ZENOBIA: I would like to discuss the possibility of hiring another housekeeper if Mattie ever gets married
as you know I’m chronically ill
and the doctor insists I have a live-in carer to help treat my condition
ETHAN FROME: jesus
when did u get so cold
ZENOBIA: it’s just that
as we have both acknowledged
Mattie is in fact a very bad housekeeper
and it’s quite painful for me to watch you do things for her you long ago ceased to do for me
ETHAN FROME: wow
so just because i leave u alone in bed all day
but shave and get dressed up to impress your maid
u think that justifies your objecting to me going to interrupt her date right now??
ZENOBIA: why do you even have to pick her up
why cant her date bring her home
ETHAN FROME: you are straight up the cruelest woman in christendom
no wonder you stay alone in bed all day
ZENOBIA: i literally cannot get up without help
ETHAN FROME: maybe leaving you in bed alone all day will teach you to treat me with a little kindness
like how the maid treats me
ZENOBIA: welcome home
I waited up for you
ETHAN FROME: you heartless bitch
will you stop at NOTHING to ruin my life
ZENOBIA: in some ways it is hard for me to watch you flirting with our maid, who is also my primary caretaker, who is also my actual cousin, who is young and healthy in ways that I am not, in our actual house
ETHAN FROME: WELL THEN MAYBE I WILL JUST DIE
THEN WILL YOU BE HAPPY
ZENOBIA: I
no
that’s not what I want
ETHAN FROME: wow
really NOTHING I do pleases you huh
ZENOBIA: I’m in pain again
I’m going to see the doctor
ETHAN FROME: you heartless fist of a woman
always in pain and often in a bad mood and going to see doctors and spending money on treatment
ZENOBIA: it’s because i’m in a lot of pain
all of those things are because i am in constant pain that no one is able to effectively and consistently treat
ETHAN FROME: mean women are a mystery to me
ETHAN FROME: welcome back, Zeen
me and Mattie broke your favorite red dish you asked us not to use while you were gone
if it helps we weren’t having sex
just staring at each other so much we broke your dish
Z if it helps I don’t have sex with her I just wanted to buried with her and love her more than any woman I’ve ever met
I’m only cheating you of your emotional rights as my wife
not the sex ones
if that helps
I hope it helps
anyhow we couldn’t fix the dish
This is just actual quotes from the book tho, right?
Like that thing on clickhole where they just posted the entire text of Moby Dick.
OK but that was the best.
“How many pages can I BS about a pickle dish?” – 10th grade me, writing a term paper on Ethan Frome, which I read but did not understand.
Turns out, 12. I can write 12 pages of complete fluff.
Welcome to academia….
We read EF in eighth grade. Not because we were precocious but because our literature teacher was slightly off. I think not understanding was infinitely worse, I remember being so ill-at-ease about every character in the whole book.
Also, years later, when I was in college, my brother was in a pretty serious sledding accident and not one single person got my dark Ethan Frome jokes.
Our ENG teacher tried to lead us to the figure our that the pickle dish was a symbol for how Ethan couldn’t get it up. It took everyone an embarrassingly long time to catch on
SOMETIMES A PICKLE DISH IS JUST A PICKLE DISH.
Not in Ethan Frome. Everything is a symbol.
My main memory of this book is having read it before we were supposed to in 11th grade English because my mom wanted to watch the movie and obviously we had to read the book first. And then my teacher asked if anyone had read it and I raised my hand and he went “Who the hell has already read Ethan Frome?”
also, sledding is bad right?
“Who the hell has already read Ethan Frome?” hahahahahaha
That’s pretty much what I got out of it.
Sledding is not only deadly, but more importantly, extremely wasteful and frivolous I mean bells, are you kidding me??
I hated this book so dang much & I never made the emotional abuse directed at Zenobia connection. So thanks for that!
THERE ARE THINGS YOU PUT AWAY ON A SHELF BECAUSE THEY ARE SPECIAL TO YOU AND YOU COULD NOT BEAR IF THEY GOT BROKEN. IT’S NOT THAT YOU NEVER USE THEM BECAUSE YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THEM OR YOU’VE FORGOTTEN YOU OWN THEM.
Er, don’t know where *that* came from. Carry on.
This may represent the shortest distance between “original text” and “Toast text” for any dirtbag piece ever written.
Which is saying something, considering how many Greek gods have been featured
Truth.
Ethan Frome: Dirtbaggier than Zeus? You decide.
Zeus at least isn’t mopey.
Well there’s a gap in my cultural knowledge I’m in no rush to fill in.
Also: “haha you don’t even have to change anything because he was already a dirtb–yes i know that is why people are selected for the dirtbag series” is pretty much the best tag.
