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TỔNG HỢP CÁC BÀI PHÂN TÍCH ROMAN FEVER HAY NHẤT “I Had Barbara”: Women’s Ties and Wharton’s “Roman Fever” The setting of Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever” (1934) is consciously casual. Two wealthy American widows with “time to kill” (10) sit chatting through the afternoon, on the terrace of a restaurant in Rome, overlooking the ruins of the ancient city. They have known each other off and on all their lives. Both have daughters who are presently out together with two eligible young Italian men, and the women recall their own courting days, also together, also in Rome. There is a risky edge to this talk because they had both been in love with the same man and knew it at the time. One of the women had been engaged to him, and duly married him, yet it is she, Mrs. Slade, who now asks herself, in relation to the other, “Would she never cure herself of envying her?” (17)—and who pushes the conversation forward with further questions. In its final pages, the story moves into high gear with the dis-closure, one after another, of three interlocking secrets from that time. Mrs. Ansley had received a letter from Delphin Slade inviting her to meet him one night at the Colosseum. The first thrust comes from Mrs. Slade,who declares that it was she, out of jealousy, who wrote that letter, in an attempt to trick her rival into a dangerous adventure. (Behind the strata-gem lay the story of a great-aunt who, by sending her sister out one cold night to the Forum “because they were in love with the same man” [18] had caused her death.) For Grace Ansley, this ruins the memory of “the only letter I ever had from him” (21), and Mrs. Slade’s triumph seems to be confirmed. But then—return blow—Mrs. Ansley reveals that the date did in fact take place (she had replied to the letter). Mrs Slade recovers from this with difficulty: “I oughtn’t to begrudge it to you, I suppose. After all, I had every-thing; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter he didn’t write.” (24) With perfect pacing, Wharton then completes the series of revelations and reversals, ending the story like this: Mrs. Ansley was again silent. At length she turned toward the door of the terrace. She took a step, and turned back, facing her companion. “I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway. (24) “I had Barbara” is the clinching shock announcement. We take it to mean, as must Mrs. Slade, that sex took place that night at the Colosseum and that Delphin Slade was the father of Barbara Ansley. The scandalous infor-mation then appears to sort out several doubts and suspicions that Whar-ton has carefully planted during the course of the narrative. Mrs. Slade envies Mrs. Ansley her bright, “dynamic” daughter Barbara and cannot understand how two such “exemplary characters” as Grace and Horace Ansley could have produced her (16–17); she, meanwhile, is disappointed in her own too perfect Jenny. Grace had been ill after her late-night “sight- seeing” (19) all those years ago, and she was “married to Horace Ansley two months afterward” (22). If Barbara is now shown to be Delphin’s daughter, then these anomalies seem to be cleared up: Grace was quickly married because she was pregnant, and Barbara is after all the daughter of the dynamic Delphin Slade. Grace Ansley’s punchline—“I had Barbara”—rounds off the series of blows initiated by her ancient rival. A final detail appears to con-firm that the relations between the two women have shifted, as Mrs. Ansley,previously seen as the more timid and passive of the two, “began to move ahead.” Thus, the battle that has taken place this present afternoon seems both to repeat and complete the one that occurred a generation before. Then, Alida had taken the initiative in attempting to punish Grace for her interest in her fiancé. She sent the fake letter that was meant to lead to a long, lonely wait at the entrance to the Colosseum, but in fact her action had had the effect of bringing about exactly what she was seeking to avoid, a rendezvous between the two potential lovers. Today, unaware of what hap-pened between Grace and Delphin as a result of her letter, Mrs. Slade has been continuing to attempt to control the future. Her renewed jealousy of Grace is prompted by a “prophetic flight” (17) in which she imagines Grace settled in grandmotherly contentment near her sparkling daughter’s family. It is this fantasy—“Would she never cure herself of envying her?”—that sets off the conversational prod that is meant to humiliate Grace once more but instead—and again as before—has the opposite result. When the story is reread in the knowledge of what is revealed at the end, many phrases seem to take on a second, confirming meaning that did not appear the first time. One of the girls is described as a “rare accident” (14). The two women are “old lovers of Rome” (11). Grace’s knit-ting collapses in “a panic-stricken heap” (20); “one, two, three—slip” (16) seems to point to a fall, not a pattern. Violence is everywhere: in “so pur-poseless a wound” (21), verbally inflicted, or in the “time to kill,” where the leisurely cliché now sounds openly murderous—time to kill. On the second reading, we see significance in the “mutual confession” (13) that first seemed only to refer to middle-aged women’s regret at the dullness oftheir lives in comparison with their daughters’. Great-aunt Harriet, who had sent her sister out to her death, “confessed it years afterwards” (18), just as Mrs. Slade owns up to her own attempt to follow the great-aunt’s example. Long ago, when she was the Ansleys’ neighbor in New York, Mrs. Slade had joked that “I’d rather live opposite a speak-easy for a change” (12): belatedly, the speak-easy’s double suggestion of transgression and confession has now turned the jibe against her. In going over the story again and finding hitherto unnoticed indications of what happened —the old story that the current story brings out—we are in the same position as the two women characters. They find themselves engaged in a process of reinterpretation and reconstruction as they go back over the events of twenty-five years before, as well as over their subsequent views of the other: “So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope” (14). Each haspartial and sometimes mistaken knowledge, and the present conversation brings out what had previously been hidden from both. Seemingly tangen-tial elements in the narrative also suggest, the second time, the need for this kind of reappraisal of the situation, by readers and protagonists alike. Mrs. Ansley concurs with her companion’s remark about the “beautiful” view of the Palatine from where they are seated: “It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter-writers. (10) On the second reading, we know, as Mrs. Slade has also found out, that there is more of a “me” in Grace Ansley than had been imagined. She did not initiate, but she did go along with, the illicit tryst with Delphin Slade. Also, the very idea of the “merely accidental” is discredited in this story: accidents happen not by chance, but in relation to particular designs and purposes that go wrong—both those in the past and those in the present conversation. “Like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter- writers”? After the first reading, we know that in this story there need be nothing random or simply decorative about an old-time letter like the one Alida Slade once signed with the initials “D. S.”; nor are old- fashioned ladies, like Great-aunt Harriet, as innocent or haphazard in their designs as might be thought. Whatever the truth of the “tradition” (18) of Harriet’s youthful misdemeanor, as a tale it was effective both as a deterrent—“Mother used to frighten us with the story,” says Grace—andas an example to follow, as Alida then did when “you frightened me with it” (19): Mrs. Slade’s characteristically conscious “stress on the ‘me.’ ” If the interpretation and use of stories is an issue within this one, there is also overt reference, by both characters and narrator, to confusions between different levels of language, making it difficult to know which elements are to be taken as central to a main story and which as “merely” metaphorical or accidental. “Well, I mean figuratively” (9), Barbara is heard to say to Jenny as the two depart; “figuratively” here refers to metaphorical knitting, which in fact is what Grace will literally be doing on the next page, though with additions of emotion and opulence that immediately detract from the bare fact: “Half guiltily”—another phrase that resonates differently on the second reading—“she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles” (10). Sliding into suggestion, literal knitting becomes ominous once more—“one, two, three—slip.”1 In New York, when their husbands were alive, Grace and Alida “had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years” (12), the two would-be contrasting adverbs thrust into the middle of an otherwise innocuous clause and raising a question about how, exactly, their meanings are to be understood. At one point, Mrs. Ansley takes up her knitting “almost fur-tively” and Mrs. Slade takes “sideway note of this activity”—as though fur-tive, or almost furtive herself, but also, in this story, as a matter of marginal uncertainty: only in light of the later revelations is it clear which gestures and which words need to be actively noted or interpreted. And at almost the end, when “[a] stout lady in a dust-coat suddenly appeared, asking in broken Italian if any one had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedecker” (23), she seems to be both a crazy diversion, a trivial distraction from the suspended drama, and also, equally, a comi-cally allegorical sideshow of the unraveling—“broken” language, broken guidebook—of previously settled stories of the ladies’ youthful past. Whether trivially touristical or highly serious—as always, in this story, both and either are possible—allusions to classical culture are scattered throughout “Roman Fever.” The letter from “Delphin” proves oracular in its production of a future event. The story’s setting above the ruins of Rome provides the backdrop for the emergence of long-buried stories and for the gladiatorial violence of Mrs. Slade/“slayed.” As in a Greek tragedy, Mrs. Ansley’s face shows a “mask” (20); at one point, she “looked straight out at the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendour at her feet” (17). In its own minor key, the story could even betaken as a modern version of Oedipus the King. As in Sophocles’ drama, what happens is not so much a new action as a conversation that, driv-ing to its painful dénouement, goes over ancient events, showing their significance to be quite different from what participants had imagined. Oedipus finds that a man he once murdered was his own father; that Polybus, the man he thought was his father, was not; and that Jocasta, the woman he married, was his birth mother. In “Roman Fever,” too, there is a revelation involving both illicit sexuality and mistaken paternity. The two families that “actually, as well as figuratively” “lived opposite each other” are in one sense the same family—more actually than “actually” first suggested—conjoined by girls who turn out to have the same father. In “Roman Fever,” the attempt to ward off a feared event precipitates its happening; and so for Oedipus, the fulfillment of the oracle that he shall murder his father and marry and have children with his mother is enabledby the successive attempts, by his birth parents and later himself, to avert it (the newborn baby is exposed and so does not know his own parents; the young man flees those he wrongly thinks are his parents, and thereby encounters first Laius and then Jocasta). To make such a grand comparison is perhaps