argue that the story is less a tragedy of failed love than a story about being trapped inside one’s own mistakes, unable to move forward. Rather than reading Ethan’s sled crash as a failed suicide followed by a bleak but ordinary life, I explore the interpretation that the “present-day” Starkfield is a form of purgatory—an endless winter in which Ethan continues the emotional patterns that destroyed him.
My guiding question is: What changes if we read Ethan Frome as already dead, living inside a self-made purgatory? I pursued this question through close reading of Wharton’s imagery, structure, and narration, paying particular attention to descriptions of landscape, time, aging, and the novella’s section break before the crash. I analyzed how Wharton uses weather, stagnancy, and repetition to blur the line between life and death--how townspeople’s storytelling frames Ethan as a living monument rather than a person.
My central argument is that Wharton constructs a punishment that is psychologically purgatorial: Ethan is forced to inhabit the same suffering he created, with no escape or redemption. This reading shifts the novel from a story about misfortune to one about moral stagnation and the refusal to change.
This project connects classic literature to broader questions about how people become trapped by their own choices, memories, and failures. For modern readers, Ethan Frome becomes less a distant character and more a cautionary figure for how unexamined lives can harden into personal prisons.
Category
Humanities
A Persistent Penance: Repetition, Memory, and Moral Stasis in Ethan Frome
UC 330
My project examines Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome through the lens of purgatory. I argue that the story is less a tragedy of failed love than a story about being trapped inside one’s own mistakes, unable to move forward. Rather than reading Ethan’s sled crash as a failed suicide followed by a bleak but ordinary life, I explore the interpretation that the “present-day” Starkfield is a form of purgatory—an endless winter in which Ethan continues the emotional patterns that destroyed him.
My guiding question is: What changes if we read Ethan Frome as already dead, living inside a self-made purgatory? I pursued this question through close reading of Wharton’s imagery, structure, and narration, paying particular attention to descriptions of landscape, time, aging, and the novella’s section break before the crash. I analyzed how Wharton uses weather, stagnancy, and repetition to blur the line between life and death--how townspeople’s storytelling frames Ethan as a living monument rather than a person.
My central argument is that Wharton constructs a punishment that is psychologically purgatorial: Ethan is forced to inhabit the same suffering he created, with no escape or redemption. This reading shifts the novel from a story about misfortune to one about moral stagnation and the refusal to change.
This project connects classic literature to broader questions about how people become trapped by their own choices, memories, and failures. For modern readers, Ethan Frome becomes less a distant character and more a cautionary figure for how unexamined lives can harden into personal prisons.