TỔNG hợp các bài PHÂN TÍCH ROMAN FEVER HAY NHẤT

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 well-cared-

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

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
1 In 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.
3 It 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.
4 My 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.
5 Dale 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).
6 Here, 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.
Grace Ansley

1. Characteristics – She is smaller and paler than Alida Slade. She is the mother of Barbara
Ansley.
2. Grace Ansley is a developing character who, initially, appears to be a quiet, not very
interesting middle-aged woman but, later, reveals herself to be a passionate person with
the ability to love deeply.
Barbara Ansley
1. Characteristics – She is the bright, vivacious daughter of Grace Ansley and Delphin
Slade.
2. She is a static character.
Alida Slade
1. Characteristics – She is larger and darker than Grace Ansley. She is the mother of Jenny
Slade.
2. She is a developing character in the sense that she changes as the reader comes to know
more about her. At first, she appears to be what she claims to be: a charming entertainer,
a good hostess, and a vibrant person. However, as the story unfolds, she is seen to be
envious and resentful as well as
capable of plotting the death of her rival.
Jenny Slade
1. Characteristics – She is the quiet, unassuming, self-reliant daughter of Alida and Delphin
Slade.
2. She is a static character.
Delphin Slade
1. Characteristics – He is the deceased husband of Alida Slade. He was a lawyer, successful
and handsome.
2. He is a developing character. As the story progresses, the reader learns that, while
unfaithful to his fiancé Alida Slade and deviously plotting to meet Grace Ansley, he was
honorable in that he fulfilled his promise to marry his fiancé .
Point of View
Omniscient objective – The author lets the reader see and hear what the characters see and
hear. The author, also, lets the reader know what they are thinking.

Conflict
External conflict
 Man vs. man (non-physical) – Alida Slade and Grace Ansley struggle against each other
for the love of Delphin Slade.
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.
Foreshadowing
 Early in the story, Mrs. Slade says, “Moonlight – moonlight. What a part it still plays. Do
you suppose they are as sentimental as we were?”
 Aunt Harriet sent her sister out to the Forum, hoping that she would catch a chill and die
because they were in love with the same man.
 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.
Symbolism
1. The Palatine, Forum, Coliseum – These ruins symbolize the ruins of the images that Mrs.
Slade and Mrs. Ansley have of themselves.
2. Coliseum – Once the site of fights between gladiators, it is the site (and symbol) of the
final struggle between Alida Slade and Grace Ansley for Delphin Slade‟s love.
3. Moon - It symbolizes romance and passion.
4. Roman fever
 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.
Imagery
 “The luncheon hour was long past ….” – On the sunny terrace in the sunlight of
afternoon, Alida Slade and Grace Ansley appear to be friends reminiscing about the past.
 “Let's leave the young things to their knitting.” – Knitting is something that normal
housewives usually do, and this gives us a sense that the two middle-aged ladies are
stereotypical widows who have dull and passive lives. However, it is, as the two women
continue to “knit” together what happened more than 25 years previously, that the reader
discovers that one of them is passionate and the other is capable of plotting murder.
 “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.
Narration
Wharton wrote the story in omniscient third-person point of view, enabling her to reveal
the thoughts of the two main characters.
Plotting
Wharton’s plot is like a house of cards. Every card supports the structure; remove one and
the house collapses.
The opening scene in which their daughters, Barbara and Jenny, run off to meet young
men triggers Mrs. Slade’s memories of her and Mrs. Ansley’s romantic adventures in Rome
twenty-five years before. Mrs. Slade recalls that Mrs. Ansley was more beautiful then than
Barbara Ansley is now. However, she notes to herself that Barbara is more vivacious; she
has “edge.” How could this be? After all, Mrs. Slade thinks, Barbara is the offspring of
“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.
Climax
The climax occurs when Mrs. Slade reveals what she knows about Mrs. Ansley’s late-night
excursion to the Colosseum twenty-five years before to rendezvous with Mrs. Slade’s
fiancé, Delphin. Some readers may regard the shocking denouement (conclusion) of the
story—revealing that Mrs. Ansley’s daughter is the child of Mrs. Slade’s late husband—as
the climax.
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
for an ultimate return to origins: whether it be racial purification or sexual housekeeping.”
(681)
2. “As I see it, Wharton does not align authorial voice with her characters’, but orchestrates
the cultural contradictions she foregrounds through narrative voices. In order to illuminate
Wharton’s politics, we need to look in other, less stereotypical places.” (682)
3. “Wharton’s story [‘Roman Fever’] investigates a general force call it fascism or
patriarchy or discipline and repression operating in culture. Wharton sees cultural origins
as fictive rather than as mythic and pursues the danger of ignoring the difference.” (683)
4. “In the act of writing, we re-member what has been dis-membered through experience;
Wharton’s storytelling here is an act of piecing together the histories of these women
competing for Delphin Slade and for authority. Wharton's task is to remember the function
of these Roman ruins both as a symbol of Western civilization’s origins and as a place
where young American women would go to make love. The history of Roman treachery is
repeated in a pale and humorous parody.” (684)
5. “The letter that Alida forges, too, has a similar place and function in the story, precisely
because Alida seems to have cleverly turned [Grace’s Grandmother’s] story against Grace.
The same story has several different narrative uses depending on the situation: in the first
case, the story is intended to discipline the daughters. In the second instance, the story is
used as a vehicle for Grace’s aggression against her rival, Alida. In the third instance, the
story is re-appropriated by Alida in order to thwart if not kill her rival. In fact, the very
act of storytelling on the terrace after dusk recalls the various levels of treachery that
belong to their shared history.” (685)
6. “Since the entirety of the story plays itself out against the backdrop of ‘the great
accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor’ in Rome, I am suggesting that Wharton
means to put into some relation of the fortunes of civilization and the fortunes of these two
families, the Slades and the Ansleys (17). The story insists, first of all, that our own myth
of origins from which we get all our founding or inaugurating force, our authority is
inherently arbitrary Wharton’s fiction, therefore participates in a kind of demystification