to an injus-tice to “Roman Fever,” a story without such classical or universal affilia-tions—or destinies—as Sophocles’ Oedipus. For one thing, there is nothing at stake in the modern tale beyond the private concerns of two well-off, unoccupied women. In Oedipus, on the other hand, the inquiry that leads eventually to the discovery of Oedipus’s other history, his “true” identity, is initiated—by Oedipus himself—as a matter of social urgency: the city is suffering from a plague and the oracle has said that the person responsible for the pollution, Laius’s murderer years ago, must be tracked down. The strong point of likeness between the ancient drama and the modern story is that in each the action consists only of conversation and its accompanying emotions; words alone have the effect of changing the sense of past events and, thereby, of changing the characters’ understanding of themselves and their histories in the present time. It would also be possible, in different ways, to look at “Roman Fever” as a female version of the Oedipal paradigm. Freud adopted Sopho-cles’ drama as his literary template for thinking about children’s—essen-tially, boys’—development to adulthood, from early years of incestuous longings and rivalrous hatred out into the wider world of the culturalcommunity in which the loss of their princely uniqueness—“His Majesty the Baby” (“On Narcissism” 91)—was compensated by the adult privileges of a life beyond the confines of the first family. The girl had no comparable story; rather, in Freud’s attempts to consider her different development, she ended up only—at best—a misfit, forever unconsciously seeking the masculinity of which she was deprived. Feminists since Freud have regu-larly protested against this overt secondarization of femininity, but many, too, have understood the theory as a useful allegory of the difficulties of women’s psychological placement in a patriarchal society. In this context, “Roman Fever,” written quite literally from the women’s point of view, as Grace and Alida sit overlooking the valued remains of a violent masculine civilization, might seem to lend support to two different perspectives on women’s lives in a modern but age-old patriarchal culture. From the first point of view, Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade have both lived the conventional feminine lives of girl, wife, mother, and widow; their identities have been primarily in relation to husbands secured, thenlived with, then lost. Mrs. Slade was proud to see herself admired as “the Slade’s wife” (13). After the death of her husband and, prior to that, of their son, “[t]here was nothing left but to mother her daughter” (13), presented less as compensation for her losses (Jenny’s, too) than as a poor third choice. “[N]othing left but [. . .]” also seems to echo the ennui that has led to the two ladies’ spending the afternoon talking—the equivalent, on this particular day, of the third-choice outlet for unused energies. “[S]ometimes I get tired just looking—even at this,” says Grace; “Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet” (10). With nothing going on in their own lives—no one to tend—the women are jaded sightseers, and conversation is tediously time-killing before it turns violently lady-killing. The differences she thinks she sees from her “opposite” side cause Mrs. Slade to rank both herself and her marriage far above Grace and Horace Ansley, whom she dubs “two nullities” (12); but it is also stressed that the two women’s life stories have been virtually identical. They mar-ried, they had children, they “lived opposite each other,” their husbands died; now, “[t]he similarity of their lot” (13) has brought them back together. Their daughters are repeating or continuing the same old story of girls, in each generation, finding husbands. Within it, there are minor historical variations to with local conditions and the degree of restraint placed upon the young ladies, but it is essentially the same narrative that is likely to involve rivalry between two girls for the same man. Great-aunt Harriet is the most ancient version of this, and Alida takes it for granted that thesame thing is going on between her daughter and Grace’s right now.2 The lack of individuality that this entails is specified by Grace in response to Alida’s reaction to the mockery of the disappearing daughters: “That’s what our daughters think of us!” Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us indi-vidually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers.” (10) Later, this suggestion of historical determinations is elaborated and corroborated in Mrs. Slade’s version of maternal Roman history: “I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travellers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street.” (15) What looks like a semisociological objectivity in this account becomes less striking when it turns out that Mrs. Slade is about to provoke with “the spice of disobedience” (16) that drew girls out in their own generation. But still it remains true that both women think back through their mothers, and their foremothers’ daughters, just as their focus today is on their own daughters’ amorous adventures. This could be seen as further evidence of their subordination to the underlying patriarchal arrangements, in which mothers protect, more or less, and daughters escape, more or less, until the point where they settle down ready to repeat the story in a new form a generation later; but it also points to the other feminist perspective through which the female relationships of “Roman Fever” might be considered. For it could be said that far from being victims of men, collec-tively or individually, the women of “Roman Fever” are the drivers of the plots; it is they, not the husbands or boyfriends, who control what happens. No men appear in the present scene of the story, apart from unidentified waiters of another class and nationality than the protagonists, whose role is no more than to let the ladies sit on through the afternoon. The young Italian men with whom the daughters are spending the day feature only asthe presumed objects of the girls’ predatory desires: “[I]f Babs Ansley isn’t out to catch that young aviator—the one who’s a Marchese—then I don’t know anything” (16). In the past that the conversation brings up, Delphin Slade and Horace Ansley are given purely reactive or passive roles. Delphin goes to the assignation with Grace because he receives her reply to the letter sent in his name. Horace appears in several dual situations with his wife—one of “those two nullities,” “two such exemplary characters,” “just the duplicate of his wife” (12). Here, he has no distinctive character and no masculinity of his own; they are two of a dull kind, the second (“duplicate”) to her. At one crucial point, he is engaged in a doubly passive situation, after Grace’s unspecified “illness” when, according to Alida, “[a]s soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and mar-ried you” (22–23). Horace is merely the accessory groomed for a mother’s swiftly pragmatic arrangement of a daughter’s wedding; in fact, he is not even mentioned, so that the marriage appears, syntactically, to take place between mother and daughter alone. In this second view, it is women who call the shots, even if their sphere of influence remains that of the family and marriage.3 Fromgeneration to generation, what takes place is a female negotiation over men. There is also the suggestion that despite appearances, the primary relationships of women are not with men so much as with one another. Babs and Jenny go around as a pair. Alida and Grace “had been intimate since childhood” (12). They are introduced at the start of the story as a kind of dual subject: From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-caredfor middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its para-pet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval. (9) They move as one, they lean as one, and their expression is the “same” one. “Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years”: a cohabitation, figuratively if not actually, alongside their marriages. When, prior to the final exchange of secrets, the two fall silent, “Mrs. Ansley was slightly embarrassed by what seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy” (15). It is crucial, too, that the only declaration of love represented in the story is from woman to woman, the letter to Grace that was written by Alida. Division and rivalry are also part of this two-in-one, with the facing Upper East Side windows functioning like mirrors that both sepa-rate and join the two women as one and as two, self and image “opposite.”There are also the metaphorical distorting telescopes through which “these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end.” “You think me a monster!” Mrs. Slade bursts out after confessing to her writing of the precious love letter; but then a few lines further down, reflecting on Grace’s treachery in getting together with her fiancé: “Wasn’t it she who was the monster?” (22). Each woman projects onto the other the features dissociated from herself or exaggerates the assumed differences that make them so conveniently contrastable and comparable, like their supposedly divergent daughters. There is a further way in which the primacy of woman-to-woman relationships comes through as a buried possibility in this story. The closing “I had Barbara” appears, initially, to be dramatic and euphe-mistic shorthand for “Your husband was the father of my child”; it is a formally symmetrical riposte to “I had him for twenty-five years” (24). In the context of what has been said about Barbara’s unusual and emphasized “edge” and the doubt about “where she got it, with those two nullities asparents” (12), the line’s ultimate reference to paternity seems to explain a minor mystery as well as produce a personal scandal. Everything we have heard up to this point would suggest the likelihood of this other parentage, once it is mooted, while the whole argumentative force of the struggle between the two women seems naturally to come to an end with the decisive reversal. But what Grace Ansley actually, not figuratively, says is that she had Barbara. She does not say she had sex with Delphin on that night—or that Delphin is Barbara’s father. The simple meaning of her statement of motherhood escapes notice, is overlooked, because it is what we and the characters already know: sure, Grace had Barbara, Barbara is Grace’s daughter. Maternity is never in doubt; paternity has been, throughout the history of human storytelling, the question-generating status. This is what leads us as readers, and presumably Alida Slade as well (no reply is actually given), to interpret Grace’s announcement as supplying new information, clinching the story with the utterance of an age-old species of female secret. And to all intents and purposes, it makes no difference whether Grace meant to speak more than her words or not, since the dramatic effect is exactly as if she had: “She began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway” (24)— end of story. Yet, if we look again at the evidence that the closing statement seems to support, it turns out that it, too, involves elisions. For if Barbara is Delphin’s daughter, she is still, surely, Grace’s as well. So there is still, in Alida’s terms, a problem about how one of “two such exemplary charactersas you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.” Even more strikingly, no doubt is raised at all about the equally anoma-lous quiet daughter of “the exceptional couple,” the Slades (13). Dull Jenny has not only come from “the Slade” (13) but from a mother known for her “ ‘vividness’ ” (14): more than Babs, she has two inexplicable parents, not just one. While we may go with the