The Myth of Imperiled Whiteness and Ethan Frome

Blanketed in whiteness—bleak, frozen, snowed in—the widely read and taught Ethan Frome has a little-recognized racist subtext. Expressing early-twentieth-century nativist anxieties about immigrants of color, Wharton warns that old, white, Yankee New England is disappearing, its farms withering, as swarthy foreigners increasingly dominate the newly industrialized landscape.