The most important use of symbolic imagery in Ethan Frome is the winter setting, which is first described in the prologue and is carried throughout the main story. Symbols allow writers to compress complicated ideas or views into an image or word. A symbol functions literally as a concrete object and figuratively as a representation of an idea. Symbols in Ethan Frome enrich the themes found in the novel as well as Wharton's characterizations. Such figurative language evokes vivid images that reveal characterization and reinforce Wharton's themes. Darkness comes, "dropping down like a black veil from the heavy hemlock boughs." The black veil causes the reader to think of a funeral. " As Mattie and Ethan approach their crippling accident, darkness prevails over the imagery. Wharton describes the moment when "her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw." The dead cucumber vine at the Frome farmhouse looks "like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death." And, when Zeena tells Ethan that she should have sent Mattie away long ago because people were "talking," the effect of her comment on Ethan is "like a knife-cut across the sinews. At the beginning of the novel, Ethan's perception of Mattie's face is "like a window that has caught the sunset," and later, he thinks her face seems "like a wheat field under a summer breeze." As Ethan and Mattie walk home from the dance, Ethan reveals to Mattie that he had been hiding while she talked to Denis Eady. Similes, comparisons of two unlike things that use words of comparison such as like or as, are direct comparisons that Wharton uses throughout the novel. Mattie's change in mood reminds Ethan of "the flit of a bird in the branches" and he feels that walking with her is similar to "floating on a summer stream." Later in the novel, when Ethan goes downstairs to tell Mattie that she will have to leave their house, their conversation has the effect of "a torch of warning" in a "black landscape." When Ethan sees her before her trip to Bettsbridge, she sits in "the pale light reflected from the banks of snow," which makes "her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless." In contrast, the imagery associated with Mattie is associated with summer and natural life. The imagery associated with Zeena is bleak and cold also. For example, in the beginning of the novel, Wharton gives readers the feeling of the bitterness and hardness of the winter by setting the constellation, Orion, in a "sky of iron." When Ethan and Mattie enter the Frome household after walking home, the kitchen has "the deadly chill of a vault after the dry cold of the night." This image is appropriate to the living death that Ethan and Mattie experience in the years after their accident. Metaphors compare two unlike things without using words of comparison (such as like or as). The figurative language used by Wharton includes metaphors and similes. Her descriptions serve a definite stylistic and structural purpose. In Ethan Frome, Wharton's descriptive imagery is one of the most important features of her simple and efficient prose style. Wharton establishes patterns of imagery by using figurative language - language meant to be taken figuratively as well as literally.
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