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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 do 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 do 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 for 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)

well-cared-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 gular, “I” had Barbara In this sense, the hidden victory of “Roman Fever” goes to a same-

sin-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, non-civilized “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 do 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 à 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-first-century gloss of a different female future

notes

1In 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

2 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

3It is here that Wharton’s per-spective differs markedly from that of its precursor text, Daisy Miller (1878) Henry James’s story focuses on a contemporary American girl whose uncau-tious behavior in Rome, includ-ing a late-night visit with a man to the Colosseum, ultimately leads to her contracting Roman fever—malaria—and dying Daisy is filtered through the percep-tions of an observing American man who is fascinated, attracted, judgmental, and ultimately criti-cal of his own prejudices Daisy’s point of view is never given; the story is, rather, concerned with the man’s responses to a mod-ern girl who assumes a freedom that ignores the conventions of sensible or respectable conduct Wharton also uses the idea of Roman fever differently In a previous generation—the Daisy Miller generation—Great-aunt Harriet’s sister did die of it, but what Grace Ansley caught as a result of her Roman night out was pregnancy, initially epresented as an illness only in order to con-ceal it Within the story, it is his-torically distanced: “[W]hat dif-ferent things Rome stands for to each generation of 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 for Wharton’s story like a catch-all, semi-euphemis-tic diagnosis of wayward sexual behavior

in young American women abroad

4My argument here is similar to Jonathan Culler’s in relation to Oedipus the King In

“Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Nar-rative,” Culler points out that the claim more than once in Sopho-cles’ tragedy that there were “many murderers” of King Laius, not just one, is never disproved; rather, it is forgotten in the face of the compelling convergence of narratives that leads us, like Oedipus himself, to be convinced that he was the murderer

5Dale M Bauer sees equally transgressive implications in the primary interpretation of “I had Barbara”: “Grace threatens the symbolic order of society by exposing the arbitrary assump-tion Alida makes about Babs’s father, not to mention the assump-tion about Grace’s respectability” (160)

6Here, especially, my thinking is indebted to Barbara Johnson’s, and in particular, at this point, to “Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?”

Roman Fever - Analysis

Setting

 Time – Afternoon

 Place – Hotel restaurant on a terrace in Rome

 Weather conditions – Spring weather

 Social conditions – „„Roman Fever‟‟ was written in the 1930s and is set

in the 1920s, but the story's characters and values reflect the attitudes of upper-class society in New York in the last half of the 19th century Mrs

Slade and Mrs Ansley are the product of that environment of affluence and relative ease The author belonged to this circle and was able to make

this society come alive in her story In Wharton's world, families such as the Astors and the Vanderbilts could be found at the height of the social

ladder In addition to this aristocratic class of people who came from old names and old money were the arrivistes These arrivistes had earned their

fortunes more recently and were often richer than the aristocrats These members of high society entertained themselves by attending the theater

and opera, by paying and receiving social calls, by attending lunch and dinner parties and house parties, by traveling abroad, and by summering

in such fashionable spots as Newport, Rhode Island

In this society, women were seen as moral judges But, despite this important role, most families did not believe that girls needed to be

educated Instead, they felt that education should be acquired only for womanly purposes, for instance, to fulfill her future husband's needs A

woman's role in life was to be a homemaker, and her single-minded purpose was to make a good marriage

The roles and accepted forms of behavior of American women in the 1920s and 1930s changed After decades of struggling, women had won

the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 Young women, known as

"flappers," exerted their greater independence by

wearing shorter dresses, wearing makeup, and cutting off their long hair into bobs They drove cars, played sports, and smoked cigarettes in public

Young women also increasingly worked outside the home, which brought them greater economic and social freedom When a woman married,

however, she was expected to quit her job and function solely as wife and mother Thus, despite the achievements of women and changes in society,

the homemaker still remained the ideal of American womanhood

Mood (the characters‟ emotional response to the events) – The mood at the beginning of the story of light; however, as more and more of

the past events in Mrs Ansley‟s and Mrs Slade‟s lives are revealed, the mood darkens and becomes charged with bitter rivalry