rhetorical flow of the final sentences, it does not, on closer inspection, sweep away the kinship questions that the story has explicitly raised (in the case of Babs) and, following the same logic, suggested (in the case of Jenny).4 The story leads us to accept that a daughter should be “like” her father or “like” her parents. The missing connection, between her and her mother, could then be seen as the one surreptitiously supplied by “I had Barbara.” It turns out, then, that there may be more to the ambiguity of “I had Barbara” than a formal point about narrative undecidability. “I had Barbara,” in its lovely literalness, says nothing about a father; instead, itmatches a desirable daughter against Mrs. Slade’s boast of having had “him,” that husband or father. There is no second parent in view: in the singular, “I” had Barbara. In this sense, the hidden victory of “Roman Fever” goes to a same- sex bond and to the connection of mother and daughter elided and downgraded by paternal kinship relations.5 Yet the opposition between the known, literal mother and the inferred and doubtful father may seem, from another point of view, too neat an affirmation of what is itself a classically patriarchal division. “Pater semper incertus est,” as Freud puts it in his essay “Family Romances,” using the Latin legal phrase; and if the father is always uncertain, then the mother, at the other extreme, is superlatively certain, “certissima” (239). This is the distinction that comes, Freud argues, to enter into every child’s understanding of the relations between the sexes; and it is never abandoned, remaining the basis of adult thinking. Freud is individual-izing a theory put forward by nineteenth-century anthropologists, who saw a crucial and progressive turning-point in the alleged move made by primitive cultures from matriarchal to patriarchal thinking. This is how he puts it himself in Moses and Monotheism: [I]t came about that the matriarchal social order was succeeded by the patriarchal one— which, of course, involved a revolution in the juridical condition that had so far prevailed. An echo ofthis revolution seems still to be audible in the Oresteia of Aeschy-lus. But this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality—that is, an advance in civilization [Kulturfortschritt], since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypoth-esis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step. (113–14) This vaunted cultural progress comes about because bodily evidence is replaced by intellectual evidence, logically consistent (“based on an infer-ence and a premiss”) but necessarily fallible (no dna testing yet). It seems, at best, a shaky shift, confirming rather than canceling the fragility of fatherhood as a category. Read in its connotative sense, as we initially take it, “I had Bar-bara” succinctly combines a patriarchal logic (“he’s the father”) with the maternal self-evidence (“I gave birth to her”) that allegedly needs no proof. But it subordinates, as culture does, the obvious, “sensual” side, within theclosing logic of the story and the overt rivalry between the two women. In its maternal rather than paternal emphasis, “I had Barbara” goes without saying and therefore does not figure: it is what is already known and is thereby passed over in the context of the other available meaning.6 It is ironically apt, in this context, that the name Barbara originates in the feminine form of the ancient Greek word for the non-Greek, noncivilized “barbarian” or βαρβαρος. The barbarian was named for his (rarely her) incomprehensible language, sounding to Greek ears like a meaningless repetition (“bar . . . bar”); he did not enter into the community defined by its logos: logic, reason, and language. What Grace Ansley “had” was (in both senses) out of order—a wild child, as yet unassimilated to patriarchal civilization. Like any baby, but especially like any girl. There are other tensions concealed in the phrase “I had Bar-bara.” To begin with, “I” is apparently “I as opposed to you”: you had him for all those years, but Barbara is what I had. But it is also, obliquely, a claim to maternal autonomy: “I” not “we.” Here, both “fathers”—the likely biological one and the one who raised her—are dismissed from having had Barbara. Only “I” “had” her, even if an illicit paternity is also being asserted. But what does it really mean, even for a mother alone, to “have” Barbara or to have “had” Barbara? In this connection, the simple statement of maternity opens out into more than one possibility. “Having” a baby is what women at the point of birth; it is the specific point of separation.But Grace has also implicitly “had” Barbara for the twenty-five years that Alida “had” Delphin; the daughter represents a long-term affective tie, begun but not defined by giving birth. “I had Barbara” all that time: better than having had “him,” boy baby or husband. When I first read “Roman Fever” twenty-odd years ago, the less obvious because so obvious maternal meaning of “I had Barbara” seemed to me interesting mainly because of the way it could be used to illustrate the instability even of texts that seemed most tightly stitched together—actually as well as figuratively. “One, two, three—slip”: meaning was never so sure, nor destinies and pasts so safely patterned or predict-able, as they might appear. In this particular development, orderly in its own consciously dis-ordering fashion, a structuralist analysis la early Roland Barthes must needs give way to a more deconstructive openness to the misfit elements in a text: the theoretical emphasis was moving on, now allowing for movement and “give” in the object of study as well. A generation on from that moment, something else has hap-pened to the solely maternal meaning of “I had Barbara.” In light of developments occurring elsewhere than in theory, the statement has lost its apparent literal simplicity of contrast to an inferred, assumed, and dis-putable father. Today, single parenting can be seen and experienced as a positive choice, and many women are adopting children—for the most part daughters—on their own. The words thus acquire a different historical resonance, in relation to subsequent possibilities and patterns of mother-ing or having a daughter. No “prophetic flight” of Alida Slade’s, fearful or fantastic, could have seen these changes on the horizon; today, they may give Grace Ansley’s closing statement about her past the surprising twenty-firstcentury gloss of a different female future. notes In another way, the description of Grace’s luxurious bag opens up metaphorically onto the silky secret of something soft that was “run through” by two different thrusting instruments. Annamaria Formichella Elsden argues that there is a distinct progression for each successive generation of women. Mrs. Slade’s handling of the waiters is Whar-ton’s suggestion of how far (Amer-ican) women have come since the nineteenth century. Their daugh-ters’ repetition of the old story is only in Mrs. Slade’s projection; today they are flying high above the “bad air” of the old dangers of “Roman Fever” (malaria). “Even more than their mothers, Barbara and Jenny are able to take com-mand of the foreign environment” (123); “the accuracy with which Mrs. Slade reads the situation and the poise with which she manipu-lates circumstances indicate her independence and efficacy and allow her to get what she wants” (122). It is certainly true that we are told nothing of Babs and Jenny’s real relations with each other, their mothers, or their men, which leaves it entirely possible that there may be real differences from the previous generation. But we cannot know for sure. It is Mrs. Slade’s own attempts to “read” then react to situations, to “take command” or “manipulate circumstances,” both in the past and in the ourse of the present conversation, that form the story of her failures. sentimental (she does not like the moonlight [11]), but rather is hard ruthless, unloving, superficial and external. Mrs. Grace Ansley is smaller, paler, less sure of herself, of ‘her rights in the world;’ of Mrs. Slade, who considers her old-fashioned (10). She is the sentimental one, not the particularly bright, but once beautiful, loving, faithful, and inwardturning.” (189) 3. “While the first story is staid because rule-governed and classical in design and structure, and because it has order, proportion, simplicity, and harmony, the second is feverish because it is told only in erupting elliptical fragments, apparently unintended, disguised and displaced. The disorder and disruption of romantic excess - love, passion, risk, adventure, danger, and novels of romantic style - make it a ruin of classical design. The claim on our interest arises in this central conflict, which lies both in the plot and in the narrative structure.” (189) 4. “The conversation on the terrace, which we hear most of from Mrs. Slade’s point of view, resembles a power struggle; this struggle for the uppermost hand camouflages the emerging second story; it is a structure of hiding? Wharton’s ironic treatment of the verbal sparring of the two women serves to constitute the ‘point’ of the story, a point that covers the protected second story. Mrs. Slade repeatedly lays siege to the second story, without knowing there is one. Mrs. Ansely’s defensive fortification surrounding her secret takes the form of her hesitation to reply, her ‘forgetting,’ and her refusal to speak of her memories, misread by Mrs. Slade as an inability to have memories?” (190) 5. “Not without prior announcements, the second story comes into the first via devious disguises and displacements. It is its very illegitimacy that gives this ‘daughter’ of the first story the edge - that takes her out of the stuffy milieu to which she was born and hence grants her the ability to attract. It is the illegitimate birth of the second story that boxes our ears and fixes the story in our memory. The second comes in fragments, like cards falling on the table until the final trump; or like an offspring pushed unplanned from Grace as if by an aggressive midwife, Alida. It hovers in the symbolic darkness inside the Colosseum, like the child which forms hidden from view in the womb. It smolders in Grace’s fuzzy memory, her faint, faltering murmurs, her denials, her uncertainties, her disavowals, even her dropped knitting, which point to something to hide.” (192) 6. “Paired oppositions - two women, two daughters, American propriety and Roman passion, past generations and present - illuminate the tensions in the narrative construction between the staid, correct first story and the feverish, illegitimate second story. As I have suggested, the relation of the first story to the second parallels the relation between the middle-aged widows and their modern young daughters, a comparison that also extends backward to the mothers and grandmothers of the two protagonists. These generational moments are neatly connected with the literal and symbolic meaning of the words.” (192) 7. “For the young Grace, however, Roman fever meant not only catching cold, and not just the generic sentiment risk just described, but especially the secret physical passion she shared with Delphin Slade, which occurred at dusk in the dangerous Colosseum. Slade is the dynamo of the story, the only male character with a generative power; it is also suggestive that in his material life he rises to prominence and wealth because of his abilities and successes. Horace, on the other hand, is bracketed by irreproachability (12); too respectable to have contributed any life to the second story, he sows no sexual seed, remains sterile. Only Delphin Slade’s contribution, giving Barbara Ansely two fathers, produces the illegitimate second story. Just as Grace’s sexual act has remained camouflaged by respectability, the symbolic value of