27 pages • 54 minutes read
Edith WhartonRoman Fever
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Knitting
From Barbara’s early suggestion that they leave their mothers to their knitting to the way Grace deploys her knitting to hide from Alida’s attack, knitting is a complex symbol of femininity and motherhood. A traditional domestic activity, knitting helps to characterize Grace, encouraging the reader to agree with Alida when she notes ungenerously that her friend is “prudent,” someone lacking in spirit or daring (758). As Alida recalls what the “spice of disobedience” might lead one to do, Grace counts her stitches “without looking up,” behavior which confirms for Alida her friend’s nature: “She can knit—in the face of this! How like her” (754-55).
But Alida’s judgments are not always as accurate as she believes them to be—or as narrative priorities encourage the reader to assume. Throughout the scene, Grace uses knitting to mask her feelings; it provides something that allows her not to react to Alida’s insistence that she look at the Colosseum and recall its place in the romantic imagination associated with the past. At the same time, the scarlet thread she uses reveals a tendency toward passion. It may be, in other words, that knitting is more complicated than its accustomed domestic association might seem.
Fever
The title of the story, “Roman Fever,” introduces a figure—fever—that accumulates connotations across the narrative and comes to symbolize the powerful drives that can push people to folly. A term for a particularly deadly strain of malaria, Roman fever kept travelers indoors after dark. Ancient ruins and other low-lying areas were understood to be especially lethal. As important as this kind of Roman fever is to the story, both as a basis of a cautionary tale and as a risk Grace accepts with Delphin, it is not the only meaning of Roman fever in the story.
Characters swept up in passion or sexual desire are regularly depicted as in a fever. Indeed, this form of fever—“sentimental dangers”—supplants contagion in the warnings passed from mothers to daughters in the story, as well as in its key predecessor, Daisy Miller. That Alida is also motivated by a kind of fever associated with Rome, jealousy and rage, layers another set of associations to the term. Nor is Grace immune to the ways that Roman fever works, for she too can be moved by anger. That Roman fever has influenced people across time, both individually and collectively, is a final implication of the title, one that looks both to the city’s past and Its present as a center of European fascism at the time the story was published.
Colosseum
Of the various Roman ruins mentioned in “Roman Fever,” the most important is the Colosseum. It is the site of Grace’s tryst with Delphin many years earlier as well as a place often singled out as particularly dangerous to travelers. Its low elevation and damp alcoves provide fertile ground for the mosquitoes that spread Roman Fever, and ruin thus symbolizes both the splendor and danger of Rome, especially to young women.
Early in the story, the narrator describes the Colosseum as a “vast Memento Mori” (753), or a symbol of human mortality and the inevitability of death. In both painting and literature, emblems of death (often skulls) were incorporated to encourage the audience to reflect on the fact of death and, by extension, the meaning of life. The association of the Colosseum with this established literary device subtly establishes the role the ruin will play in revealing to these women the meanings of their choices, while also insisting that theirs are only a small part of the “great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendour” throughout the long expanse of Roman history (755).
Related Titles
By Edith Wharton
