Introduction Practice Quiz — Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton — tap or click to flip
Practice Quiz: Introduction
What is the introduction to Ethan Frome about?
It is Edith Wharton’s authorial preface explaining why she wrote the novel and how she decided on its narrative structure.
What dissatisfied Wharton about existing New England fiction?
She felt other writers captured surface details like wildflowers and dialect but overlooked the harsh, granite-like quality of the land and its people.
What structural problem did Wharton face with Ethan Frome?
The dramatic climax (or anti-climax) occurs a generation after the main events of the tragedy, creating a challenging time gap.
Why did Wharton reject telling the story through a single village gossip?
It would have violated the deep-rooted reticence of her characters and eliminated the "roundness" achieved by using multiple perspectives.
What two literary works does Wharton cite as models for her narrative method?
Balzac’s "La Grande Bretèche" and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book.
How did Wharton’s friends react to her proposed narrative structure?
They gave it "immediate and unqualified disapproval" when she tentatively outlined it to them.
What does Wharton say an author’s introduction should contain?
A statement of why the author attempted the work and why they chose one form over another for telling it.
How does Wharton describe her protagonists in the introduction?
She calls them "granite outcroppings" who are "half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate."
What role does the narrator serve according to Wharton?
He is a "sympathizing intermediary" between the rudimentary characters and the more complicated minds of the readers.
Who are the two chroniclers Wharton names as contributing to the narrative?
Harmon Gow and Mrs. Ned Hale, each contributing only what they are capable of understanding about the case.
Why does Wharton say a sophisticated narrator suits her simple characters?
When the observer is sophisticated and the subjects are simple, the narrator can see "all around them" without doing violence to probability.
What quality of her characters made a direct telling impossible?
Their deep-rooted reticence and inarticulateness meant they could not tell their own story in a natural way.
What is the central metaphor Wharton uses to connect landscape and character?
She compares her characters to granite outcroppings, suggesting they are as hard, inarticulate, and shaped by the environment as the New England bedrock.
How does Wharton connect the form of the novel to its content?
She argues the story "must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists," meaning form mirrors their austere existence.
What does Wharton mean by the "anti-climax" of the story?
The story’s devastating resolution occurs a generation after the main tragic events, making the aftermath more important than the crisis itself.
What theme about artistic truth does Wharton express in the introduction?
She argues that every subject "implicitly contains its own form and dimensions" and that elaborating or complicating her characters’ sentiments would have falsified the whole.
What extended metaphor does Wharton use to describe tempting but false story ideas?
She compares false "good situations" to sirens luring a sailor’s cockle-shell to the rocks, with their songs heard during the difficult middle of a work in progress.
What narrative technique does Wharton defend in the introduction?
The frame narrative, in which an outside narrator pieces together the story from multiple limited sources rather than telling it directly.
What does Wharton mean by "roundness" in describing her narrative approach?
She means a three-dimensional, sculptural quality achieved by showing events through multiple perspectives rather than a single flat account.
How does Wharton use the word "wraiths" in describing false story ideas?
She calls them "insinuating wraiths of false good situations," personifying bad ideas as ghostly, seductive presences that haunt novelists.
What does "vernacular" mean in the context of New England fiction?
It refers to the local dialect or everyday language of a particular region, which other writers reproduced but Wharton found insufficient.
What does "reticence" mean as Wharton uses it?
It means a habitual reluctance to speak or reveal one’s feelings, which Wharton identifies as a defining trait of her New England characters.
What does "imponderable" mean in Wharton’s closing paragraph?
It means something that cannot be precisely measured or evaluated, referring to the intangible quality that gives a work of fiction its life.
Complete this quote from the introduction: "They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings; but..."
"...half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate."
What does Wharton say about the "deep-rooted reticence" of her characters?
She says it was one of two essential elements of her picture that prevented her from having a village gossip simply pour out the whole affair to the narrator.