Roman fever as sexual fulfillment remains in the second story; it is never part of the conversation.” (193) 8. “The narrative insists, giving significant mental space to the daughters’ story, because of the feverish light reflects on the mother’s second story. The younger generation harks back to the old: the mothers are reminded about their first meeting in Rome, in their twenties, because their daughters are now in a similar situation. Mrs. Slade’s secret envy and hatred for Mrs. Ansely hatred is brought into focus by her comparison of the two daughters . Readers have been quick to say that Jenny and Barbara reproduce Grace and Alida, as young ladies competing for the same man. Barbara White for example suggests that the ‘veritable epidemic’ of jealousy extends o the daughters (9), but I think this rivalry between them exists mainly in the mother’s minds. I find Alida’s envy, though prompted in par by her pretensions for Jenny, has much more to with her past and continuing rivalry with Mrs. Ansley than any real rivalry between the daughters. It is Mrs. Slade who bitterly reflects that Jenny has cannot possibly win out over the brilliant, dynamic Barbara, just as Alida feared Grace’s sweetness and beauty . Nor does one daughter send the other away.” (194) 9. “If ‘Roman Fever’ is telling us precisely that sex did happen in the mothers’ generation, the “living, moving something” that makes the story memorable is the displacement of its avowal. The second story lies in the symbolic shadows of literal meanings. It displaces its sexual story onto the daughters’ free-flying courtship. It lurks in the multiple ideas of Roman fever– not just as an illness and not just as sentimental romance, but a camouflage of pregnancy and a euphemism of sex. The mechanisms of hiding reveal what they purport to hide: they are double. And because it pretends to censure an untellable, illegitimate story, this devious narrative claims space in our minds.” (194-95) 10. “To a large degree, the reader’s construction is already figured in the plot as I have shown: the story of illegal sex and pleasure, hidden passions, a bastard birth, etc., provides a thematic figure of the narration. Thus there are two moments in our reading. In the first we collect the bits of knowledge about events of the past, encoded in the language. The second story mode puts the reader in the position in seeking that particular referential knowledge and enhances our pleasure - but it endures only after the first reading, and then never returns.” (196) 11. “Like Alida, we as readers are in a state of partial misknowledge or misprision about the story until in a final blazing moment, which puts everything right in n instant, which validates the submerged impressions, the flaky layers of significance, the displacements and denegations in which our suspicions have until then floundered. Those ungrammaticalities of the first story are then satisfactorily explained by the second. In a roundabout way that is here shown to characterized a woman’s creativity, ‘Roman Fever’ stumbles to its striking conclusion and there ratifies the feverish art of the interpreter.” (197) Envy, Fear, and Destruction in Roman Fever Although it lacks the bloodshed and violence of Medea, Hecuba, and Titus Andronicus, Edith Wharton's Roman Fever is an ironic example of a female avenger piece. One needs only to examine one of the main characters, Mrs. Slade, to classify it in the genre. Mrs. Slade suffers from the deadly disease of jealously, a cliché hardly neglected in female avenger literature. She harbors an unending resentment for Mrs. Ansley, her childhood friend, because of a romantic rivalry that occurred years prior. When they by chance meet each other in Rome, she feigns friendship, all the while knowing the terrible (yet ironic) deed that she carried out against Mrs. Ansley years earlier. Yet she feels her revenge-the falsifying of a love letter from her husband to Mrs. Ansley-is incomplete until Mrs. Ansley understands it was she that wrote it. Only then will Mrs. Ansley truly suffer, for, as Mrs. Slade puts it, "all these years the woman had been living on that letter" (89). This work, primarily a satire on the childishness of the upper-class, holds strong associations with darker revenge literature like Titus Andronicus and Medea, because of the unnecessary vendetta Mrs. Ansley peruses. To classify Roman Fever in the revenge genre, it is necessary to rely heavily on Mrs. Slade's characterization. Her motive for hurting Mrs. Ansley is directly related to revenge. Aside harboring envy in the past because of Mrs. Ansley's love for Delphin and her "quiet ways" and "sweetness" (89), in the present Slade shares equal resentment over Mrs. Ansley's daughter, Barbara. Her daughter Jenny, as Slade describes her, "was that rare accident, an extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth and prettiness seem as safe as their absence" (81). Yet Slade feels that Jenny is "a little boring" (81) and envies the vividness of Barbara. She confesses that Jenny is a "foil" of Barbara, and has "no chance beside her" (83). The grand unrevealing near the end of the play-when it is disclosed that Barbara is actually the illegitimate child of Delphin and Mrs. Ansley-serves to reinforce the inner-connection nature of Slade's revenge. Both her grievances, unknownst to her, were interconnected; indeed, one even occurred because of her initial reaction to jealously. Wharton here brilliantly demonstrates the relationship envy shares with revenge. In this respect, Wharton has in many ways surpassed the "revenge" genre by devolving her story as a realistic critique of vengeance. Slade does not simply "avenge" but is symbolically "avenged upon" by fate, thus illuminating the destructive dimension of revenge. Yet another interconnection noticeable in Roman Fever is the relationship between fear and revenge. Slade admits that she forged the letter to Ansley because she felt threatened by Ansley, that she was "afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways, your sweetness .your .well, I wanted you out of the way, that's all" (89). The motif of fear is invoked subtly in her distress over Jenny's situation, when she mourns that "Jenny has no chance beside" (83) the liveliness of Barabara's personality when it comes to men. The fear of the darkness of night and "Roman fever"-metaphorical terms with certain sexual connotations-are mentioned persistently throughout the piece as a reoccurring motif. Thus Roman Fever is not only an excellent example of a revenge piece, but also a successful critique of revenge in its demonstration of the interconnection of envy, fear, revenge, and destruction. Analysis of Plot in Roman Fever By Philip Devitt Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever develops plot in an interesting way. We see the present situation unfold through the internal dialogue of Alida Slade and Grace Ansley, and the tension that mounts between them. But Wharton also weaves in the past actions of the two friends, showing the years of insecurity, jealousy, and secrecy that lead to their revelations. Alida and Grace spend the entire story sitting on a restaurant terrace overlooking the hills of a Roman village. It has been years since they have seen each other, but there is a building tension between them, subtle at first. When they discuss their daughters’ lives and the romanticism of moonlight, they realize how little they know about each other. We soon see that this tension has always existed between the supposedly intimate friends, as they sit in silence, each reflecting on their view of the other. Alida has always been envious of Grace. They both come from the same social class and had successful husbands, but to Alida, Grace always had something she didn’t. She called Grace and Horace irreproachable and entertained herself with the thought of them being raided. Even in her youth, Alida was jealous of Grace. The letter she forged from Delphin urging Grace to meet him at the Coliseum was motivated solely by her insecurity about her relationship. Long after being widowed, Alida finds herself envious of Grace for new, but similar reasons. She doesn’t like that Grace’s daughter Barbara is more assertive when it comes to men. She wishes that her daughter, Jenny, would fall in love and lead an exciting life, but she knows that Barbara will be the one who marries a wealthy man. Alida despises Grace's contentment with life as she quietly knits. Alida still clings to the prominence she had when her husband was alive, while Grace has learned to accept her new life. Grace’s reflection on Alida is much less detailed, but we see that she pities her and feels her life was "full of failures and mistakes." The first part of the story then concludes in a significant way, when we learn Grace has always felt sorry for Alida. At the time, we don’t know what exactly she is sorry for, but it foreshadows the twist in the plot to come. When the second part of the story begins, the present plot seems more defined now that we have been introduced to the past. The tension continues to build between Alida and Grace, and Alida becomes increasingly uncomfortable. It is obvious she still envies Grace, and she is in conflict with herself over whether she should tell her she wrote the letter. She says she "must make one more effort not to hate her." By revealing to her that Delphin never wrote the letter, and reminding her she could never have him, she could feel superior to her. For once, she could make Grace envy her. At this point in the plot, suspense is at its highest. We are left wondering for several minutes what "effort" Alida will make not to hate Grace, and as she reminds her of the story of her great-aunt, the tension between them reaches its breaking point. Alida says she can’t bear it any longer and confesses the truth to Grace. This moment builds in the present plot, but it is propelled by the events of the past. Alida makes her revelation thinking it will devastate Grace and shake her life to the core. To think for many years that the letter was from him, when in fact he never wrote it, was sure to take away from Grace’s happiness, Alida thought. But Grace’s revelation that Delphin responded delivers a blow to Alida instead. As Alida becomes dumbfounded by Grace’s response, Grace becomes the more dominant and assertive of the two. Eventually, she builds up the confidence to suggest Barbara resulted from her fling with Delphin. After many years apart, it seems a strange coincidence the two women would meet at the same place and time. But the improbability of this meeting does not hinder the plot. The setting is meaningful to them both-- a place filled with memories and simpler times, so it isn’t surprising they would meet there, of all places. If the setting had been somewhere such as a circus or the middle of the desert, their meeting would be a bit more random and hard to believe. But their history in Rome makes it conceivable. If anything, the setting propels the plot to pick up pace. The views of the Palatine and the Coliseums intensify Alida’s jealousy and rage, and the unbearable tension leads her to confess. Wharton’s inclusion of the past plot interspersed between the events of the present plot is an effective way to make the climax compelling. There isn’t one thing in the story that doesn’t have a purpose, as everything the ladies say to each other and feel about each other, tie in with the events of the past. But the surprise ending revealed by Grace in the last line leaves us with an indeterminate ending. Grace does not clearly state that Barbara is her daughter with Delphin, but it opens up the possibility. For many years, knowing Delphin was the one thing Grace could never have was what kept Alida from completely hating her. This irresolution leaves us wondering not only how far their relationship really went, but what effects it will have on Alida now that she knows the truth. Like "The Other Two" and "Autres Temps," Wharton's 1934 story, "Roman Fever" deals with its characters' perceptions of themselves and others, and their attitudes towards the past. