ENG328Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Narration, Neurasthenia, Multiperspectivalism
Ethan Frome
She had a love affair that awakened her
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But Ethan Frome is about the devastation of sexual repression
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“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in
such cases, each time it was a different story.”
Comparable to Falkner's As I Lay Dying
Focalisation shifts from section to section
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Various accounts coloured with subjectivity
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Objective reality is blurred and distorted
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Time is layered, chronology is disrupted
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He sets up expectations through the multiperspectivalism is a farce
He actually offers a visionary reconstruction about what might have
happened
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Only voice is that of the omniscient narrator
Authority derived from inexplicable access to Ethan's interiority
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Inarticulate character given words he could never deploy
Verbalisation is strictly the narrators in Ch. 1-9
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What is the tone that the story takes?
Element of condescension?
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Substituting the scientific idea of determinism with the classical idea of fate
Character seems to be mainly irrelevant here
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Irredeemable and brutal reality
Naturalism as a slice of life
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Tends to wallow in the excrement of lower life
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Hysteria, neurasthenia
S. Weir Mitchell
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Thesis is that women who suffer from hysteria have an excess of
atephones
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So they get put on a high fat diet
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Male hysterics suffered from masturbation, gambling, drinking, etc.
They had to go on hikes
§
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Women were just hypersensitive and had to be given complete
immobility
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He was a genteel physician without much scientific information
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Women with hysteria as the "pest of many households…despair of their
physicians…destroy the comfort of everyone around them"
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Like a description of Zeena
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If entrapment is multi-faceted, what possible edifying and enlightening vision
can be conveyed given these premises?
The novel cannot be a tragedy because there is no action, suffering and
knowledge
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Sin, suffering, redemption (religious version)
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There is nothing to say about Ethan Frome in the context of morality
Negative outcomes are predetermined
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Moral comes from social and economic critique
Presents a kind of judgement on the American economic system that
creates this kind of inertia in the characters
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Ethan is 52 at the introduction of the story
His lameness is the result of a "smash-up"
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Characterised by his grave demeanour
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Looks super old
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He always had to take care of people
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Idea of narrative gaps
But apparently the gaps are filled in
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So why is our attention drawn to them?
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Lots of inferences made on unreliable grounds
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Simply presents the story omnisciently with authority
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Condescension is reflected in the narrator's attitude
"As far as the mental and moral outreach…"
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"two women did what they could to prevent a decent dignity…"
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Is Ethan Frome what the narrator would have become without education,
wealth, etc.?
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Narrator observer in Ch. 1-9
Problem is the narrator wasn't there to observe anything
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In the epilogue, the narrator is once again a dramatic narrator•
Tragic ending comes as no surprise, even if the transformation of Mattie into
Zeena comes as a huge one
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Mattie and Ethan are imprisoned by the landscape and by their lives
Death is their only ticket out of town
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Precisely because he has displaced his educational aspirations that they
are displaced onto Mattie
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Entirely domesticate and yearns only for a different domesticity (54-55)
just wants Mattie to be the Zeena
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doesn’t really want transformative influence in his life
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Let the vision possess him
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Phallic symbol of the dead cucumber
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Images of castration
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Mangled cucumbers stuffed into a pickle jar
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What does the narrator get out of narrating the story?
Ethan is the narrator's winter man, shadow self
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Had he lacked the economic mobility of Ethan, he could have been him
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Narrator's reaction to the story is the ultimate point of the narration
What we have is a vision of Ethan's story
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Everything the narrator deems to be true is in the narrative frame (prologue,
epilogue)
Everything else is a construction
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What do we know about him even?
He's an engineer, he's active, he's an observer of rural life
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Like Marlow, the narrator is saved by his devotion to his work•
Occupying the same position (the threshold) the women are virtually
interchangeable
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Ethan Frome is impotent in the face of real world dilemmas
Ravished by indolence and not by lust or desire
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Devoid of erotic desire
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Desire for death, for the numbness of anaesthesia
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Passivity and regression eclipses activity and progression
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Flees sexuality
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Sled ride is a sublimation of sexuality
The allure of nothingness
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Extinction of thought and feeling
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He is in front, cradled in the arms of another
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Mattie has nothing to lose
She has no family, no skills, etc.
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Has not been prepared for an economically independent life
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She is trapped in a different life
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If Ethan's life is hard, a woman's life is a lot harder
Good girls don't grow up into happy wives
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Their only escape is madness or death
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Narrator is Ethan's double
Same interest in animals and science
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He was the engineer he could have been
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Only the narrator can see Zeena as witch, Mattie as Snow White, and Ethan
as prince
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As this dreary and naturalistic novel reveals, witches do indeed exist
Created by socio-economic system
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Lecture 15
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
1:10 PM
Document Summary
She had a love affair that awakened her. But ethan frome is about the devastation of sexual repression. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. He sets up expectations through the multiperspectivalism is a farce. He actually offers a visionary reconstruction about what might have happened. Only voice is that of the omniscient narrator. Authority derived from inexplicable access to ethan"s interiority. Inarticulate character given words he could never deploy. Substituting the scientific idea of determinism with the classical idea of fate. Tends to wallow in the excrement of lower life. Thesis is that women who suffer from hysteria have an excess of atephones. So they get put on a high fat diet. Male hysterics suffered from masturbation, gambling, drinking, etc. Women were just hypersensitive and had to be given complete immobility. He was a genteel physician without much scientific information.