 Tone (emotional atmosphere of the work) – Wharton's story contains several tone shifts a) At the beginning of "Roman Fever," Wharton is reminiscent She might even imagine herself as Mrs Slade or Mrs Ansley The two women enjoy their vacation remembering back to when they were their daughter's age, attracting suitors and commanding attention b) Throughout the whole story, Wharton is critical of Old New York society As she describes the two middle-aged women, she provides their thoughts about one another and, in doing

so, illustrates their condescending, self-righteous attitudes toward one another even though they proclaim

themselves "friends." Wharton's description of the widows' plights following their husbands' deaths adds to her social critique The author stresses that the women feel lost in society without their husbands and struggle to find a purpose in life

c) Finally, at the story's end, Wharton's tone is revealing In having Mrs Slade expose her plot against Mrs Ansley all those years ago, the author depicts the lengths that women will

go to in order "to keep their man." However, the story's end is full of revelations, the most shocking of which is that Mrs Ansley did meet Mrs Slade's future husband all those years ago and had a child with him Barbara

All of Wharton's various tones contribute to her purpose in exposing the underbelly of

"aristocratic" Old New York The author adeptly demonstrates in

this story that the seething emotions under the starched and corseted members of her society eventually surface and reveal their true character.

Aunt Harriet

1 Characteristics – She is devious and murderous

2 Aunt Harriet is a static character

Internal conflict (Man vs himself)

 Alida Slade is having to cope with the change in her identity The death of her husband and the new resulting social identity that she is forced to live with leaves her feeling

"unemployed" and even hoping that her daughter will start a relationship with an unsuitable man so that she could feel "needed.“

 Alida Slade struggles with her envy of Grace Ansley and the way that she knows that her husband actually loved Grace It is this envy that she is finally able to give voice to during the course of this story

 Grace Ansley, who is in a struggle with Alida Slade for the love of Delphin Slade, met him

at the Coliseum, former site of gladiatorial combat

Theme

1 Friendship – Mrs Slade and Mrs Ansley have been friends since they first met as single women 25 years ago However, their friendship is never close because of the rivalry between the two

2 Rivalry – Mrs Slade and Mrs Ansley have always been rivals As young women, both had loved Delphin Slade (the cause of the rivalry) Their rivalry is also seen in how Mrs Slade views the marriages their daughters will make and in her comparison of her and Mrs Ansley‟s difficulties in being

widows The rivalry prompts Mrs Ansley, near the end of the story, to disclose that Delphin Slade is the father of her daughter, Barbara

3 Love and passion – While Mrs Slade believes herself to be a loving mother and a passionate woman, nothing she says about herself or her family members backs this up In contrast, Mrs Ansley – although a seemingly quiet and mousey sort of woman – apparently has loved Delphin

Slade The fact that she has hidden her love for her for 25 years demonstrates that she is capable of deep love and passion

 The passion felt by Grace Ansley and Delphin Slade

 The jealousy of Grace Ansley felt by Alida Slade

5 Knitting

 Mrs Ansley‟s knitting is described as “a twist of crimson silk.” Thus, the reader might interpret the knitting as representing the more passionate side of Mrs Ansley‟s personality because of the color crimson, which is associated with passion

 When Mrs Slade starts to talk about their shared past, Mrs Ansley lifts her knitting “a little closer to her eyes.” In other words, knitting – a not very passionate activity – is used

to hide her emotions and passions

 “Mrs Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fonts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum.” – As the sun begins to set, the two women begin revealing their dark secrets

 “[Grace] began to move ahead of Mrs Slade toward the stairway.” – This imagery is used to represent the power shift at the end of the story Up until the point, Mrs Slade has been the powerful character Now, she must give way to Mrs Ansley, who by revealing her secret has become the more ominant character

Irony

 Grace Ansley appears mousy and incapable of deep emotions; however, she is passionate and continues to love Delphin Slade 25 years after their one-night tryst

 Barbara Ansley‟s personality appears the opposite of her mother‟s personality However,

in reality, she is much like her mother was 25 years previously

 Alida Slade attempts to murder her rival, Grace Ansley However, it is Grace, who wins triumphs at the Coliseum

Plot Summary

By Michael J Cummings © 2008

From the terrace of a Roman restaurant, two middle-aged women gaze down on the

splendor of Rome and its ancient ruins The narrator describes one of the women as small and pale and the other “fuller” and “higher in color.” On the stairway leading to a courtyard below, two young girls hasten off to an adventure The women overhear one of them

saying, “Well, come along, then, and let’s leave the young things to their knitting.”

