Zenobia Frome

So much depends on a red pickle dish.

Really. In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s famous 1911 novella, what happens to Zeena’s prized glass pickle dish literally becomes a matter of life and death.

When the dish gets broken, we know Zeena will find out. It’s inevitable in so bleak a tale. How she finds out—and so soon after the catastrophe—is what’s strange. Could it be that the cat, privy to the occasion of the crash (in fact instrumental to it), is the source of witch-like Zeena’s knowledge? Is the cat Zeena’s familiar animal?

Wharton—a dab hand with overtly (for her) supernatural tales—supplies ample ammunition for the Zeena-as-witch proposition. For one thing, there’s the physiognomical evidence:

... she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face ....

The kitchen from which the creature emerged is described as having “the deadly chill of a vault.” And then there’s this tantalizing tidbit from part one.

Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade.

As my 11th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Hines, gleefully pointed out, “shade” is a semi-archaic word for a disembodied spirit—which brings us back to that troubling cat. In the followup to the crucial pickle-dish scene, puss watches the proceedings from Zeena’s rocking chair with “narrowed eyes” and subsequently sets off a “spectral rocking” when it jumps down.

Perhaps most damning is this statement shortly before the story’s terrible climax:

She [Zeena] was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.

For some, all this maybe-witch business is merely Wharton’s way of critiquing an unforgiving world. To quote literary scholar Elizabeth Ammons, “Witches do exist, Wharton’s tale says, and the culture creates them.”

For me, it comes down to this question. Is Zeena a hag with an awful power over the souls in her sphere—a power that will condemn them to a living hell?

But suddenly his wife’s face, with twisted, monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal ....

WITCH!

P.S. Speaking of shades ... Mrs. Hines must be haunting this post, which I notice has magically turned into a Junior English essay. Wonder what grade it would get ...