Search

Starkfield. Fictional village in the hills of western Massachusetts’s Berkshire County, where Wharton herself lived for many years. Small and rural, Starkfield lives up to its harsh name. Though connected by trolley to the larger town of Bettsbridge—which has libraries and theaters—Starkfield is isolated and lonely during the long New England winters. The village has a post office and a Congregational church. It also has one mansion, Lawyer Varnum’s house, in which the narrator boards during his enforced residency in the community. The narrator refers to the “deadness” of the community only two pages after describing Ethan Frome as looking dead.

Hanaford. Fictional New England community supported by Westmore, its industrial suburb. Home to the Westmore cotton mill, Hanaford is the home of the mill owners and managers. Factory money provides them with country houses, gardens, servants, and entertainments.

A Chorus Line is both a celebration of and a tribute to the unheralded men and women known as gypsies, who make up the chorus lines of Broadway musicals. The show opens as twenty-four young hopefuls learn the dance routine that they will use in the final audition for a new Broadway production. As the lights come up, Zach, the choreographer and director, is teaching a jazz combination, followed by a ballet combination. Identifying dancers only by their numbers, Zach puts the dancers into groups to perform. He watches as they dance and sing “I Hope I Get It,” a musical number that reflects their insecurity and desperation. The number ends with all the dancers lined up holding eight-by-ten glossy photographs in front of their faces.

Adam of the Road is a quest tale in which Adam Quartermayne loses everything, only to regain it after successfully conquering the road and thereby reaching maturity. As the story opens, Adam is awaiting the return of his father, Roger Quartermayne, a successful minstrel. Adam has been in an abbey school for five months while Roger has been attending minstrels’ school. He is impatient for Roger’s arrival so that they can return to the road and the life of minstrelsy that Adam loves, but he is comforted by Perkin, his best friend, and Nick, his dog.

*Mohawk Valley. Region of what is now New York State surrounding the Mohawk River, which flows west from a point north of Albany to near Lake Oneida. Most of the action takes place here, but characters refer, usually disparagingly, to the machinations of politicians in Albany and Philadelphia, as well as other sites connected with the Revolutionary War, such as Fort Ticonderoga in New York and Connecticut’s Newgate Prison, a former copper mine used as a penal colony to hold Tories and Loyalists.