Do we actually have control over our lives, or are we just following a path that’s already laid out for us? A potential answer to this question is presented by Edith Wharton in Ethan Frome, and it’s still worth considering in our current day and age.

At first, it’s easy to fall into Ethan’s dream. When he’s around Mattie, everything feels lighter, brighter. He sees her as the spark that could burn down the prison he’s built with Zeena. But as I kept reading, I realized Wharton was carefully pulling the rug out from under that fantasy.

Ethan believed he could rewrite his story by swapping one person for another. He imagined Mattie could just replace Zeena, like trading misery for happiness was as simple as changing the names in his life. But the more I read, the more I started to see that it wasn’t about who was sitting across from him—it was about the cycle itself. He wasn’t trapped because of Zeena. He was trapped because that’s who he was: someone destined to carry other people’s weight. No matter what, the story was always going to circle back to that same porch, that same chair, that same life.

There’s this haunting moment when Mattie literally takes Zeena’s place. First by opening the door the same way Zeena did, and later by sitting in her rocking chair. It gave me chills because I realized Wharton wasn’t just showing that Mattie was becoming like Zeena but rather showing that the outcome was inevitable. No matter how much Ethan tried to escape, his life was always going to fold back into itself.

That’s what really made me sit with the idea of determinism. Maybe Ethan’s choices didn’t matter as much as he thought they did. Maybe our choices don’t either, at least not in the way we like to believe. What if fate isn’t something you can fight? What if the very thing you’re trying to run from is the thing you’re destined to repeat?

Ethan thought he was making different choices, but they led him back to the same place: a life of caretaking, sacrifice, and emotional paralysis. Years later, Mattie becomes just like Zeena: bitter, frail, and discontent. The version of life Ethan feared most is the one he ends up trapped in forever. It’s like the universe quietly folded his story into itself and whispered, There was never going to be another ending.

How much of our own lives are shaped by patterns we don’t notice until it’s too late? Are we really free to make new choices, or are we just playing out the scripts written by our circumstances, our fears, our deepest wiring? Ethan Frome doesn’t offer an answer but rather just holds up a mirror to that uncomfortable possibility.

In the end, Wharton doesn’t give Ethan a clean break or a dramatic escape. She leaves him right where he started with the people he thought he could outrun, in the house he thought he could leave behind. Maybe that’s the point: sometimes, no matter how much we want to believe we’re steering the ship, the current has already decided where we’re going.

And maybe the scariest part is realizing we’ve been going in circles all along.