The short story Roman Fever by Edith Wharton depicts a tale of two women and their romantic love. The women characters in the short story tell each other a series of tales, embedded within the story at different narratives, about the enticements and dangers they face when they were young. This chain begins with the tale of Ansley’s great-aunt, who sends her younger, prettier sister to gather “a night-blooming flower” in the Roman Forum, whereupon she catches a Roman fever and dies. Years later, great-aunt, Harriet confesses that she deliberately plotted her sister’s illness out of jealousy. Grace’s mother frightens her with this tale as a child; Grace frightens Mrs. Slade with it during their winter in Rome when they too are romantic rivals; and Mrs. Slade reenacts it when she sends Grace a letter, ostensibly from the man they both love, which proposes a midnight tryst at the moonlit Colosseum in the hope that Grace will wander forlornly about the cold ruins and, like her greataunt, succumb to Roman fever.
The uniqueness of the short story is that it uncovers such issues as female misbehavior through tales of wives. In the course of the narrative, which takes place some twenty years later, it is retold once more by Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade, now widowed, as they gaze at the Forum, the Palatine, and the Colosseum in the gathering Roman twilight. It is appropriate, then, that the most recent retelling functions as yet another confession, in which the two women reveal their long-ago transgressions to each other: that Alida forged Delphin Slade’s love letter to lure Grace to the Colosseum; and that Grace met Delphin there, conceiving a daughter instead of catching the Roman fever. The old wives’ tale in “Roman Fever,” then, serves women as a warning, as a punishment, and as a means to confess their sins. Wharton leaves it to readers to decide the true meaning of the story. She ends with the following phrase: “I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway” (Wharton). The story plot is full of the anxiety that such compromising correspondence generates in her heroines.
I like this short story as it is full of suspense and has some elements of a detective story. Readers do not know the punishment that awaits women who disregard their mothers’ warnings about romance. Grace Ansley’s great-aunt’s immortality in family folklore, or Grace’s own dull marriage to a man she does not love, it is the feverish emotions that still possess Alida Slade after twenty years–jealousy, bitterness, pride, unrelieved guilt, and impotent rage, all directed at other women or at herself which seem to be the real punishment for acquiring forbidden knowledge. Wharton depicts that misbehavior and a lie can lead to terrible outcomes for all people involved in the conflict. The short story can be read as an account of the curse of male dominance in society, which turns women against each other and themselves. The story can be understood as a cautionary tale, one which illustrates what a woman suffered for venturing beyond the narrow confines of proper feminine behavior. Wharton’s descriptions of that purloined letter from its intimations of illegitimacy, forgery, and plagiarism, to the fact that it no longer exists and, in one sense, never did suggest the depth of her own anxiety about what it represents.
References
Wharton, E. Roman Fever. Web.