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have been friends and rivals for years, living across East 73rd Street from each other. Brought together in Rome with their daughters, and looking out over a view of the Roman Forum, the two widows fall to reminiscing about the time they spent in Rome as young women, shortly before their marriages. Before long, the friendly talk takes a dark turn, and secrets long kept are revealed. • • • • • • • As their daughters leave them for the afternoon, to rendezvous with the young Italian men they have met, Mrs. Ansley says, "The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just looking — even at this." What does she mean by 'the new system,' and why has it left them as bystanders? Mrs. Slade envies Mrs. Ansley, but takes a condescending attitude towards her friend, thinking of herself as the social superior, whereas Mrs. Ansley she sees as hopelessly respectable, irreproachable, and a "museum specimen" of old New York. Do you think Mrs. Slade just sees what she wants to see in Mrs. Ansley? Mrs. Ansley, on the other hand, feels sorry for Mrs. Slade. Wharton writes that the two view each other, "each through the wrong end of her little telescope." Have their conceptions of each other blinded them to the realities of their personalities? Why does Mrs. Slade decide, after all these years, to confess that she wrote the letter that was sent to Mrs. Ansley, supposedly from her then fiancé Delphin Slade, asking Mrs. Ansley to meet him after dark at the Coliseum? Why hadn't Mrs. Slade even considered that Mrs. Ansley would have written back to Delphin, and that the two might have actually met that night after dark? All these years, she had believed Mrs. Ansley's rushed marriage to Horace two months later was an attempt to out-do her. Why could she not see the connection? Mrs. Ansley confesses that she has always known that Mrs. Slade hated her. Why have the two maintained this facage of friendship, with so much ill will behind it? Were you surprised by Mrs. Ansley's confession at the end of the story, or did you see it coming? Unfulfilled Expectations: An Essay on Edith Wharton's Roman Fever No matter what story is being read, a reader will always have certain expectations. Most stories build up certain expectations and fulfill them at the end. Yet, there are other stories that will carefully lull readers into a false sense of predictability only to surprise them with a twist. Roman Fever, a short story by Edith Wharton, is one of those stories that slowly raise the readers’ expectations only to complicate those same expectations. Wharton accomplishes this through her use of point of view and character in the story. “Roman Fever” is the story of two, middle-aged women reminiscing on what was and what could have been. Both women are widows with a beautiful daughter to keep them company past the death of their husbands. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley claim to be friends. In fact, the reader would almost assume the two were friends. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had known each other since their girlhood days, back before they were Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley, respectively. The two were married around the same time, gave birth to daughters around the same time, and lived across the street from each other for years. Readers expect the two women to be friends. Surprisingly, this is the first expectation that Edith Wharton manages to complicate. She does this, primarily, by using the point of view. The point of view is third person omniscient. This allows the reader the luxury of being able to see the characters’ thoughts and feelings. It is there, inside the heads of the two women, that the reader is able to see that the feelings they have for each other is not friendship. In fact, Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley seem to barely tolerate each other. On page 842, Mrs. Slade “reflected on how little they knew each other.” This is surprising to the reader. Gernerally, when two people have known each other for so long they should have some sort of intimate knowledge of the other. However, it is stated that it is quite the opposite. Both women “visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope.” (843). Characterization and point of view both work together to surprise the readers with the biggest twists in the story. This is when the reader finds out that not only did Mrs. Ansley have an affair with Mr. Slade, but Barbara Ansley is actually Mr. Slade’s daughter. The characterization, both physical and mental, of Mrs. Ansley makes this twist quite a shock for the reader. She is described as being “smaller” and “paler” than Mrs. Slade (841). This physical comparison places Mrs. Ansley as the more passive member of the friendship. She is quite beautiful but far too demure and slight to take attention away from the larger and more impressive Mrs. Slade. Mrs. Ansley’s personality also makes the affair seem quite outlandish. Mrs. Slade describes her “friend” as being “old-fashioned”, “irreproachable”, and a “nullity” (841 & 842). It is hard to believe that someone so boring and old-fashionedwould something so shocking as to have premarital sex with a man who was not single. The point of view also helps add to the surprise and shock of the revelation of Mrs. Ansley’s affair with Mr. Slade. Though it is third person omniscient, Mrs. Slade’s thoughts are far more over-powering. The reader is able to see everything the dramatic and lively Mrs. Slade thinks, while the demure and refined Mrs. Ansley seems to keep her thoughts to herself. Even when the reader gets a glance inside Mrs. Ansley’s head it is to comment on how she is unexpectedly composed or is struggling to keep her emotions in check. There is almost nothing in Mrs. Ansley’s thoughts that would suggest she had an affair with Mr. Slade. In fact, even the many glances into Mrs. Slade’s mind keep the reader confident that Mrs. Ansley would never out step the bounds of proper society. On page 842 Mrs. Slade wonders how the “dynamic” Barbara was born from “two nullities as parents.” However, when Mrs. Slade brings up this very question to Mrs. Ansley on page 845 she does not question Mrs. Ansley’s “lack of expression” when the woman responds to her question. In fact, Mrs. Slade thinks that Mrs. Ansley is so absorbed in her knitting that she has no time to reminisce (845). It is through Mrs. Slade’s opinions and assumptions that the reader makes his or her own opinions and assumptions. The ending is a surprise for everyone. Mrs. Ansley had no idea that the future Mrs. Slade had any idea that she was having an affair with Mr. Slade. Mrs. Slade had no idea that Mrs. Ansley would step out of her boundaries to something so interesting as to write back and, eventually, meet Mr. Slade at the Colloseum. Finally, what seems to be the largest shock in Roman Fever Is the unexpected origin of Barbara Ansley. The story Roman Fever is a brilliant work of literature. By focusing on Mrs. Slade’s thoughts and characterizing Mrs. Ansley as the weaker of the two, Wharton is able to tempt the reader into expect a cookie cutter ending without twists and turns. However, through her mastery of language, Wharton leaves the readers’ expectations unfulfilled. Topic: what are your impression of Alida and Grace? Who gets more of your sympathy? Find details to support your answer. In the 20Th century American literature, Edith Wharton was an outstanding novelist who wrote many short stories, the best of which is '' Roman Fever'', the story about two middleaged widows of the leisure class involved in a love triangle 25 years earlier; one is Alida Slade, and the other is Grace Ansley. The clear contrast of their characters gives me as a reader different impression, hence, different feelings. In fact, the author's skillful description of Alida's psychology throughout the story gives the impression that she is obviously subject to the passion of love and other love-related passion – jealousy, envy, hate and fear – the sentimental dangers. When a girl, she loved Delphin so passionately that she became jealous of Grace, the more beautiful lady, who also loved her fiancé, Delphin. Her envy toward Grace filled her with hatred for her opponent because she feared to lose him; therefore, she found every means to get rid of that woman. That is the reason why she wrote to Grace, requesting a rendez-vous in the Coloseum in the name of Delphin, in the hope that Grace would wait for Delphin there in vain and catch a '' Roman fever'', a fatal disease, her malicious stratagem against Grace failed beyond her expectation. Even after they got married, she still covered her hate for Grace by saying that the latter's house was a ''speak-easy'' to see it raided by the police. This time , in Rome again, she wants to humiliate Grace by letting-out the trick she played on her twenty-five years ago without knowing that it will boomerang on herself. In contract to Alida, Grace is free from all the sentimental danger committed by Alida though she was affected by the passion of love when she was a girl. She loved Delphin, Alida's fiance, and had a daughter with him after their love meeting in the Colosseum, but she has kept it a secret because she does not want to offend Alida. She only lets it out at the last minute when Alida wants to humiliate her. Her reaction is understandable because it is not revenge but self-defence. Her attitude toward her old friend throughout the story deserves our admiration. In short, the more I read the story, the more I hate Alida and admire Grace's dignity. In other words, through this story, Edith Wharton proves herself as a writer of a sure sense of psychology and is worthy of being called one of the best short-story writes in the 20th century. "Roman Fever" and "The Chrysanthemums" - A Comparison The two short stories have different characters, plot and setting and yet they have a common ground in which human beings are deeply involved. In short, the setting of each work powerfully suggests a rather calm, dull and peaceful mood at a superficial level; however, the main characters are struggling from the uncontrollable passions and exploding desire at heart. First of all, in "The Chrysanthemums" the Salinas Valley is depicted as somewhat dull, like "a closed pot." In addition, its geographical setting represents an isolated atmosphere, and, furthermore, Elisa's actions of handling chrysanthemums can be translated into a static, inactive one. However, when it comes to her concealed passion, the whole picture in this piece can be interpreted in a different way. In fact, Elisa is portrayed as "over-eager, over-powerful" in a sharp contrast to the unanimated space in which she lives. On top of that, Elisa expresses her volition to explore uncharted worlds like the peddler who happens to visit her farm house. Also, it must be noted that, even though Elisa does not reveal her desire openly largely due to the authoritative patriarchal system, Elisa's interior motive is directed toward the violent, bloody prizefights. In other words, the imbalance between the relatively restricted setting and Elisa's vaulting desire to wander into the unknown territory is chiefly designed to strengthen the overall imagery of Elisa, whose drive to experience the violent outer world. At the same time, it can be inferred that appearance (setting) and reality (Elisa's human nature) are hard to understand. In this regard, "Roman Fever" provides an exquisitely similar portrait. At