Conflicts In Ethan Frome By Edith Wharton

People live all their lives trying to chase dreams. Most people do and those are the risk takers they ones who aren 't afraid to try even if the future is uncertain. The ones who don 't try often look imagine how their life could have been if they had taken that risk. In the book Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton we see the main protagonist Ethan lack the courage to chase his dream and in the end pays the price for it.

In the book he is dealing with inter conflicts between two women. One is Zenna his sick and depressed wife and the second is mattie the young a pretty maid.He has a responsibility and sense of duty towards zeena, but he loves Mattie. However, he had a chance to a risk to express his love to Mattie while Zeena was not there, but

As said in chapter 6, “he had not touched the tip of her fingers,” (Wharton 73) in other words, he did not even try to take the risk to try and hold her hand. I believe it was because he was scared. We see the narrator keep referring to the cat, as if Zennas presence was still in the house. He was not sure what would come if he took this chance to embrace his relationship with Mattie and do what he desires because in the back of his mind he kept thinking of Zenna. Clearly, if he would have taken that risk to make a move by touching her hand, then he would have actually felt happy. Even though he, “was so irrationally happy,” (Wharton 73) just from imaging how it would be like to live with her, still he did not really take the risk to try and experience how it would feel like to express their feelings and dream of them

Ethan chooses his duty to Zeena over his dream with mattie he would receive when proposed with the option of moving to the West, he decides against it because of what he owes to Zeena. He doesn 't knows if she would not be able to support herself and that clouded future is why he doesn 't agreed to leave. Again, Ethan chooses between duty to Zeena and seeking his personal dream when he and Mattie were going to take their lives so they would not have to live without each other. Throughout his time with Zeena, he was forced to choose between duty to his family and his dreams. He could have left and continued his dream of being an engineer but instead he married her do to a sense of payment for what she had done for his mother. He cast away his dream because he did not know whether he would have an opportunity like this