I’m surprised it’s so underused. There are at least a few others it should have been applied to.
aaaaaaaaaa year 12 english memories… The boy in my class who wrote “PICKLES = DICKS” in the margin of his copy, the many hours spent arguing over who was the worst character, my horrible coursework about EF and Jude the Obscure (love you Jude you’re not a dirtbag sorry about your life, Arabella and Sue die in a hole) that took me way too long to write because I kept weeping about THE BABIES…
Oh my God THE BABIES *weeps all over again*
I ended up having to read Jude the Obscure as an all-nighter during a howling November gale, getting to THE BABIES at about 4 am. . .
I salute your bravery. I read Jude and Tess back to back, mostly on the train to and from school, and there was a lot of snotty crying in public until my housemaster called me into his office to find out what the hell was going on and I had to start leaving it at home.
My strongest memory from reading this book in American Literature my sophomore year of high school is when our slightly effeminate wisp of an AMAZING English teacher, sat on his desk in front of us, and said, “Pickles and donuts, children. You know what that represents, don’t you?” and we all tried to avoid eye contact, ashamed, and he threw his legs open and said, “SEX!”
(I was put off of Edith Wharton for years after struggling through Ethan Frome, and then started reading her other books, and loved them, and thought I probably owed Ethan Frome another try. Nope! Still hated it!)
Our wee lady English teacher had an Ethan Frome walk, where she imitated how he would have walked after the accident, which was legendary. And in retrospect, pretty disrespectful to the disabled in general, though EF himself probably deserves it
Somehow my weird English curriculum never got around to having us read Ethan Frome, but on the theme of English teachers and sex talk:
My senior year English teacher, who was in his late 50s, frequently hungover and very very bitter about teaching high school, liked to fill class time by reading poetry out loud. So he opens the Norton’s at “To a Skylark,” and then looks up conversationally and tells us that when he was at Yale (did I mention he went to Yale? Because he mentioned it. A lot.) he and his girlfriend would go read this poem outside because she thought it needed to be screamed to the sky. Pause. “And she knew from screaming. [heh heh] ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit!. . .” while we all gawk at each other silently asking “Did he just brag to us about how hard he banged his girlfriend? That’s what he meant, right? No, he didn’t mean that. . .DID he mean that?!?”
I raise you my english teacher who would ONLY discuss the oral scenes when we studied Roth’s Indignation. He also suggested all the female students become dommes because we were all “so bossy”.
That is definitively on the creepy side of rogue-ish, Jesus.
Wow, men should just not.
We never got any sexual symbolism in our AP English class. Everything was Christ symbolism. EVERYTHING. JESUS IS EVERYWHERE.
I didn’t do well in that class, oddly.
It’s okay. Edith Wharton hated Ethan Frome too.
I once asked my 7th grade American History teacher “How’s it hangin?” because I thought it was just a cool way to ask, “How are you?”
Adolescence is funny.
It’s… it’s not just a cool way to ask “How are you?”
No wonder everyone I’ve said that to gave disgusting answers lol
I legit loved that book and I am here for this in a big way. My love for it may have come from reading it in 11th grade in October while tending to vegetables and hot cider at a farm stand and being generally a woeful and romantic-hearted teen. The atmosphere really enhanced everything.
omg same. The atmosphere in my head/the real world while I read it pretty much matched the cold isolated muted atmosphere in the book. I haven’t read the book in ages, though. This makes me want to reread it.
I love it for similar reasons — read it first in high school, but then re-read it while living in Vermont doing things like pressing my own apple cider and home-canning and contemplating whether to choose the family farm over the aggressive career mood. My boyfriend of the time also loved that book and we talked about it and then we WENT SLEDDING TOGETHER DOWN A MOUNTAIN AT NIGHT and then I married him and we moved back to the family farm to take care of my aging relations.
I pretty much read Ethan Frome as a cautionary tale about my life……
Same. I read it in October in a small town near the Berkshires. The atmosphere is everything.
I feel like I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, even though I haven’t even really been waiting for it since the “dirtbags” started. It calls to me.
Also, y’all, check out the dirtbaggery on this beautiful Penguin Classics cover (which I once owned and then got extremely wet and muddy to the point of ruination, appropriately)! Maximal dirtbaggery.
Ooo, look, yay, I found the whole thing (even though it’s a little too small to read properly)
Ugh my mom LOVESSS this book and could not understand why I hated in when I read it in high school. This confirms that I was right (I already knew it).
I’ve been telling people for years that I’ve never read Ethan Frome. Now I remember that I did and just SUPPRESSED ALL MEMORIES OF IT.
