Three thoughts about Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

Following book-group discussion last night, three additional observations about Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome": First, most American fiction of the 19th century and early 20th century contained the idea of freedome and the possibility of escape, whether to the West and "the territories" (Huck Finn), to sea (Melville), to Europe (James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald) - the country seemed open to many possibilities, not the least of which was the possibility of starting over; but Ethan Frome is a claustrophobic novella, though there is a wistful reference to a character to went West and made good, that escape is impossible for Ethan and for any of the characters - they're stuck. Second, as much as anything else this is a book about poverty, rural poverty in particular. The Tea Party ought to read it; is this the world they would want, in which the "government" does nothing to promote the welfare of anyone, in which everyone is completely dependent on their fate and their families, and a poor girl like Mattie is confined to a life of misery, perhaps of prostitution, because her family went broke? Third, is Zeena really as horrible she appears in this novella? No doubt, she is a nasty person, a harridan, a bully, possibly a liar - but Wharton goes through a great deal of trouble to set up an elaborate narrator scheme here - this is not told by an omniscient narrator but by the young engineer, who apparently gets most of his information from Ethan - and how reliable is Ethan's account? Zeena is just as desperate as Mattie - without her marriage and without Ethan to run the farm, she would also be confined to the poor house, so is she wrong to recognize the threat Mattie raises to the marriage and to try to get her the hell out of there? All the perceptions of Zeena are Ehtan's - of course he would see her as cruel and nasty, because she stands in the way of his gratification. The only scene in which we actually see her shows herr to be a caring person, nursing the ill and injured Mattie (as she once did Ethan's mother). There may be layers of complexity not evident on first read-through.