Lev Raphael- prisoners of shame EFs story is one of disappointment, failure, powerlessness and shame. the physical burden is matched by an emotional chain, that silences, constraints his life: shame over a life of disappointment culminating in being trapped, and over his inadequacies as a man shame is the affect that causes him to hide. Shame is an impediment to speech. p.38: first glimpses of Fromes sience early roots of his shame and disappointment: quit technical college, death of his father ended the possibility of study, and escape from Starkfield. EF has no personal talents that can offer him even the fantasy of a better life. His life of isolation seems to change w. Mattie Silver. Matties story. Matties liberation is a kind of imprisonment, she has to pay for her fathers success and failure. Indentured worker Mattie is a pathway out of isolation for E., but she is also a source of shame. he does not feel special when he goes for her to the church dance. p.47 Frome: grave and inarticulate, envies gaiety in others. Mattie eases his shame he is jealous of dean and Mattie, and then he is jealous of his jealousy after the walk, censorious Zeena is waiting for him, he goes to the bedroom with lowered head shame as key element in his relationship with Zeena zeenas shame help him trap in starkfield (Look down on, p. 64) her power manifest in critical silence, but he is not reduced to complete powerlessness p.86 ethan spend one night w. mattie: balance between them changes: p 73,74 zeenas return triggers the first fight between them, lie of ethan, hale flushed, emabarrased shame keeps him from pleading an emergency helplessness when zeena announces she has hired a girl, he tries to shame zeena into keeping mattie. E is left weak and powerless and enraged: tells mattie the news, embarrassment discovery of pickle dish longing for escape, goes again to mr hale, talks to mrs hale, sympathy, shame for asling money. failed suicide twenty years without visit life of silence and constraint is a nightmare, in which shame has reduced human possibilities and human speech to an unbearable minimum. by suicide he longs for release of a life of failure and disappointment.

A VISION OF UNRELENTING INFERTILITY ETHAN Frome represents the failure of fertility and the insistent barrenness described throughout the novel suicide attempt prefigured in the smashed pickle dish. (zeena carried it as a dead body) the dead cucumber vine that makes Frome imagine Zeenas death and the pickle dish are symbols of a lost or past fertility. glass under the foot of a bride symbol of fertility, pickle dish only infertility. in the dinner, the picle dish and the pickles form of display are a display for the eroticized scene of the accident thet breaks the vessel of the young womans body and preserves her in infertility. the broken pickle dish and the breaking of the body of the young woman suffest the horror of fertility rituals gone awry. the narrators vision: the dish and the boy cannot be put together, but the story can form a whole and seamless narrative.