Coldness is a prominent theme in both Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man." When one thinks of coldness, the misery, the emptiness, and the lack of life associated with it also come to mind. Ethan Frome and "The Snowman" show that the coldness of one's surroundings turns one cold and numb on the inside by taking away all feeling and imagination and leaves a person with nothing.
Ethan Frome is the story of a man's unfortunate life. It is set in the cold and dismal town of Starkfield in New England. The effect of the long winters is evident in all the townspeople. The narrator is "struck by the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community" (7). Even when the warm, effervescent months come along, they are not enough to melt the internal coldness of the people, especially Ethan Frome.
Wallace Stevens
Cover of first edition of Ethan Frome
Ethan FromeEthan's life has some promise in the beginning when he was able to get away from the coldness of Starkfield; But his parents' illnesses bring him back and take away any chance of getting away. As more time passes, Ethan becomes more like the austere town of Starkfield. On one cold, snow filled night, the last thing keeping Ethan alive inside, Mattie, is permanently injured. Everything after that has no longer has any meaning to him. He is forever trapped in Starkfield and because he has "been in Starkfield [so] many winters", he becomes "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" (7, 13).
Just like Ethan Frome, the speaker of "The Snow Man" is taken over by the coldness of his surroundings. Slowly the coldness of winter seeps into the...