Introduction to Literature, 2500 Fantasy is an Escape from Fear Everyone, at some time in life, will experience fear. But, often fantasies are created in one’s mind to escape that fear. Ethan Frome uses his fantasy as an escape to the entrapment of his marriage and the fear of public condemnation.Ethan Frome lives in the winter town of Starkfield, Massachusetts where “the storms of February…pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds…charged down to their support; and …Starkfield emerged from its six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter” (Wharton, 5). The narrator, upon meeting Ethan Frome for the first time, thought “he seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.” He “had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, but had in it…the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters” (Wharton, 9).Frome finds he is unable to escape the dreariness of the town of Starkfield. Each day while passing the headstones on his property he feels as if they are mocking him, claiming: “We never got away—how should you? Whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver ‘I shall just go on living here till I join them.’ ” (Wharton, 36).Ethan Frome marries Zenobia (Zeena) after the death of his mother in “an unsuccessful attempt to escape the silence, isolation and loneliness of life” (Lawson, 71). But, after time, he finds his life again becoming silent, as it was with his mother. Their lack of communication is continually making the marriage more miserable. When they do communicate “he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally thinking of other things while she talked...
