¶ … construction of a person who feel disconnected from his social setting? What are the elements of a person's experiences that combine to disconnect him or her from his social environment, and create the archetype misfit? Sometimes the person's ethics create the desire within him to be separate from his social surroundings sometimes the person is thrust into a setting with which he does not share any connections. Sometimes the simple choices of the individual separate him or her form the social surroundings, and create an isolated individual who is searching for meaning, and purpose. Such is the case for the characters in Ethan Frome, and Recitatif.
In the case of Ethan Frome, to combat the silence, isolation, and loneliness in his life, he marries a woman who is dissimilar to him, names Zenobia Pierce after his mother's death. While Ethan wants to leave their home town of Starkfield, his new bride will never leave and develops into an oppressively silent hypochondriac in order to gain her husbands attention. Ethan is unable to break away from the laborious captivity of his farm, and so there seems to be no hope for Ethan. The moral landscape of Starkfield offers no redemption and no new life. Therefore Ethan must live out his days surrounded by the elements of a harsh and indifferent nature, and harsh and emotionally stark surroundings of a loveless marriage.
The motif of silence is complementary to the motif of isolation of man from his fellow men. The isolation of each character before the tragedy is not self-imposed, but is enforced upon them by outside circumstances.
Ethan tried to escape the isolation of Starkfield and his father's farm by going off to college at Worcester. Then his father's death brought him back to the farm. There are several significant phrases within the novel that signify the silence and isolation that these three characters live in, including: "A dead cucumber-vine dangles from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death...." (Wharton, 51) In this particular phrase, the narrator has portrayed Ethan looking for a way out of his marriage and isolated life, even if it by imagining his wife's possible death, without him having to make the choice. The narrator refers to "hemlock-shaded lane, where Ethan's sawmill glommed through the night and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields" (Wharton, 48), in this paragraph alone, I get an imagery of death and loneliness without any hope for tomorrow.
For the characters in Recitatif, the misanthropic tendencies of two childhood friend…
