Chapter 1 begins the main story of Ethan Frome, which takes place about twenty-four years earlier than the prologue and epilogue and describes the three and a half days before and including the “smash-up” (Mattie and Ethan’s sledding accident). Wharton shifts the point of view in this chapter from the first person to the limited omniscient point of view. The limited omniscient point of view allows Wharton to relate the thoughts and feelings of only one character. In Ethan Frome, Wharton relates the thoughts and feelings of Ethan.
As the story opens, Wharton continues the imagery and symbolism of the winter setting in Starkfield. The first paragraph describes the winter night when Ethan walks into town to meet Mattie at the church. It is windy, and there is two feet of snow on the ground; the stars shine like icicles and Orion seems to be a “cold fire.” (“Cold fire” is an oxymoron—a figure of speech in which terms with opposite meanings are combined.) Wharton’s intention is to emphasize the bitterness and hardness of the winter by describing a star in a “sky of iron.” On the walk home, when Mattie assures Ethan that she does not want to leave the Frome household, “the iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness.”
Wharton uses imagery associated with winter to characterize Zeena, and imagery of spring and summer to represent Mattie. When Ethan reaches the church, he stays in “pure and frosty darkness,” analogous to the silence and isolation he experiences and in opposition to the happy sociability of the interior of the church which he sees in “a mist of heat” caused by the “volcanic fires” from the stove in the room. Ethan feels that Mattie’s effect on him is like “the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth.” Her face seems to him “like a window that has caught the sunset.” On their walk home from the church, when Ethan reveals to Mattie that he had been hiding while she talked to Eady, “her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw.” Mattie’s changes in mood seem to Ethan to be like “the flit of a bird in the branches.” And when he finally gets up the courage to put his arm around Mattie, he feels that walking with her is like “floating on a summer stream.”
