Ethan Frome and New England : the writing of common place
Abstract
Making a stand against the allegedly superficial local color tradition, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) aims at confronting the harshness of New England rural life. By appropriating a set of topoi, the narrative seemingly takes up, and subverts, the hackneyed regionalist tradition. In the guise of a New England tale, it questions the region's ability to give shape to a common space and configurate a community defined by human relations rather than submission to a common law. Relying on Jacques Rancière's study of the common, this essay examines how the narrative investigates the common to bring out the uncommon and unshared that is inherent in it. It argues that by articulating a naturalist perspective with modernist strategies, Ethan Frome nonetheless reconfigures the place to make it the site of a new community. The narrative thus reshapes the region and articulates it with the nation’s « imagined community » (B. Anderson), while defining beyond a dialogical common space – simultaneously narrative, poetic and pictural – that gives shape to a transnational aesthetic community.
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