(destructive) process; both women believe their own inaugural myths about their
daughters Both are wrong about the order of things, and Wharton uncovers a profound
emptiness at the heart of history since chance seems to rule.” (685-86)
7. “The surprise of the story demonstrates how hopelessly enmeshed they are in the
fictions about women’s place, the fictions their mothers told, for instance the one that
Great Aunt Harriet enacted when she arranged for the death of her sister, her rival.” (687)
8. “Mrs. Slade still continues to think of marriage in terms of social hierarchy, just as she
had thought about her own marriage to Delphin as the mark of social superiority over her
rival. Although she notices that Roman fever has changed over the years, and the girls are
no longer in danger of catching malaria, she does not notice that her account of Babs and
Jenny as rivals for the same man dooms her to a repetition of her own history.” (687)
9. “Neither Mrs. Slade nor Mrs. Ansley can keep herself in check any longer after twenty-
five years of silence. Hence, in their discussion, they let loose with what Wharton herself
calls ‘violence.’ Although Alida realizes somehow that her aggression is misdirected, she is
powerless to control it.” (687)
10. If women as signs represent American culture, then Grace Ansley’s gesture can only
mean that this character rejects the domestic harmony and opts, instead, for the scene of
destruction, the scene of confrontation with the other (Alida Slade) who represents the
repressions of patriarchal culture that has infected them (like the fever itself). By throwing
the whole notion of paternity in doubt, and therefore throwing up her daughter’s name for
grabs, she displaces herself as sign of American culture and becomes the signifier of the
disruption of the proper name, of paternity, of patriarchal codes by which women are
conventionally signified.” (689)
11. “Wharton’s short story reproduces, at the level of form, the metaphor of the inverted
telescope that describes the vision of the two women: it reduces the social landscape many
times over and thereby participates in the scene of destruction.” (690)
12. Mrs. Slade refuses to think through to the source of her hatred for Mrs. Ansley; she
does not want to acknowledge that her paranoia about Mrs. Ansley’s smile or offhand
comments emerges from her dis-ease with the social law she is compelled to follow.
Wharton demonstrates the lack of self examination at the heart of all social relations