The pale woman, Mrs Horace (Grace) Ansley, recognizes the voice as that of her daughter, Barbara The other woman, Mrs Delphin (Alida) Slade, says, “That’s what our daughters think of us.”

Mrs Ansley says the girls were really speaking of mothers in general, but then she

withdraws from a handbag some red silk pierced with two knitting needles, confessing that she sometimes tires of doing nothing but looking at the sights Alida laughs

It is late afternoon, long past the lunch hour, and the last of the other diners have moved

on But Alida suggests that they remain on the terrace to enjoy the view They met at the restaurant in their youth, when both were younger than their daughters are now Mrs

Slade asks the head waiter to grant them permission to linger on the terrace, providing him a gratuity, and he says they may stay as long as they like–perhaps to eat dinner later

on under the moonlight

“Well, why not!” Mrs Slade says We might do worse There's no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back Do you even know back from where? I don't!"

Mrs Ansley says she thinks they are with Italian aviators they met at the embassy The young men invited the girls to fly with them to Tarquinia for tea

When Alida Slade asks her companion whether she thinks the girls are sentimental, Grace says she hasn’t the slightest idea “what they are,” adding that “perhaps we don’t know much more about each other.” They muse for a while on their limited knowledge of each other even though they have known each other for a long time

Alida Slade recalls how beautiful Grace was as a girl, more beautiful than her daughter, Barbara, is now Barbara, however, has “more edge,” Alida thinks, wondering where she got it After all, Barbara was the offspring of “nullities museum specimens of old New York,” Alida observes to herself For years, the Slades and the Ansleys were neighbors on East Seventy-Third Street in New York Then came the year when Horace Ansley and

Delphin Slade died only months apart The two women commiserated with each other

“[A]nd now, after another interval," the narrator says, "they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest appendage of a salient daughter."

Mrs Slade admits to herself that the loss of her husband was a social setback As the wife

of a corporation lawyer with international clients, she had entertained and traveled often, receiving compliments on her looks and her fashions Now, she has only her daughter, Jenny There was a son, full of promise, but he died very young

Alida wants to mother Jenny But Jenny, a very pretty young lady, is so perfect in every way that she needs no mothering It is Jenny who watches out for her mother

And what does Grace think of Alida? That she is “awfully brilliant, but not as brilliant as she thinks.” But she has a “vividness” lacking in Jenny However, Grace feels sorry for Alida, for she has had a “sad life” with many “failures and mistakes.”

Bells ring It is five o’clock Grace takes out her knitting as Alida observes that Rome

means different things to different generations:

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 [O]ur mothers had a much more difficult job than our grandmothers When Roman fever stalked the streets it must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls at the danger hour; but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice of disobedience thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool hour after sunset, the

mothers used to be put to it to keep us in—didn't they!

Engrossed in her knitting, Grace answers yes perfunctorily between stitches, as if she is really not that interested in Alida's observation Her attitude annoys Alida, who then shifts her thoughts to her companion’s daughter Barbara is out to snare one of the fliers, a

marchese, Alida thinks, and her poor Jenny cannot compete with her Perhaps Jenny’s

inability to compete is the reason that Grace Ansley wants Barbara to befriend Jenny—

Barbara will always stand out in comparison

“That Campolieri boy is one of the best matches in Rome,” she tells Grace, then

compliments Barbara as being “dynamic.”

“I think you overrate Babs, my dear,” Grace says

Her companion then compliments Babs on her intelligence and notes that the thought of their daughters and the young men in a romantic setting by the sea evokes memories of the past “too acutely.” Alida imagines that Grace is thinking that Babs will return engaged

to Campolieri She also imagines that Grace will sell her New York home and move to Rome

to be near her daughter However, she then reproaches herself for such thoughts, thinking she has no right to think unkindly of Grace

As the sun sets, Alida reminds her friend of her delicate throat The evening chill could cause her to come down with Roman fever or pneumonia But Grace says, "Oh, we're all right up here Down below, in the Forum, it does get deathly cold, all of a sudden but not

here."

