(You may be wondering why I have the cover image of Ethan Frome when I’m writing about Animal Farm. I’ll get to that.)
I’ve been reading Animal Farm recently, which isn’t something I’d done since I was a teenager. I’ve never taught the book, which is surprising, because as many of my students will tell you I’m a little too enamored by horrifying reads. (Students: Laura, don’t you like any stories that aren’t creepy? Me: Of course, I love . . . Um . . . Well, there’s, nope, actually that is also creepy.)
Some books frequently taught in high schools clearly may interest teen readers for some reasons, but also have drawbacks as classroom reads. Take Ethan Frome, for example. It’s short—in an age when adolescents mostly watch TikTok videos or YouTube clips, short definitely has something going for it. Ethan Frome is also atmospheric, in a way that old New England stories are and a way that I love. Few books capture the relentless isolation and chill of a New England winter like Ethan Frome. It also was written by Edith Wharton, so it’s a novella written by an American writer considered “important.” Bonus points, because Wharton is, as you may have noticed, a woman, and she was successful in the literary world when few women were. Ethan Frome therefore ticks off both “canon” and “white women of the canon” boxes if a school or a teacher is keeping track of such things.
Yet, it’s an odd book to teach to teenagers. An unnamed narrator ends up in Starkfield, Massachusetts one winter and meets a local man named Ethan Frome. The story is what the narrator discovers, or perhaps partially imagines, led to the accident that haunts Ethan and that ruined his life. The protagonist is Ethan, who is unhappily married to Zeena, a woman preoccupied by her own health and constantly seeking expensive treatments while she orders Ethan around. Ethan might have gone to school; he showed promise academically, but instead is struggling to survive on the remote family farm. He’s in his late 20s, and she’s a bit older, in her 30s. Enter Zeena’s cousin, Mattie, who is in her early twenties yet depicted very much as a young adult. She is young, inexperienced, vivacious, innocent, and cast out into the cold, cruel world as an orphan with no money. She is the object of Ethan’s increasing and yet silent passion. You might notice a pattern here—anyone read Jane Eyre?
However, Jane Eyre’s protagonist is young Jane herself, and the story is about her longings and awakening passions, as well as her faith and spirituality. (There’s many a thing to say about race and racism in Jane Eyre, but I’ll leave that for others or another time.) Ethan is the protagonist of Ethan Frome, and Mattie is what he longs for. Readers can’t be positive that she longs back until late in the novella, and she often reads more as object than as subject. An object in sweet, innocent dresses with eye-catching ribbons in her hair. Which makes this story primarily about a man trapped in a loveless marriage who feels burdened by his chronically sick (or possibly mentally ill) wife and starts longing after his wife’s younger, barely adult, innocent cousin, a young woman staying in his house because she has no financial resources and nowhere else to go. You know, a young, vulnerable woman like some of the students in high school classes.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t great discussions to have about Ethan Frome with adolescents, but in terms of the thousands of books I might teach, this one wouldn’t be my first choice.
Animal Farm is another matter.
This is a much longer post than I anticipated so, I’ll post about Animal Farm in a bit.