Is the cause of destiny an attitude towards life, or is it the people or places one has known? Edith Wharton shows in her book, Ethan Frome, how choices determine someone's destiny. Ethan Frome is the story of a man who marries a woman he doesn't love and soon falls in love with his wife's cousin. As the plot develops, Ethan is forced to make decisions that will lead him to the life of love he is seeking, or lead him down the path of defeat and failure. The choices she makes will affect how her future is revealed and the author, Edith Wharton, examines and explains this through the plot, the conflicts that occur and the use of irony within the story to make understand the reason for this theme. It is true. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. The choices Ethan makes are major plot points that allow an opening for the next step in the book. When he “asked [Zeena] to stay with him” (Wharton 29), Ethan creates his first choice which leads to the next one. This indicates how marrying Zeena changes his life as he takes a different path. In addition to that, instead of falling in love with the girl he married, Ethan begins to love Mattie, moving the plot even further. "Oh Matt, I can't let you go!" (Wharton 70) He says as he confesses his love for her. He is unable to love his wife and when he falls in love with Mattie his life changes. These choices move the plot forward and make the rest of the story depend on them. The author also establishes Ethan's character at the beginning and end of the book to show that his choices lead to his sad life within the plot. At the beginning of the book, Ethan is portrayed as a man who has experienced devastating events that have caused him to have “something bleak and unapproachable about his face…” (Wharton 1). This shows how the reader knows that Ethan's life is full of tragedy and how his choices lead to it. Ethan's life isn't just defined at the beginning of the book; his life is also finally ended by saying “…It is he who suffers the most” (Wharton 77). This indicates the effect of all his bad choices: sad and full of suffering. With this in mind, the plot unfolds Ethan's life in the prologue and epilogue to begin and end Ethan Frome's harsh life. Ethan's internal conflicts lead him to make quick and unsure decisions that lead to poor outcomes. His poor choice when he asked Zeena to stay was based on conflict with himself. “He was seized with an unreasonable fear of being left alone… [And] before he knew what he was doing, he had asked her to stay there with him” (Wharton 29). Ethan is fighting with himself because he doesn't want to be alone and forgotten, so he tries to end that conflict by making the easy choice: asking her to stay. On top of that, Ethan is in conflict not only with himself but with his life in general. He felt that “The sweetness of Mattie's confession… made the other vision more repugnant, the other life more intolerable to return to” (Wharton 71). This led him to make the wrong choice to commit suicide rather than face his life and ruin what he had in the long run. The conflict with Ethan's wife is also the effect of poor decision-making in the story. Ethan's poor choice to hide the broken plate rather than confront his wife causes conflict with her. When he "... put the pieces together... [so] that close inspection convinced him of the impossibility of detecting... that the plate was broken" (Wharton 36) he opened up a new form of deception that caused discussion . If only he had told her that the plate was brokenwhen she returned home, he could have avoided the worst of the conflict with her. Even more, Ethan falls in love with Mattie, which causes conflict with his wife. He has an argument for the first time with Zeena, caused by his choice to love Mattie. Zeena jealously declares, “'I've kept her here a whole year: now it's someone else's turn'” (Wharton 49) when she announces that she will send Mattie away. If Ethan had not fallen in love with Mattie, then Zeena may not have wanted to send her away, resulting in an argument between the couple. If Ethan had not chosen to commit adultery, perhaps it would not have caused the conflict between him and his wife. Ethan's conflict with poverty and slavery leads to poor decisions based on feelings of petulance. Ethan's choice not to strengthen his relationship with his wife allows the story to grow when they argue for the first time. When it is revealed that “it was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years” (Wharton 48) the reader finally understands how they were not the best couple. They had never argued before, but they still don't act like spouses when they could have met and fallen in love. Not only the communication problems between the couple, but also Ethan's choice to stay and take care of Zeena. instead of going back to college, it ramps up the intensity. Ethan decides to stay and shoulder the burden of his family members and the farm. “'Someone had to stay and take care of the people. There was never anyone but Ethan.'” (Wharton 2) True, he had to take care of them, but he didn't have to marry Zeena and could have gone back to college. Unfortunately, because he decided to welcome her into the family, he was taken prisoner and had to live out the rest of his days with her at home. Both his choices to marry Zeena and not love her cause Ethan to have conflict with her and problems with the rest of his life. Ethan Frome's irony expands the reader's mind, causing them to have a deeper understanding of the decision-making process. It shows how decisions may not all be the best ones even when they seem so, and how the dramatic irony at the end makes the reader know that Ethan ruins his life by going down that hill. The irony also shows how Ethan himself is ironic as a character. The decisions he makes seem good at the time, but, ironically, they all turn out to be bad. It seems good for him to fall in love with Mattie because she was a good person, and when they were alone together, "he would like to stay... with her all night in the dark" (Wharton 19) because it seemed right to him that they should be together. Since he is in love with Mattie, Zeena's jealousy grows, plunging the couple into a tragic future. Mattie isn't just another person; she was also lively and just what Ethan needed in his life. Ethan was fascinated by Mattie because she was like the bright summer compared to Zeena's cold winter. When "[Ethan] kept his eyes fixed on [Mattie], marveling at the way her face changed with every turn of their chatter, like a cornfield under a summer breeze," (Wharton 38) he knew he needed the life in her that his wife did not have. If only he had tried to turn Zeena this way, then they could have been happy. Since he fell in love with Mattie, Ethan's life has been in ruins. In the last choice of the book, the reader mostly knows how it will end, so the dramatic irony reveals Ethan's true fate rather than the one he was seeking through the choice he makes. If he had only left Zeena when he had the chance, he would have had a better life. Ethan wrote, "Zeena, I've done all I can for you, and I don't see it being of any use... Perhaps we'd both be better off parting ways" (Wharton