Alida says whenever she looks at the Forum, it reminds her of the story about her friend’s

“dreadfully wicked great-aunt.”

“Oh, yes; Great-aunt Harriet,” Grace recalls

It seems that Harriet supposedly sent her sister one evening to pick a certain flower in the forum so that Harriet could save it in her collection of dried flowers But her real motive in sending her out was to expose her to Roman fever, for she and her sister were in love with the same man The girl caught it and died So says the story handed down Alida says she became frightened when Grace told her the story “that winter when you and I were here as girls The Winter I was engaged to Delphin.”

Alida also reminds Grace about her own visit to some ruins one chilly evening Afterward, she became ill for a while but thankfully she got well When Grace asks why Alida brought

up the story, Alida says she can no longer bear keeping to herself the fact that she always knew why her friend went out that night—to go to the Colosseum to meet Delphin, the man Alida was engaged to

"And I can repeat every word of the letter that took you there."

Shaken, Grace rises, letting her knitting and gloves fall from her lap Alida then repeats words from the letter, which she had memorized Grace, regaining her composure, says, “I know it by heart too.” However, she says she burned the letter immediately and wonders how Alida found out about it

"Well, my dear, I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!"

Grace sits back down Tears streak her face as she says, “[I]t was the only letter I ever had from him!”

Alida says she hated Grace because she knew she was in love with Delphin Filled with envy, she wanted Grace out of the way

“Just for a few weeks; just till I was sure of him.”

So she wrote the letter Now, she says, she can’t explain why she’s telling Grace about this incident The latter concludes, “[I]t's because you've always gone on hating me." Either that, says Alida, or “I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind Of course, I never thought you’d die.”

Alida feels a bit remorseful for a moment, but her animosity returns when she considers that Grace harbored secret love for her husband over the years and “had been living on that letter."

"You tried your best to get him away from me, didn't you? But you failed; and I kept him That's all," Alida says

After recovering from her illness, Grace married Horace Ansley in Florence, leading Alida to believe at that time that she never really cared for Delphin

Alida then says she wrote the letter as a joke and took pleasure in picturing Grace waiting alone in the darkness for someone who would never come

“Of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward,” Alida says But Grace tells her she did not have to wait Delphin was there Alida does not believe her But Grace say

he was indeed there because she answered the letter

“Oh, God—you answered! I never thought of your answering "

It is now cold on the terrace Grace gets up and wraps her fur scarf around her

“We'd better go I'm sorry for you,” she says

Getting up to leave, Alida acknowledges that Grace got the better of her that night long ago, but she adds that she herself came out better in the long run

“After all, I had everything; I had him [Delphin] for twenty-five years And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn't write."

Grace moved toward the terrace door, then turned around and said, “I had Barbara.”

The action takes place in the afternoon and evening on the terrace of a Roman restaurant with a view of the Forum, the Colosseum, and other sights Although no scenes take place elsewhere, the narration refers to activities in Tarquinia, a small town about fifty miles northwest of Rome, and to events that took place years before in New York City

Characters

Alida Slade: Middle-aged widow of Delphin Slade, a corporation lawyer While she is

dining in Rome with her old friend, Grace Ansley, the narrator reveals that she really

despises Grace, who once was intimate with Delphin before he married Alida

Delphin Slade: Late husband of Alida

Grace Ansley: Middle-aged widow of well-to-do Horace Ansley When Alida Slade reveals

her long-simmering enmity for Grace, the latter counters with a shocking revelation

Horace Ansley: Late husband of Grace

Barbara Ansley: Vivacious daughter of Grace Ansley Alida Slade resents her because of

her obvious superiority to her own daughter The last sentence in the story reveals that Barbara is really the daughter of Delphin

Jenny Slade: Daughter of Alida Slade She is beautiful but lacks the charisma and charm

of Barbara Ansley

Headwaiter: Supervising waiter at the terrace restaurant overlooking the Roman Forum,

the Colosseum, and other ancient ruins After receiving a gratuity from Alida Slade, he invites Alida and Grace to remain at the restaurant to enjoy the view

