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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.