The Predominant Red Pickle Dish Analysis

The Predominant Red Pickle-Dish | Foretelling the crashing of hopes and dreams | | Jxxx Nxxxx
For Mrs. Barrows, Eng. 232-700 | 4/8/2011 |

|
Wharton fills the pages of Ethan Frome with dimension and meaning through layers of symbolism and imagery. The most predominant, lying at the heart of the story, is the red pickle-dish. It symbolizes life and vitality through the color and ceremonial use by being kept on the shelf. It is through the breaking of this dish that Wharton foretells the crashing of Ethan’s hopes and dreams.
Ethan went away to college for a year to escape the boredom of Starkfield, but his mother’s illness and subsequent death reined him in. He marries…show more content…
She treats them as proof that her place in the household has been usurped by Mattie (Bernard). Confronting Mattie and Ethan with the broken dish she says “You’re a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It’s the way your father begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn’t get at em—and now you’ve took—from me the one thing I cared for most of all”(127). According to Fournier, Zeena sees Mattie's use of the cherished red dish as an act of unforgivable betrayal. Under the surface she is blaming Mattie for Ethan’s behavior, his shaving regularly and helping with household chores and ultimately for the death of her marriage (Ehrenhaft). Zeena, knowing irrevocable damage has been done, is now determined to send her cousin away and informed Ethan that Mattie was leaving the next day on a train. Ethan, feeling Zeena’s sole purpose is to continually tie him down and strangle him, suddenly feels “all the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rise[ing] up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others” (118). Because Mattie is not Ethan’s relation, he is helpless to do or say…show more content…
Imagery and Symbolism in Ethan Frome. English, National Council of
Teachers of. College English. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1961.
178-184. Web. 7 April 2011
Ehrenhaft, George. Barron's Book Notes, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. Woodbury: Barron's
Educational Series, Inc., 1985. Web. 9 April 2011.
Fedorko, Kathy A. Facts of File. 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online.Web. 27 March
2011
Fournier, Suzanne J. Narrative Art: Edith Whatron's Ethan Frome; A reference Guide. Santa
Barbara: Praeger, 2006. Web. 27 March 2011
Review, Children's Literature. Highbeam Research. 1 January 2008. Article: Wharton,