Between Ethan Frome and Mayor of Casterbridge, my Grade 10 curriculum was so bleak and depressing (and probably put whole generations of kids off classics).
The frumenty woman is my personal heroine.
“Put away that damn lamp! I’m trying to take a piss here!”
Is this something particularly cruel English-teaching people decide to do to 15/16yos? Because although EF was not assigned, we had “1984”, “My Antonia”, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” and “The Bluest Eye” all in a row.
It’s a wonder my class was not carried off by melancholia en masse!
Literally just going through and thumbs-upping everything because you all make me so happy. I legit loved this book so much in 11th grade English class that it prompted me to read Age of Innocence, which I loved even more, Edith Wharton 4eva
Oh man, I was the exact same. I read this one first because it was shorter and it was so miserable and I loved it. Then I read The Age of Innocence and cried a lot. I love Edith Wharton so much.
I also loved Summer, by Edith Wharton.
I think I read a different Ethan Frome than everyone else in the comments because I love it a lot and totally side with Ethan. I think of Zenobia as never having outgrown her high school goth stage.
Zenobia: NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY PAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNN
Ethan: No, I grant you that, but how about we hire you some help and I work very hard to take care of you and perhaps you should see more doctors?
Zenobia: YOU CRUEL MAN HOW CAN YOU BE SO HEARTLESS
Ethan: I think perhaps because of the poor decision I made in giving up architecture to return to the family farm. It has forced upon me the grim realization that mattering myself for a noble Ideal is not always the best solution.
Zenobia: MARTYR YOURSELF FOR ME SELFISH MAN. DON’T YOU KNOW THAT LOVE ALWAYS INVOLVES TEARS???
Ethan: I will love you and take care of you and I will put you first but I will not slavishly devote myself to you.
Zenobia: I HATE YOU AND NOW I MUST GO LISTEN TO NIGHTWISH
Ethan: Fine. I give up. I WILL REACH FOR WHAT LITTLE TRANSIENT HAPPINESS LIFE MAY OFFER!!!!!
……
Ethan, much later: Oh shit. That didn’t work out so well, did it.
Because guess who perks RIGHT the fuck up when she finally has a chance to star as her own Nurse Ratchett to care for Ethan and Maddie.
(Also, ironically, the name Zenobia means something like “Given the gift of life by Zeus.”)
Oh, no. You are 100% correct. Zenobia hops right out of that bed and turns into Baby Jane for Ethan and Maddie once there’s no chance she’s going to have to be a real farm wife, i.e., have a baby every year.
literally everyone interprets the book that way, which is why this is ‘Dirtbag Ethan Frome’ and not ‘What Everyone Thinks About Ethan Frome’! Like: everyone is just like, oh obviously Zenobia is a big evil FAKER, as are all women who experience chronic/invisible illnesses and don’t paste on a big cheery smile, and it’s obviously All In Her Head, as evidenced by the fact that she eventually cares for a more injured person. And that’s fine, and a totally legit reading! But like…there is so much sympathy for Poor Ethan and how much he wants to bang his maid and it’s like, maybe part of the reason your wife is such a dick is because you pay exactly none attention to her and are clearly in love with her young, healthy, happy cousin who can do everything she can’t do, and who also lives with her!!! A LIL DIRTBAGGY
But can’t we all, in the fullness of our Very Open Hearts, just find ALL of them dirtbags? Is there no room for that kind of generosity of spirit?
not on my damn web site
I hate it when we fight.
::cough, cough::
Oh, I’m not feeling great. I probably deserve some compassion and have thus ended our fight.
I think Wharton does that for us already. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Yes, well, a) I saw the opportunity for greater being-funnierness defending the original (you took all the good dirtbag jokes!); b) ever since I stopped listening to Nightwish I have sadly died to creative thinking and become a Zenobia-hating conformist; I am sure that only reading The Toast has kept me from rising from the dead / becoming Republican, and c) my heart could only have been more smitten (smoten? YOU SMOTE MY HEART DAMNIT) had it been Dirtbag Newland Archer (who was, in my opinion, actually a lot more of a dirtbag than Ethan Frome, but I also love him a lot more).
In all seriousness, though, I had never read much commentary on Wharton so I didn’t know what the standard read on Frome was; I laughed hard while reading you but disagreed with reading Zenobia as an example of minimizing women’s illnesses, especially given Wharton’s own history of chronic nonspecific illness (aaaaand her husband and lover situation….)
Anyway usually when you’re hilariously skewering a beloved character everyone laughs but people are also like “aahhhhh how could yoooouuuuu!!!!” (Like with dirtbag Mrs Whatsit, which I loved!) but this time no one did that, so I wondered whether I was actually the only one who disagreed with the read, which would have surprised me but made me go (re)re-read the book.
