Roman Fever

“Roman Fever” establishes the similarity between its two main characters from the opening paragraph. As yet unnamed, they are alike in age (“middle”), in affluence (“well-cared-for”), and in their reactions to the view of Rome (“vague but benevolent approval”) (749). Subsequent details align them even more specifically. Both women are widows from New York City traveling with daughters in early adulthood. They had been friends as young women and, after their marriages, lived on the same block of East 73rd Street in Manhattan. They had drifted apart but reunite in Rome accidentally. 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” (752). Again, the story notes “the similarity of their lots” and the “mutual confessions” they share bind them together. They matter less as individuals than as representatives of “a collective modern idea of Mothers” (749).

Although the characters are thus presented as similar, the story unfolds through the exploration of their differences, particularly as they emerge from one final, and crucial, similarity: while in Rome as young women, both had fallen in love with the same man, Delphin Slade. He married Alida rather than Grace, which is the root of their differences. When Grace reveals that her daughter is Delphin’s, however, their difference is diminished again, as is Alida.

While they differ in character, one final likeness couples the women. The narrator says that they “visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope” (753). With the diminutive “little” and the quick repetition of “each,” the narrator offers a slyly cutting assessment of both women. Each is convinced that her judgment is right, failing to understand how limited her perspective is. Lived experience, in this image, does not bring the outside world closer to either Alida or Grace; instead, the telescope’s inversion suggests that what each woman has endured makes her less able to appreciate, or even perceive, the other.

While “Roman Fever” stresses similarity, it also draws on Gothic literary conventions to establish the women’s antagonism. Organized around sharp dichotomies, Gothic literature regularly opposes a “dark lady” to a woman who is both beautiful and innocent. Equally fundamental to the genre is an emphasis on sexual danger and the inclusion of settings and architecture freighted with historical resonance. These elements are all present in “Roman Fever,” which uses elements of the Gothic to present a story of sexuality and danger. But Wharton’s use of Gothic conventions also questions some of their assumptions. Who is the predator: the dark lady (Alida) who lured Grace to danger, or Grace who had sex with Alida’s fiancé? Further, Alida marries Delphin, but does she lose in the end? For as much as the Gothic relies on oppositions, it also insists on problems with perception, noting the unreliability of the senses and reason alike.

“Roman Fever” also considers the power of stories, those that individuals tell themselves and those they circulate about others as gossip. Its particular interest is the connection between stories and wounds. The narrator reveals that, when they lived across the street from one another, Alida set out to harm Grace’s reputation: “The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit and went the rounds” (751-52). The “hit” the story makes is an attack on Grace. Alida justifies her cruelty here, as she does later in the story, with specious moralizing. The incident parallels a more vicious form of story-telling when Alida forges a letter from Delphin to Grace, inviting her to a tryst at the Colosseum.

Yet Alida is not alone in telling tales with potentially malevolent intent. Grace shares the story of her great-aunt Harriet, which her mother used to frighten her as a child. Grace first told Alida this story during the winter she became engaged to Delphin. “You frightened me with it,” Alida recalls. Surprised, Grace observes that she didn’t expect her friend to be “easily frightened” (757). The narrative leaves unanswered whether Alida was frightened that one person could be so cruel to another or that the power of love could cause someone to transgress social conventions. The controlled narrative perspective Wharton uses in “Roman Fever,” particularly when paired with the abrupt reversal at its conclusion, introduces significant ambiguity.

Much of “Roman Fever” concerns the past, but Alida also speculates on the future, imagining Barbara’s marriage to the “extremely eligible Campolieri” and the “perfectly peaceful old age” this marriage would enable for Grace. No comparable future is imagined for Alida or her daughter Jenny, as the latter is understood to be a “foil” for her more brilliant friend (755). Given the way stories in the past shape the present, “Roman Fever” proposes but does not explore the idea that stories in the present will determine the future. Wharton asks readers to contemplate the complex ways that words work and wound, creating and forestalling possibilities and taking casualties along the way.