Roman Fever

The two main characters have known one another since before their names were Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley and the narrator notes that they are “intimate friends.” Yet the description of their friendship is immediately qualified when the narrator continues to observe that “like many intimate friends, the two ladies had never before had occasion to be silent together” (754). This silence “slightly” embarrasses Mrs. Ansley for it “seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy, and one with which she did not yet know how to deal” (754). Not only does this passage offer a rare insight into Grace’s inner world, but it also suggests that even for people who are “intimate,” there are distinctions and stages to be navigated and managed.

A core theme of “Roman Fever” is the varied nature of intimacy, powerfully established in the closing revelation that Grace and Delphin had been physically intimate. What, though, does it mean to say that the main characters are “intimate friends,” given that they are together by accident after years with little contact? One answer is evident in the detail that the women “lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years” (751). Here, the reader is reminded that proximity provides a kind of familiarity, a key meaning of intimacy. Yet the story simultaneously presents and complicates the fact that they are neighbors. The narrator notes, “When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East 73rd Street were renewed, No. 23 across the way, was always aware of it” (751). The kind of friendly surveillance that can develop between longtime neighbors lends humor to a sentence that becomes more sinister after later revelations.

Before these changes, though, it is still possible to determine which woman lives where—Alida portrays herself as active and Grace as passive, so she resides in the house that is “aware”—but Wharton’s decision to use addresses rather than names undercuts the sense that relations between these households are friendly, as does Alida’s circulation of a cruel rumor about Grace. The passage repeats the opening paragraph’s distinction between literal and figurative language, suggesting that despite the intimacy generated by spatial proximity the women are radically different.

Social convention after the death of their husbands enables “a brief renewal of their intimacy” (752). Norms for the expression of condolences, here by the “appropriate exchange of wreaths” (752), puts them in contact, while their shared experience “in the half-shadow of mourning” creates a new kind of connection (752). Where before physical proximity had made them familiar with one another’s lives, now shared experience of loss gives them insight into one another’s challenges. As they emerge from mourning’s “half-shadow,” however, their intimacy again dissipates.

The women have passed through multiple stages of intimacy when silence heralds to Grace “a new stage of intimacy” (754). In their subsequent conversation, as Alida recollects the events that took place in Rome more than 25 years earlier, the reader learns about the girlish intimacy the women shared as well as the forms of betrayal they enacted. If mourning cast its shadow across their lives and allowed them to be intimate in one way, here the “shadowy” terrace provides a setting for illumination and revelation, providing them greater knowledge but surely ending their intimacy forever. They learn, minutely, how wrong they have been about themselves and each other, most importantly what they were willing to do to secure happiness.

“Roman Fever” ends with a final proposition about intimacy. Alida responds to the news of her fiancé’s infidelity with the waspish assertion, “After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn’t write” (762). The implication is clear: 25 years of marriage are more consequential than one night of passion. Grace’s reply, “I had Barbara,” offers a sharp rebuttal, after which she “move[s] ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway” (762). The juxtaposition of lengthy shared experience to brief sexual passion presents two different ways of thinking about intimacy, sharing something crucial with someone. The previous discussion of their households suggested that proximity is a poor substitute for genuine intimacy and here, too, the story ends with the idea that having “everything” might leave one with nothing that matters.