Ethan Frome by Edith Warton

The quote, “ Her tragic heroines and heroes are the victims of the group pressure of convention; they are passionate or imaginative spirits, hungry for emotional and intellectual experience, who find themselves locked into a small closed system, and either destroy themselves by beating their heads against their prison or suffer living death in resigning themselves to it”, by Edmund Wilson, is thoroughly expressed in the novella Ethan Frome, by Edith Warton. In this quote, Wilson …

…representing the feel of their setting. When producing the novella, Edith Warton had a purpose to everything, the small town winter setting was suppose to give the characters a feel of isolation. Due to this, it effected the relationship of Ethan and Mattie. They never had any privacy, meaning everyone new their business. These events and more eventually escalated up to the point where they tried to take their own lives because they were unhappy.