Son of Alida Slade: Child who "inherited his father's gifts," according to Alida, but died

while still a boy

Harriet: Deceased great-aunt of Grace According to a story handed down, Harriet and her

sister loved the same man To get rid of her sister, Harriet supposedly tricked her into

exposing herself to Roman fever She later died of the disease

Type of Work and Year of Publication

“Roman Fever" is a short story centering on the relationship of two women The story has a

surprise ending It first appeared in Liberty magazine in 1934

“nullities museum specimens of old New York.” Her observation introduces the secret rancor she feels toward her companion and foreshadows ever so obliquely the ironic

ending Moreover, the reference to New York enables the author to shift the scene—in Mrs Slade’s mind—to Manhattan, where they were neighbors in an upscale neighborhood In turn, the thoughts of Manhattan call up memories of the women’s lives there and the

deaths of their husbands, Delphin Slade and Horace Ansley Mrs Slade then recalls the effect of her husband’s death on her social life And so the story goes, with one thought or one line of dialogue linking the plot to the next development—until Mrs Slade reveals her knowledge of Mrs Ansley’s nighttime visit to the Colosseum twenty-five years before to rendezvous with Mrs Slade’s fiancé, a revelation that leads Mrs Ansley to reveal her own secrets about that night

Perhaps the one flaw in the plot is the contrived chance meeting of Alida Slade and Grace Ansley at the same restaurant of the same hotel in Rome

Symbols

Roman Fever: Grace's desire for Delphin; the ill will that poisons Alida against Grace (See also the entries under Roman Fever and Its Significance, below.)

Grace's Knitting: The troubled, intertwining lives of Alida and Grace Grace knits the

pattern of their lives with crimson silk, symbolizing the passionate feelings of the two

women When Grace drops the knitting, the knitting symbolizes the wreckage of Grace and Alida's relationship

The Ancient Ruins: Perhaps the crumbling relationship between Alida and Grace

Afternoon Light: The last hours of cordiality that Alida and Grace show for each other on the terrace of the restaurant

Evening Darkness: The entry of Alida and Grace into each other's dark secrets

Roman Fever and Its Significance

Definition

The term Roman fever was coined to describe malaria, outbreaks of which occurred

frequently in Rome over the centuries The city was a hotbed of the disease because of the swampy areas in it that became breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying disease-causing

parasites The term malaria itself derives from the Italian words mala aria, meaning bad

air Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a single-celled parasite that enters the

bloodstream primarily via the bite of the female anopheles mosquito The parasite invades the liver and divides Then the new, smaller parasitic cells enter the body’s red blood cells and produce so many additional parasitic cells that the red blood cells rupture and

discharge whole armies of parasites into the bloodstream The body reacts with chills, high fever, shaking, and sweating When the sweating lowers the body’s temperature, the

symptoms subside However, renewed attacks by the multiplying parasites cause a

reoccurrence of the symptoms, and the cycle repeats itself again and again Severe anemia (in which there is a significant reduction in the number of the body’s red blood cells)

eventually develops, leading to serious complications that can kill the patient Eventually, drugs were developed that halt the multiplication of the parasitic cells

Symbolic Meaning

In Wharton's 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 figuratively when Grace's love for Delphin fired her with enmity for Grace and a desire to get even by writing the letter Alida later suffered from complications of the fever when she became intensely jealous of Grace's daughter Roman fever simmers secretly within both women for the next twenty-five years

Themes

Destructive Passion

Intense passion in the forms of love, fear, vengefulness, enmity, and jealousy poisons the relationship between Alida Slade and Grace Ansley First, Grace falls in love with Alida’s

fiancé, Delphin Out of fear of losing Delphin and out of a desire for revenge, Alida

executes a plot exposing Grace to an evening chill that sickens her and isolates her from Delphin For the next twenty-five years, Alida seethes with enmity for Grace while

pretending to be her friend She also develops intense jealousy of Grace’s daughter,

Barbara, because of her obvious superiority to her own daughter, Jenny Meanwhile, Grace endures life with Horace while Delphin—who fathered her child—lives nearby as the

husband of Alida

Social Status

It appears that Alida Slade's happiness when Delphin was alive centered primarily on the social advantages she derived from being his wife, not on love The following passage

reveals her attitude in this regard:

It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected

obligation: the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London, Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so

handsomely reciprocated; the amusement of hearing in her wakes: "What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is Mrs Slade—the Slade's wife! Really!

Generally the wives of celebrities are such frumps."