THANK GOD I AM NORMAL AFTER ALL! 😉
….except maybe for how much I love Ethan Frome. In fact I may go re-read it again anyway. Maybe that part’s not normal. Oh well…..
I think I read this version too. I totally sided with Ethan. Zenobia sort of reminded me of my perpetually depressed, yet impossible to please, mother.
I love this book and used to give it to any friends who moved to Massachusetts from a warmer climate as an Introduction To New Englanders And Why We’re Hostile.
From New England and can confirm. This and the complete works of Robert Frost are really all you need to survive in the north east.
which is why I’ll never move there
And Stephen King. Robert Frost doesn’t ‘splain enough about the Red Sox, IMO.
Ethan Frome, Robert Frost, and Stephen King, and that’s All You Need.
And this lamp….
I’ve always hated that Ethan From is the Wharton book they give you to read in high school (reason: it is the shortest. This is literally the reason). It is nothing like her other books. Yes, the bleakness and the condemnation of marriage is like her other books, but everything else about it reads like it’s from a different author. I blame it on her trying to write about poor people: all her books about rich assholes (aka her real life experience) are great, full of absolutely perfect details. But also, Ethan Frome is possibly the tamest book she wrote in terms of sex, pickles and donuts aside…Has anyone read “Summer”? It’s considered the partner of Ethan From (aka “Winter”) and it’s kinda an amazing run-down of sex and bad situations.
Also, the fact that it’s the tamest in terms of sex probably also contributes to it being taught in high school.
“Summer” 5eva. If you want any lace on your blouse, knit it yourself! And the man/woman game is rigged, but it’s the only game in town!
I mean it’s not the ONLY game but okay.
holy shit I hated Summer so much
SO. MUCH.
i was assigned it summer before 9th grade.
NINTH GRADE? What school system allowed that? Did they not read it beforehand? Did they not understand that whole scenes took place at an abortionist’s office? (No shade to abortionists, but I can’t wrap my head around any school teaching about it, considering my ninth grade experience didn’t even allow for discussion of abortions in sex ed)
I went to a Catholic Girls high school and don’t remember there being any abortionists! Literally all I remember was A. it was extremely depressing B. the terrible love shack C. she marries her surrogate dad.
It was miserable summer reading.
An Irish friend of mine – who I love dearly and with all my soul, but who is, one might politely say, given to picaresque exaggeration – swears blind that his class were given Beckett’s The Unnamable to read at the age of eleven. If this is true (and I really do have my doubts) it suggests his teachers had refined crushing of the spirit to a fine art.
I read it in college and don’t remember any abortionists either.
“Summer” depressed me for months. It might actually be the most devastating of Wharton’s novels, despite a lot of stiff competition.
I liked Summer. ok, I admit, I may partly like them because they are set in the Berkshires.
Fun Ethan Frome fact! Edith Wharton originally wrote it in French as an exercise to improve her French literacy.
Antenne cornichon
My high school English teacher referred to the scene where Maddie is knitting and Ethan is fondling the scarf as “the hottest scene ever” and I can never forget that.
I reread this recently because I’d watched the movie and felt guilty about doing that without revisiting the book. It’s amazing how much I feel for Zenobia, so this piece is very welcome.
(BTW, I recommend the 1993 movie. It was filmed on location in a tiny picture-postcard town buried in snow, and everyone shivers and blows their noses in an unfeigned manner. Joan Allen is flipping excellent as Zeena, Patricia Arquette is decent and Liam Neeson is a gorgeous hunk of man who didn’t let his personal beauty and charm stop him from portraying Ethan as a jerk. Very generous performance there.)
I reread this recently because I’d watched the movie and felt guilty about doing that without revisiting the book. It’s amazing how much I feel for Zenobia, so this piece is very welcome.
So glad I never bothered to actually read this novel! Thank you for affirming me!
Puhlease can we have Dirtbag House of Mirth next, Mallory?
Mallory. I have never commented before. But I need to tell you that I love you. Seriously. This is amazing.
A mansplainey friend of my sisters once tried to convince a room of well read women (myself included) that 19th century women authors aren’t worth studying because they are only concerned with “women’s” stuff (home life, sex, actual relationships.) He then held up Edith Wharton as the exemption, and I started to laugh. I said “Wharton was all about home life and relationships and analyzing gender roles how are her books not ‘women’s'” and he said “well I’ve only read Ethan Frome, so that’s what I was thinking of” and I said “you are no longer allowed to be in this conversation, goodbye.”
So yeah, even people who read Ethan Frome are dirtbags. Full dirtbaggery.