Going beyond the narrative device of having the characters' bodies relay their thoughts (such as a blush expressing embarrassment or desire), Wharton instead applies the language of the body to reflection. Ethan's physical deformity, Zeena's ill health, and Mattie's physical demise frame the text as focused, almost elementally, on bodily survival in an unforgiving setting.
In a life overcome by a treacherous, frozen environment and hard labor, awareness of the body's needs supercedes that of the mind. Wharton does not lend lengthy introspective passages to Ethan's philosophizing his emotions but, instead, renders his psychology through the language of the body. Finally, the characters' emotionality, because they could not express it through verbal dialogue, cannot be experienced through internal monologue. Wharton then parallels the characters' stunted expression to restrained emotion, a pivotal reciprocity for her final dynamic.
The townspeople first lack effective discourse, where conversation surrenders to colloquial language, brief description, and even silence. Although bombarded with simplifying forces, the characters' incapacity to express their "sentiments" "articulate," or possess strong communicative abilities, is one of the key strategies Wharton employs for a psychologically simple yet intense character who personifies his mute landscape. The isolated figure emerges "scarcely more articulate" than his origins (4). Where "any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would have falsified the whole," the characters' representations are circumscribed through lack of education, finances, and communication reciprocated by their snowy, barren environment. In the introduction to Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton discusses her stylistic intention as an author to portray complex theory through relentlessly "simple" characters.
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