first, there are various descriptions elevating a serene mood as follows: "diffused serenity", "the spring effulgence of the Roman skies", "the sky curved crystal clear" and "The corner .still shadowy and deserted." As shown above, readers are likely to be misled by a peaceful mood. Essay on Roman Fever The climax in " Roman Fever " by Edith Wharton appears at the very end of the story, however the author, she has prepaired subtly for this shocking ending by using a series of foreshadowdings and hints before reaching the climax. At the first part of the story, the foreshadowings mostly concentrates on Mrs. Ansley. When Mrs. Slade praised the Palatine for its beauty Mrs. Ansley assented" with so slight a stress on the 'me' "and a small break in the middle of the sentence: "It always will be, to me". And then the next "undefinable stress" on "remember": "Oh, yes, I remember". It's rather easy to notice, the author has hinted the readers that Mrs. Ansley must have had an important and forgetable event in Rome. (p.430) Then the author describes Mrs.Slade bag "as discreetly opulent looking as Mrs. Ansley's". We questioned that why Mrs.Ansley, a small, pale, easily-colored person can possess such opulent a bag which is as grand and impressive as Mrs.Slade who was depicted at the beginning of the story as a woman who is" fuller, higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous eyebrows". Whether Mrs. Ansley is a meek, gentle person? If we read carefully enough we would notice that in the opening of the story (p.429) Mrs. Ansley "drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk ." The crimson silk, its color, of course and obviously not suitable for a meek, womanly like her. That kind of color stands for victories and the yearn for victories. We can infer, though not much surely, that Mrs. Ansley is a kind of person who like to be the winner. Come back to the word "discreetly", we might probably feel that these two women have tried to keep up with each others inwardly. The readers would expect to learn more about the race triggered by the jealousy between them. The author foreshadows more clearly as the story goes along. The scene when Mrs.Slade's gaze "turned toward the Colosseum" (middle of p.434) is so meaningful. Already the sky has losed its "golden flank" and begins to turn into the "purple shadow", which foreshadows the something is coming to the end for it, an evil and immoral unidentified thing, would show its whole face in a "crystal clear" way. The picture of the conjunction between the afternoon and the evening: "It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven" also signals that there will be the conjunction or the exchange of secrets, revenges or something between Mrs. Ansley and Mrs.Slade. When Mrs. Salde said: "I was easily frightened because I was to happy. I wonder if you know what that means" followed by Mrs.Ansley faltering and Mrs. Slade's not explaining why she easily frightened when being too happy but coming back to the Roman Fever, Colosseum ., the readers would feel somehow Mrs. Slade had commited a crime, an immoral act before her marriage so that she feared to lose that happiness. With the tale of Aunt Harriet, we can guess that something rather like the tale would did occur again and involved these two genteel women, two" intimate friends "! After Mrs. Slade revealed her secret which much shocked Mrs.Ansley, the author conducts the readers to an small interlude describing the sky "emptied of all its gold, dusk spread over it,abrutly darkening the Seven Hills ". Though the natural atmosphere was dull, the there was "steps were coming and going on the terrace", waiters who began their work, "rearrange" tables and chair, "a feeble string of the electric lights flickered out" in the restaurant. However," the the corner where Mrs.Slade and Mrs.Ansley sat was still shadowy and deserted". That corner didn't have any light, even a "feeble" light to brighten and ease the tense, sorrow of the situation. The author wants to clue us that their "friendship" could never be as it had been or its furture, its ending would be as dark and full of dusk as the sky at that time. I think that this story is best exemplified for the subtle plotting style of Edith Wharton by using the foreshadowing. It makes the story seem to be rather tedious with one who reads carelessly and interesting with one who can find out the hint, the figurative meaning of each word, each line of the author. The foreshadowing, in my opinion is very suitable for writing about the aristocracy for it can describe deeply the mean battles under the stable, polite and genteel facade between the upper-class people Warning!!! All free online essays, sample essays and essay examples on any writing topics are plagiarized and cannot be completely used in your school, college or university education. ROMAN FEVER Plot Summary The story opens with two middle-aged American ladies enjoying the view of Rome from the terrace of a restaurant. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have been lifelong friends, thrown into intimacy by circumstance rather than by true liking for each other. They first met as young ladies vacationing in Rome with their families, and they have lived for most of their adult lives across the street from each other in New York. Now, in the 1920s, they find themselves again in each other’s company. Both are spending the spring in Rome, accompanied by their daughters, Jenny Slade and Barbara Ansley respectively, who are roughly the same age. Jenny is safe and staid, unlike her mother. Barbara is vivid and dramatic, apparently unlike either of her parents. When Jenny and Barbara leave to spend the day with Italian aviators, Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley wile away the afternoon on the terrace overlooking the ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum, chatting and remembering old times. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have in some ways led parallel lives. Besides living in the same New York neighborhood, they both became widows at approximately the same time. Mrs. Slade, the widow of a corporate lawyer, finds her new life dull, without the excitement of entertaining and going on business trips. She believes that Mrs. Ansley cannot find life as dull, because her life has never seemed interesting in the first palce. In Mrs. Slade’s eyes, Mrs. Ansley and her husband represented “museum specimens of old New York.” However, Mrs. Ansley believes that Mrs. Slade must be disappointed with her life. Toward the end of the afternoon, Mrs. Slade remembers how Mrs. Ansley became sick during the winter that they spent in Rome when they were young. Although at that time of year people no longer caught malaria, or Roman fever, the dampness and cold night temperatures could still make people quite sick. Mrs. Slade recalls how Mrs. Ansley became seriously ill after going to the Colosseum after sunset one evening. Mrs. Ansley seems to have a hard time remembering this event, but Mrs. Slade reminds her of the details. Suddenly, Mrs. Slade, wanting to hurt her friend, bursts out that she must tell Mrs. Ansley that she knows why Mrs. Ansley went to the Colosseum that night. Mrs. Slade then recites the contents of a letter asking Grace [Mrs. Ansley] to meet Delphin Slade (then the fiance of Alida [Mrs. Slade]) at the Colosseum. When Mrs. Ansley wonders how Mrs. Slade could know the contents of the letter, Mrs. Slade confesses that she had written it. She had been afraid that Grace [Mrs. Ansley], who was in love with her fiance, would win Delphin away from her. She hoped that Grace would catch cold, and so be unable to be involved with Delphin for a few weeks until she (Alida/Mrs. Slade) could be more sure of Delphin’s affections. But she never thought that Grace would get so sick. Mrs. Ansley is upset by the revelation because it represents the loss of a cherished memory; as she says, “It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn’t write it?” Mrs. Slade realizes that Mrs. Ansley still cares for Delphin, although Mrs. Ansley claims to cherish only the memory. Mrs. Slade says that she wishes she hadn’t told her friend about the letter, but she defends her actions by saying that she didn’t believe Grace (Mrs. Ansley) had taken Delphin so seriously, since, after all, Grace had married Mr. Ansley just two months later, as soon as she left her sick bed. After a pause, Mrs. Slade says that she sent the letter as a joke; she remembers how she spent the evening laughing at her friend, waiting in the dark by the Colosseum. Mrs. Ansley surprises her companion by saying that she didn’t wait, that Delphin had arranged everything and that they were let into the Colosseum immediately. Mrs. Slade accuses Mrs. Ansley of lying, wondering how Delphin would know that Mrs. Ansley was waiting for him. Mrs. Ansley says that she answered the letter, and that she is sorry for Mrs. Slade because Delphin came to her that night. Mrs. Slade responds by saying that she doesn’t begrudge Mrs. Ansley one night; after all, she had Delphin for 25 years and Mrs. Ansley had only a letter that Delphin didn’t write. Mrs. Ansley has the final word: “I had Barbara.” Characters Barbara Ansley Barbara Ansley is the brilliant and vivacious daughter of Mrs. Ansley. Barbara and her mother are vacationing in Rome with their neighbors, Mrs. Slade and her daughter Jenny Slade. Barabara and Jenny are away spending time with some Italian aviators during the story’s conversation between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Slade envies Mrs. Ansley for her brilliant daughter. During the course of this conversation, Mrs. Ansley reveals to Mrs. Slade that Barbara is the daughter of Mrs. Slade’s late husband, Delphin. Grace Ansley Mrs. Grace Ansley, a middle-aged widow, is a wealthy New Yorker who is vacationing in Italy with her daughter Barbara, and her neighbor Mrs. Slade, and her daughter Jenny Slade. In Mrs. Slade’s opinion, Mrs. Ansley has led a staid, uneventful life. Although she presents the picture of the proper middle-aged widow, for instance, knitting and looking at the Roman view, her calm exterior hides a secret past. As a young lady in Italy, Grace (Mrs. Ansley) fell in love with Alida’s (Mrs. Slade’s) fiance, Delphin. However, after meeting him one night at the ruins of the Colosseum, she had become quite ill. When she rose from her sickbed, she immediately married Mr. Ansley. Despite her marriage to Mr. Ansley, she has always nursed the memory of her evening with Delphin, and the letter he had sent her. When Mrs. Slade reveals that she, in fact, sent the letter, not Delphin, Mrs. Ansley’s fantasy is destroyed. She, in turn, reveals to her friend an even more devastating secret: that her dynamic daughter, who Mrs. Ansley has long noted is so different from either of her parents, is in fact Delphin’s daughter. Alida Slade Mrs. Alida Slade, a middle-aged, wealthy, New York widow, is vacationing in Italy with her daughter Jenny, her neighbor Mrs. Ansley, and her daughter Barbara Ansley. The wife of a famous corporate lawyer, Mrs. Slade found her married days filled with excitement and adventure. She prided herself on being a charming entertainer, a good hostess, and a vibrant woman in her own right. After the death of her husband Delphin, Mrs. Slade finds life dull, with only her daughter to divert her; however, Jenny is quiet and self-sufficient. Mrs. Slade feels both superior to and envious of her lifelong friend, Mrs. Ansley. She also has been nursing a decades-long resentment against Mrs. Ansley, for falling in love with Delphin when Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade were both young ladies on vacation in Italy. Afraid that Grace (Mrs. Ansley) would steal away her fiance, Alida (Mrs. Slade) sent Grace a note, signing Delphin’s