Like much of Wharton’s work, Ethan Frome has a naturalist bent; it’s generally skeptical of free will, instead framing Ethan’s fate as the product of impersonal social and natural forces. Poverty, sickness, a changing economy, and norms surrounding gender and sexuality intervene in Ethan’s life at key moments, and it’s the convergence of all these forces that ultimately stops Ethan from leaving Zeena. Even the New England landscape seems to shape Ethan’s existence and personality in fundamental ways; according to the narrator, “his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight […] but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters” (13).

Ethan himself certainly feels helpless in the face of all these circumstances, telling Mattie that he’s “tied hand and foot” (87). However, constricting as Ethan’s situation is, it’s also true that he makes few real attempts to change it. He intends, for example, to challenge Zeena on Mattie’s dismissal, but he backs down the moment Zeena alludes to his relationship with Mattie, presumably because he fears the stigma of being branded an adulterer: “He had meant to humble himself, to argue that Mattie’s keep didn’t cost much, after all, that he could make out to buy a stove and fix up a place in the attic for the hired girl—but Zeena’s words revealed the peril of such pleadings” (66).