When Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome was first published in 1911, reviewers were struck by the tragedy of her New England tale of a miserable marriage and failed suicide attempt, with The Saturday Review claiming that it was a story ‘too terrible … to be told’ (Anon. 1911a, 650). The tragedy itself lay not so much in the unhappiness of a wretched marriage, but in the botched job Ethan makes of leaving it. Ethan falls in love with his wife's young cousin Mattie and, when the girl loses her position as a home help with the Fromes, he decides that death would be better than the bleak futures awaiting them if they have to live apart. Their suicidal plan to sleigh together down a dangerous slope into an ancient tree fails when Ethan is confronted by a vision of his wife's face, with its ‘twisted monstrous lineaments’ (Wharton 1995, 124) and swerves off course. Ethan survives to live on as a bent and twisted figure in constant pain and Mattie, now an invalid, is taken back to the Frome homestead, where she will spend the rest of her days under the care of the woman they wronged. Twenty-five years later, the once bright-eyed Mattie Silver has become a complaining drone with a ‘bloodless and shrivelled face’ (127) and is now virtually indistinguishable from her witch-like cousin, Zeena Frome.

Although Zeena is betrayed by her husband and the cousin who had supposedly come to help her, she is vilified by the narrator, who focuses on her cold, querulous nature and her aged, sickly appearance. In the year of the novella's publication, an anonymous New York Times reviewer, while moved by the tragic nature of events, echoed this view, finding Zeena the villain of the piece, describing her as ‘a whining slat¬tern who hugs her imaginary ailments to her flat and barren breast’ and a selfish wife who spends the little money her husband has on ‘quacks and patent nostrums’ (Anon. 1911b, 603). In 1980 Elizabeth Ammons re-examined this demonised figure and convincingly identified the ugly, withered, toothless Zeena as the archetypally ‘terrifying and repulsive’ witch (1980, 77), an argument continued by later critics, including Judith Saunders (2018, 117) and Joanna Gill (2001, 17), who read Zeena's cat as her familiar. Indeed, such is the narrator's hatred for this ‘evil’ woman (Wharton 1995, 87) that his layers of grotesque portrai¬ture can appear overdone at times, lending what Geoffrey Walton argues is a ‘decided element of caricature’ to this figure (1982, 86).