Question

Read the following passage from Edith Wharton's novel *Ethan Frome*:

"The Starkfield winters were what he feared most. When the shadow of the cold fell on the valley, it seemed to lock the hills in a silent grip from which there was no release. For six months the snow lay deep on the pastures, and the white drifts piled up against the farmhouse doors like the mounds of a graveyard. Ethan Frome had lived through thirty-three of these winters, and each one had left him a little more silent, a little more detached from the life of the village. The physical confinement of the farm, isolated at the end of a lonely lane, mirrored the confinement of his own thoughts. In the beginning, as a young man back from his studies in Worcester, he had believed he could escape the oppressive stillness of the hills. He had dreamed of laboratories, of cities where men spoke of science and progress. But the death of his father, followed by the long illness of his mother, had drawn him back to the soil. Then came Zeena, and the silence had settled for good. Under the cold, gray sky of Starkfield, his ambitions had shrunk to the simple necessity of endurance. The landscape was not merely a background to his struggles; it was the silent partner in his defeat, a force that slowly drained his willpower until he could no longer conceive of a life beyond the snow-blocked horizon. The hills, which in summer sometimes wore a deceptive look of peace, in winter became a prison wall, reminding him daily of the boundaries he could never cross."

Based on the passage, the Starkfield winter setting acts as a catalyst for Ethan Frome’s internal change primarily by doing which of the following?