Deceit

Alida Slade forges a letter to lure Grace Ansley to the Colosseum Then, for the next

twenty-five years, she pretends to be Grace's friend Alida's behavior calls to mind

Shakespeare's observation in The Merchant of Venice: "A goodly apple rotten at the

heart: / O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!" (1 3 80-84) It also calls to mind

words in his play Macbeth: "Away, and mock the time with fairest show: / False face must

hide what the false heart doth know” (1 7 94-95)." The narrator does not disclose

whether Grace had deceived Horace into believing that Barbara was his child, although Grace allows Alida to believe so until the latter provokes her

The Ever-Present Past

The past haunts Alida; it is always there to roil her emotions and embitter her against Grace When Alida can no longer contain her corrosive memories of long ago, she reveals them to Grace—perhaps in an attempt to exorcise her demons and transfer them to Grace But Grace counters with revelations of her own, one of which promises to make the painful past an unwelcome companion of Alida for the rest of her life

Irony

Irony is a powerful figure of speech in the story, especially its occurrence in the last

sentence Other examples of irony in the story build up to, and rely on, that sentence for effect An example is this observation of Alida Slade regarding Barbara: "I was wondering, ever so respectfully, you understand wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic [as Barbara]."

Is the Mothers' Past the Children's Future?

Wharton hints at the possibility that Barbara Ansley and Jenny Slade will repeat the actions

of their mothers She does so by creating the following parallels between Grace's daughter and Alida and between Alida's daughter and Grace:

1 Both girls are receiving the attentions of young men, as their mothers did twenty-five years before

2 One of the girls, Barbara, is vivacious and very smart, as Alida was

3 The other girl, Jenny, is very beautiful but otherwise ordinary, as Grace was

4 Barbara is likely to become the fiancée of a promising bachelor, according to Alida She muses that "Babs would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligible Campolieri." Twenty-five years before, Alida herself was engaged to a promising bachelor Add to these parallels this circumstance: As daughters of Delphin Slade, Barbara and Jenny are half-sisters This fact is significant in relation to the story about Grace's Great-Aunt Harriet While competing for a man with her own sister, she deliberately tricked the girl into exposing herself to Roman fever

One may speculate that Wharton must have created all these similarities for a reason—namely, to suggest that circumstances are right for the past to repeat itself

Study Questions and Essay Topics

1 Why didn't Grace publicly acknowledge her love for Delphin and force him to choose between her and Alida?

2 Do you believe Grace told Delphin about her pregnancy?

3 Do you believe Grace told Horace that he was not Barbara's biological father?

4 Do you believe Grace told Barbara that she was Jenny's biological half-sister?

5 What is the meaning of the underlined words in the following paragraph from the story:

Yes; being the Slade's widow was a dullish business after that In living up to such a

husband all her [Alida's] faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to live up to, for the son who seemed to have inherited his father's gifts had died suddenly in boyhood She had fought through that agony because her husband was there, to be helped and to help; now, after the father's death, the thought of the boy had become unbearable

6 Write an essay that compares and contrasts the psyches of Alida Slade and Grace

Ansley

7 Write an essay explaining the extent to which Edith Wharton drew upon her own

experiences 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 of History” examines Wharton’s story in terms of its social and political context Bauer’s article begins with discussing the rumors of Wharton’s own illegitimacy and accusations of being an anti-Semite However, Bauer

contends that the reasons she was looked at as having anti-Semitic ideas were due in large part to the positions the characters in her works held Bauer next provides a summary of

“Roman Fever” and then examines, in depth, how it reflects social foundations and myths

as being arbitrary in nature Further, Bauer examines how Wharton critiques history, social institutions such as marriage and patriarchy, and rivalry between women as caused by sexual jealousy Bauer closes the article with the assertion that Wharton’s writing is an observation of the society in which she lived: a society of violence, hatred, paranoia, and anger Bauer’s article references many other authors to support his claims and assertions His arguments are well written, informative and prove to illuminate the many dimensions and layers of symbolism that occur below the surface of Wharton’s “Roman Fever.”

1 “‘ Her ‘Roman Fever’ questions origins, persecution, and sexual violence Rome itself being a powerful site of primal violence Her story interrogates society’s periodic demand