name. When Grace went to meet Delphin, she became quite ill. During this trip to Italy, Mrs. Slade, wanting to hurt her friend even after all these years, confesses to Mrs. Ansley that she, not Delphin, sent the letter. Mrs. Slade immediately regrets her action, and she can’t help but feel sorry for her friend, after she sees how Mrs. Ansley has cherished the memory of that letter. When Mrs. Slade expresses this feeling, however, Mrs. Ansley shocks her with the revelation that Barbara (the daughter of Mrs. Ansley) is Delphin’s daughter. Delphin Slade Although Delphin Slade is dead at the time the story takes place, he remains a prominent figure in the minds of both his wife and his former lover, Grace (Mrs. Ansley). The story hinges on his past actions. As a young man, while engaged to Alida (Mrs. Slade), Delphin met Grace at the Colosseum one night and fathered Barbara. This secret has been concealed from his wife for the past 25 years. Jenny Slade Jenny Slade is the quiet, staid, self-sufficient daughter of Mrs. Slade. She is accompanying her mother to Rome along with Mrs. Ansley and her daughter Barbara Ansley. Jenny and Barbara are away spending time with some Italian aviators during the story’s conversation between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley. Themes Friendship Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have been friends since they first met as young women in Rome, when Alida (Mrs. Slade) was engaged to Delphin Slade. This friendship forms the enduring tie between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley. However, their friendship is undercut by the deeper, hostile feelings they have for each other, feelings that they hardly dare to admit. Because each has something to hide about the early days of their friendship, they have not been honest with each other in their friendship. In addition, their friendship has not been very intimate, despite their similar backgrounds and close proximity to each other on same street in New York. Mrs. Slade, in particular, strongly dislikes Mrs. Ansley, because of Mrs. Ansley’s love for Delphin. She has made fun of Mrs. Ansley to their mutual friends, and she believes that Mrs. Ansley has led a much duller life than she and Delphin. At the same time, however, she cannot shake her envy of Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Ansley, on the other hand, believes that “Alida Slade’s awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks.” She also believes that Mrs. Slade must be disappointed with her life, alluding to undisclosed failures and mistakes. The competitive nature of their friendship reaches a climax one afternoon in Rome. As Mrs. Slade views the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome, she cannot help but remember the anger she felt at Grace’s (Mrs. Ansley’s) love at the time for her fiance. She confesses, after 25 years, that she had lured Grace to the Colosseum by forging a note from Delphin. Mrs. Ansley’s repsonse to this confession that Barbara is Delphin’s child completely alters the relationship between the women. Rivalry Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have been rivals throughout their long friendship. Sometimes this rivalry is expressed subtly, as when Mrs. Ansley says that the view upon the Palatine ruins will always be the most beautiful view in the world “to me,” as if she alone is privy to the glories of Rome. Sometimes the rivalry is expressed directly through the women’s thoughts. For example, Mrs. Slade compares herself directly to Mrs. Ansley. She believes that her widowhood is more difficult than Mrs. Ansley’s widowhood, for she had led a full, active life as the wife of an international corporate lawyer, while Mrs. Ansley and her husband were more of “museum specimens of old New York,” or in even less kind terms, “nullities.” Mrs. Slade also admits to envying her friend, a habit that she developed long ago. The cause of this barely acknowledged rivalry becomes clear as the story develops. Mrs. Slade has never gotten over the fact that Grace (Mrs. Ansley) had fallen in love with her fiance Delphin Slade, and had gone to the Colosseum to meet him. The rivalry between these women runs very deep. At one point, Mrs. Slade implies a desire for her friend’s death. When she brings up their past adventures in Rome, she refers to Mrs. Ansley’s great aunt, a woman who sent her sister to the Forum because they were in love with the same man — the sister caught malaria that night and died. Love and Passion Mrs. Slade considers herself more dramatic and passionate than Mrs. Ansley. She believes that she had contributed as much as her husband to “the making of the exceptional couple they were.” She also values the quality of being dynamic, and admits that she has “always wanted a brilliant daughter.” However, neither Mrs. Slade’s words nor her actions seem to reveal great depths of love or passion she felt for her husband or her daughter. Her greatest passion seems to have been for her late son, whose death made her feel “agony.” But she blocks out this feeling, because the “thought of the boy had become unbearable.” Finally, the life that Mrs. Slade now leads seems to be one of order, even if she does not embrace such order. Ironically, Mrs. Ansley emerges as the more passionate of the two women. Although she seems to be involved in more mundane activities, such as knitting and playing bridge, her revelation of the night that she spent with Delphin at the Colosseum demonstrates that she is capable of hidden depths of passion. Living across the street from Delphin for twentyfive years and raising his child suggest that she is capable of enduring love as well. Style Setting “Roman Fever” is set in Rome, Italy, around the mid-1920s. On the one hand, the ruins of Rome become the focus of Wharton’s skill at descriptive writing. On the other hand, the ruins of Rome remind both women of an earlier time spent in Rome together when their friendship and rivalry both began. More generally Wharton shows the kind of life a woman of independent means could lead in Rome at that time. The setting of Rome is contrasted with the home neighborhood of the two women on Manhattan’s East Side in New York. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have lived across the street from each other so close that each woman knows all the mundane details of the other’s everyday life. But this setting is too confining to allow them to communicate their true feelings. It is only in Rome that Mrs. Slade feels able to reveal the truth to Mrs. Ansley. Point of View The story is told from a third-person, omniscient point of view. This means that readers see and hear what the characters see and hear, and that readers are also privy to their thoughts. However, in this case, the interior life, motivations, and reactions of Mrs. Slade are revealed to a greater extent than those of Mrs. Ansley’s. For example, readers know that Mrs. Slade decides to tell the truth about the letter Delphin was supposed to have written 25 years ago because she is envious of her rival and dislikes her, though at the same time she believes she is a good person. Readers also know that she regrets her words after she has said them. On the other hand, not much is revealed about Mrs. Ansley’s motivation. Readers not know, for instance, why Mrs. Ansley decides to reveal the truth about Barbara’s parentage. Structure Although the story is relatively brief, it is divided into two sections. The first section provides the background and history of Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley. The second section develops the theme of the rivalry between the two women, concluding with the truth about Barbara’s parentage. The two parts also represent the past and the present. In the first part of the story, Mrs. Slade notes Mrs. Ansley’s odd emphasis on the personal pronoun me when she talks about the view of Rome from the terrace. She also notes Mrs. Ansley’s emphasis on the personal pronoun / when she says “I remember” in response to Mrs. Slade’s comment about the summer they spent in Rome as girls. Although Mrs. Slade attributes this emphasis to Mrs. Ansley’s being old-fashioned, the emphasis really alludes to Mrs. Ansley’s fond memories of the time she spent with Delphin. In the second part of the story, Mrs. Slade’s musings show that she is gearing up toward something more significant than a simple conversation about malaria. At one point, she watches Mrs. Ansley knitting and thinks, “She can knit — in the face of this!” The reader wonders what thisrefers to, since up to this point the women are simply having a casual conversation about the past. Symbolism and Imagery Wharton makes use of a number of symbols and images to reinforce the emotions of the story. The ruins that the two women are gazing at of the Palatine, the Forum, and the Colosseum symbolize the ruins of these women’s perceptions of themselves and each other. Mrs. Ansley calmly knits, which would seem to be the staid activity of a middle-aged woman, but what she is knitting is described as “a twist of crimson silk.” Her knitting can be said to represent the passionate and more frivolous side of her nature. Also, the women’s actions can be viewed symbolically, to indicate their feelings toward the conversation and each other. As soon as Mrs. Slade starts to talk about their shared past, Mrs. Ansley lifts her knitting “a little closer to her eyes,” thus shielding herself and her reactions from Mrs. Slade. However, when Mrs. Slade learns that Mrs. Ansley did meet Delphin at the Colosseum, it is Mrs. Slade who must cover her face and hide her deepest emotions. In fact, by the end of the story, the power structure has changed, as shown by Mrs. Ansley’s actions. After revealing the truth about Barbara’s father, she “began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway.” "Roman Fever" is among Edith Wharton's last writings and caps off her noteworthy career. "Roman Fever" was first published in Libertymagazine in 1934, and it was included in Wharton's final collection of short stories, The World Over, in 1936. Several reviewers of this final collection from newspapers and magazines throughout the nation called special attention to "Roman Fever." Since then, however, the story has received little critical attention. The few critics who have written about the story describe it as artistic, complex, and reflective of Wharton's moral landscape. "Roman Fever," however, is frequently included in anthologies, both of Wharton's work and of American literature, and this may be a better indicator of its value as worthwhile literature than its critical history is. The story, at first, seems to be little more than a tale about the nostalgic remembrances of two middle-aged women revisiting Rome. Yet the tone of both the outer and inner dialogue shows a deep-felt animosity between the two women. The more outgoing Mrs. Slade is envious of Mrs. Ansley's vivacious daughter and jealous of her past love for Mrs. Slade's husband. The final sentence of the story reveals that Mrs. Slade has a valid reason for her feelings of competition with Mrs. Ansley though she only learns of it after years of ill-feeling. Some readers may find this final sentence to be a trick ending, on par with those of Saki or O. Henry. But a close reading of "Roman Fever" shows that Wharton carefully crafted her story to lead up to that exact moment of truth. Wharton's fine construction indeed makes "Roman Fever" one of her greater works of short fiction. Interpreting Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever" Definitive criteria for judging the success or failure of a work of fiction are not easily agreed upon; individuals almost necessarily introduce bias into any such attempt. Only those who affect an exorbitantly refined artistic taste, however, would deny