between the anti-Semites and the Jews, and between these two little women here Mrs.
Slade and Mrs. Ansley, looking at each other through the wrong end of their telescopes.”
(692)
Berkove, Lawrence. “‘Roman Fever’: A Mortal Malady.” CEA Critic. 56. 2 (1994):
56-60.
Lawrence I. Berkove’s“‘Roman Fever’: A Mortal Malady,” looks at Edith Wharton’s story in
terms of the moral concepts that “Roman Fever” examines. First, Berkove notes the
greatness of this work, saying that it is one of her best known and most frequently
anthologized stories but points out the little critical attention it has received. Next, he
claims that one cannot read this work as merely a critique of manners and social strictures.
Rather, one should read it in terms of the moral undertones present throughout the work.
Berkove gives the reader several clues as to the “ominous level of immorality” in the title
of the story alone (56). He provides a concise definition of the phenomenon of Roman
fever and how it was virtually used as a weapon by the characters on the work, against
their rivals. Also, he examines how the character of Adila Slade deliberately repeats history
and how this history could be repeated with her daughter Jenny with Grace’s daughter,
Babs. Berkove then examines the moral character of the figures in the work in order to
depict the level of immorality present throughout the story. He points out that the women
in the work participate in savage cruelty on the same grounds as Roman gladiators in
ancient Rome. He discusses the mixture of Roman and pagan vales with that of Christian
ideals, which present themselves in the passions of the women in this story. Berkove closes
the article by examining Wharton’s view of women as being not necessarily morally
superior to men in that deception and lies are at the center of the character’s relationship
in “Roman Fever.”
1. “‘Roman Fever,’ judging by the frequency with which it is included in anthologies of short
stories and American literature, is undoubtedly one of Edith Wharton’s most respected
stories. Edith Wharton, too, has been subject to a recent revival of interest. It is therefore
surprising that the story has received so little critical attention.” (56)
2. “Wharton’s genius, it turns out, is moral as well as aesthetic; the story besides being
artistic is a powerful exemplum about the dangerous susceptibility of human nature to the

mortal diseases of the passions.” (56)
3. Alida consciously and deliberately repeated the act of Aunt Harriet and hopes at the time
for the same consequence to result. That Grace did not die does not exculpate Alida; the
malicious intent was there.” (57-58)
4. “The central action of the story takes place in the Colosseum, a place where gladiators
fought. Unbeknown to themselves, Alida and Grace continue the gladiatorial tradition. They
have been relentless and unscrupulous, using their bodies, their husbands, their daughters,
and their lives of lies as weapons to score on each other. In the name of love, they have
been rivals for twenty-five years and sought to kill each other, one literally and the other
figuratively.” (59)
5. “In selecting two such women to be the protagonists of ‘Roman Fever,’ Wharton
demonstrates he distance from the position that women are by nature morally superior to
men. She also conveys her seriousness about the moral standards that women as well as
men must obey to rise above the natural tendency to savagery. ” (60)
Petry, Alice Hall. “A Twist of Crimson Silk: Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever.’”
Studies in Short Fiction 24.2 (1987): 163-166.
Alice Hall Petry’s “A Twist of Crimson Silk: Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’” argues for more
critical and serious reading of the text. That is, “Roman Fever” is one of Wharton’s most
widely anthologized and acclaimed work, though there has been very little critical
examination of the text. The main focus of Petry’s article is on the role of knitting as a
stereotypical activity of “older” women. However, one finds that it possesses much more
significance upon closer inspection. Wharton is able to destroy the stereotype by placing it
in stark contrast to the interior lives of the characters as passionate individuals, which also
reveals the actual events of their past. Petry shows a number of different ways in which
knitting is used throughout the story. First, Grace knits with crimson silk, which suggests
several layers of passion. