Lev Raphael- prisoners of shame

EFs story is one of disappointment, failure, powerlessness and shame.

the physical burden is matched by an emotional chain, that silences,
constraints his life: shame over a life of disappointment culminating in
being trapped, and over his inadequacies as a man
shame is the affect that causes him to hide. Shame is an impediment to
speech.
p.38: first glimpses of Fromes sience
early roots of his shame and disappointment: quit technical college,
death of his father ended the possibility of study, and escape from
Starkfield.
EF has no personal talents that can offer him even the fantasy of a
better life.
His life of isolation seems to change w. Mattie Silver.
Matties story.
Matties liberation is a kind of imprisonment, she has to pay for her
fathers success and failure. Indentured worker
Mattie is a pathway out of isolation for E., but she is also a source of
shame.
he does not feel special when he goes for her to the church dance. p.47
Frome: grave and inarticulate, envies gaiety in others. Mattie eases his
shame
he is jealous of dean and Mattie, and then he is jealous of his jealousy
after the walk, censorious Zeena is waiting for him, he goes to the
bedroom with lowered head
shame as key element in his relationship with Zeena
zeenas shame help him trap in starkfield (Look down on, p. 64)
her power manifest in critical silence, but he is not reduced to complete
powerlessness p.86
ethan spend one night w. mattie: balance between them changes: p
73,74
zeenas return triggers the first fight between them, lie of ethan, hale
flushed, emabarrased
shame keeps him from pleading an emergency
helplessness when zeena announces she has hired a girl, he tries to
shame zeena into keeping mattie. E is left weak and powerless and
enraged:
tells mattie the news, embarrassment
discovery of pickle dish
longing for escape, goes again to mr hale, talks to mrs hale, sympathy,
shame for asling money.
failed suicide
twenty years without visit

life of silence and constraint is a nightmare, in which shame has reduced

human possibilities and human speech to an unbearable minimum. by
suicide he longs for release of a life of failure and disappointment.

A VISION OF UNRELENTING INFERTILITY

ETHAN Frome represents the failure of fertility and the insistent

barrenness described throughout the novel
suicide attempt prefigured in the smashed pickle dish. (zeena carried it
as a dead body)
the dead cucumber vine that makes Frome imagine Zeenas death and
the pickle dish are symbols of a lost or past fertility.
glass under the foot of a bride symbol of fertility, pickle dish only
infertility.
in the dinner, the picle dish and the pickles form of display are a display
for the eroticized scene of the accident thet breaks the vessel of the
young womans body and preserves her in infertility.
the broken pickle dish and the breaking of the body of the young woman
suffest the horror of fertility rituals gone awry.
the narrators vision: the dish and the boy cannot be put together, but
the story can form a whole and seamless narrative.