the importance of poignancy in literary pieces. To be sure, writings of dubious and fleeting merit frequently enchant the public, but there is too the occasional author who garners widespread acclaim and whose works remain deeply affecting despite the passage of time. The continued eminence of the fiction of Edith Wharton attests to her placement into such a category of authors: it is a recognition of her propensity to create poignant and,indeed, successful literature. The brevity of her "Roman Fever" allows for a brilliant display of this talent?in it we find many of her highly celebrated qualities in the space of just a few pages. "Roman Fever" is truly outstanding: a work that exposes the gender stereotypes of its day (1936) but that moves beyond documentary to reveal something of the perennial antagonisms of human nature. From the story's first sentence, upon the introduction of two women of "ripe but well-cared-for middle age," it becomes clear that stereotypes are at issue (Wharton 1116). This mild description evokes immediate images of demure and supportive wives, their husbands' wards. Neither woman is without her "handsomely mounted black handbag," and it is not until several paragraphs into the piece that Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley even acquire first names (1117). Thus, without even disclosing any of the ladies' thoughts to the reader, Wharton has already revealed a great deal of their personal worlds. They live in a society which expects women to act largely as background figures, thoroughly engaged with furthering their husbands' careers and the constant struggle to remain pretty. Indeed, little else is desired or even tolerated?and Grace Ansley and Alida Slade appear, at first glance, to conform to this image perfectly. As the workings of the characters' minds are revealed, the extent to which they have internalized these values becomes apparent. Each, in their brief description of the other, mentions that her acquaintance was quite beautiful in her youth. Alida recalls how much she enjoyed having been married to a famous lawyer; she misses being "the Slade's wife" (1119). Startlingly, now that their husbands are dead, we find that the women consider themselves to be in a state of "unemployment" (1118)! But just as it begins to seem as if these women have wholly adopted their societally prescribed personas, one begins to see deviations from the stereotype. "Alida Slade's awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks," decides Mrs. Ansley (1119). One had begun to expect these "ripe but well-cared-for" women capable only of suitably "feminine" mediocrities, but this comment reveals an insightful intellect hidden beneath the personality's surface. Mrs. Slade, worrying that Mrs. Ansley's daughter "would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligible Campolieri," and concerned that her own daughter may be serving "as a foil" for the young Ansley's beauty, reveals the grim seriousness with which a woman was forced to take marriage (1121, 1120). One begins to realize the lengths to which females put themselves in order to conform to a decidedly cartoonish gender role as Wharton begins to expose the shortcomings and paradoxes of this sexual stereotype. The story's climax?Mrs. Slade's confession of forgery and Mrs. Ansley's shocking announcement?delivers the coup de grace to society's outmoded impositions upon females. The myth of sedate and subservient women is exploded as one realizes them fully possessed of those traits previously held to be the exclusive property of men: cunning, ruthlessness, and deceit. Wharton's story is groundbreaking in its presentation of two female characters who are not defined, first and foremost, by their sex, but by their species. "Roman Fever" allows its women to be human, but, alas, all too human. Here, however, is the reason behind the piece's continued success. Not content with simply an expose of the tribulations of her times, the author has infused the story with an ageless significance. Grace and Alida, the two ladies who "had live opposite each other?actually as well as figuratively?for years," serve also as symbols of the ongoing conflict between those two fundamental divisions of the human psyche: introversion and extroversion (1118). Alida Slade, the "fuller and higher in color" of the two, is outgoing and excitement loving, a classic extrovert (1117). Few social nuances escape her notice, and she always looked forward, when married, to "the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad" (1119). She finds life as a widow so dull that she wishes her daughter would fall in love, "with the wrong man, even," simply so "that she might have to be watched, outmaneuvered, rescued" (1119). Grace Ansley, "the smaller and paler one," on the other hand, is a much more solitary, introverted figure (1117). She is "less articulate than her friend," and her lack of overconcern for others can be seen in her "mental portrait[s]," which are "slighter, and drawn with fainter touches" than Mrs. Slade's (1119). Indeed, she is sufficiently withdrawn into her thoughts that even as Mrs. Slade begins to steer the conversation to a discussion of that fateful night when Mrs. Ansley went to the Colloseum, we find that "the latter had reached a delicate point in her knitting." "One, two, three?slip two," is her only initial comment (1120). Wharton's treatment of this theme is fascinating and insightful. We find that Mrs. Slade, despite her dismissal of Mrs. Ansley as "tame and estimable," chides herself for the fact that she will "never cure herself of envying her" (1118, 1121). Mrs. Ansley, furthermore, regards Alida's life as "full of failures and mistakes" (1119). Mrs. Slade has imagined for years that her letter-forging scheme successfully removed Mrs. Ansley from competition for Delphin, but we find that, in reality, in backfired upon her in the worst of all possible ways. Ultimately it is Grace Ansley, the more reserved of the two, who has the last word and who suffers the smallest defeat. The author's interpretation of the conflict between outgoing and solitary personalities amounts to the defusing of another myth. Mrs. Slade, precisely because of her gregarious nature, is wholly dependent on society to find enjoyment in life. Alone and in her middle age, she is constantly observing others to glean their view of her. Despite her self-confident ways, she is trapped within the traditions of society and is thus the more conventional of the two. Mrs. Ansley is revealed as a character who has become self-dependent and able to overcome societal pressures. Grace, with her knitting needles and quiet demeanor, establishes the introvert as the more radical character. "Roman Fever," then, is a work deserving of its place among acclaimed literature. Its brevity, rather than stifling artistry, serves instead to showcase the skill of an adept author. It is a multifaceted story and will doubtless continue to be enjoyed by future generations. Works Cited Wharton, Edith. "Roman Fever." 1936. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Lexington: Heath, 1994. 1116-1125. [...]... when she wrote "Roman Fever. " Critical Responses to "Roman Fever" See also the current bibliography on short stories and the bibliography on "Roman Fever. " The following summaries and quotations provide a sample of the critical perspectives on this story Bauer, Dale M “Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever : A Rune of History.” College English 50.6 (1988): 681-692 Bauer’s “Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever : A Rune... Case of Roman Fever. ” Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe New York: P Lang, 1993 313–31 Susan Elizabeth Sweeney's “Edith Wharton’s Case of Roman Fever looks at the meaning of the title of Roman Fever as both ironic and autobiographical Sweeney takes care throughout the article to provide both and explanation of the title within the historical context of Rome and the fear of Roman fever, ... popular success, and Roman Fever, one of Wharton’s most widely anthologized stories However, the most profound difference between Roman Fever and ‘Daisy Miller’ is that, in Wharton’s story, experiences prohibited to women are textual as well as sexual.” (319) 5 Roman fever was the punishment for disobedience in the cautionary tale that Grace Ansley’s mother told her, and roman fever, apparently,... behavior.” (328) 10 “In its allusion to romance, romans, and the seductive dangers of Rome, Roman Fever poignantly expresses Wharton’s complicated feelings about forbidden carnal and literary knowledge By articulating her anxiety, she transformed it into art.” (328) Mortimer, Armine Kotin “Romantic Fever: The Second Story as Illegitimate Daughter in Wharton’s Roman Fever. ’” Narrative 6.2 (1998): 188-98... story, Roman fever symbolizes the passion that drives the plot This passion manifests itself in the Colosseum tryst between Grace Ansley and Delphin Slade and in Alida Slade's long-suppressed enmity for Grace and jealousy of Grace's daughter Grace and Alida as Victims of Roman Fever Grace developed Roman fever figuratively when she burned with love for Alida's fiancé, Delphin Alida developed the fever. .. roundabout way that is here shown to characterized a woman’s creativity, Roman Fever stumbles to its striking conclusion and there ratifies the feverish art of the interpreter.” (197) Envy, Fear, and Destruction in Roman Fever Although it lacks the bloodshed and violence of Medea, Hecuba, and Titus Andronicus, Edith Wharton's Roman Fever is an ironic example of a female avenger piece One needs only to... and "Roman fever" -metaphorical terms with certain sexual connotations-are mentioned persistently throughout the piece as a reoccurring motif Thus Roman Fever is not only an excellent example of a revenge piece, but also a successful critique of revenge in its demonstration of the interconnection of envy, fear, revenge, and destruction Analysis of Plot in Roman Fever By Philip Devitt Edith Wharton’s Roman. .. regard, "Roman Fever" provides an exquisitely similar portrait At first, there are various descriptions elevating a serene mood as follows: "diffused serenity", "the spring effulgence of the Roman skies", "the sky curved crystal clear" and "The corner still shadowy and deserted." As shown above, readers are likely to be misled by a peaceful mood Essay on Roman Fever The climax in " Roman Fever " by... Roman gladiators in ancient Rome He discusses the mixture of Roman and pagan vales with that of Christian ideals, which present themselves in the passions of the women in this story Berkove closes the article by examining Wharton’s view of women as being not necessarily morally superior to men in that deception and lies are at the center of the character’s relationship in Roman Fever. ” 1 “ Roman Fever, ’... and Mrs Ansley, looking at each other through the wrong end of their telescopes.” (692) Berkove, Lawrence “ Roman Fever : A Mortal Malady.” CEA Critic 56 2 (1994): 56-60 Lawrence I Berkove’s“ Roman Fever : A Mortal Malady,” looks at Edith Wharton’s story in terms of the moral concepts that Roman Fever examines First, Berkove notes the greatness of this work, saying that it is one of her best known and . TỔNG HỢP CÁC BÀI PHÂN TÍCH ROMAN FEVER HAY NHẤT “I Had Barbara”: Women’s Ties and Wharton’s Roman Fever The setting of Edith Wharton’s short story Roman Fever (1934) is. Grace and Alida as Victims of Roman Fever Grace developed Roman fever figuratively when she burned with love for Alida's fiancé, Delphin. Alida developed the fever figuratively when Grace's. travellers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever [. . .].” Malaria had, in fact, ceased to be the real threat it had been in nineteenth-century Rome. But Roman fever s title role makes it also function