"Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!" (Page 97, Williams) Throughout the novel, Ethan is strongly obligated towards his wife, Zeena. "Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn't ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his father-then his mother-then his wife." (Page 3, Wharton) Zeena's illness and his poverty problems crush his desire of ever being with Mattie, causing him to be "trapped" under all of the snowfall in Starkfield.
B-3 (Similarity).
Amanda Wingfield and Zeena Frome are both presented as the controlling figures in both novels.
Tom can't live his life without Amanda being in the way. Working to keep his family alive, he is realizing that doing so erases any further future for himself. "But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self-self's all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I'd be where he is-GONE!" (Page 23, Williams). Tom feels like Amanda is holding him back from fulfilling his full potential and ultimate happiness, and he desperately wants to escape this situation whether it be by going to the movies, or by leaving the scene altogether. Zeena acts like Ethan's worst nightmare, with no love and no respect, Ethan is trapped in a marriage that he can't say he's happy to be in. "All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others." (Page 65, Wharton). Being the overbearing women that she is, Zeena used her controlling advantages to take everything from Ethan, as well as threatening to cut off connection with Mattie.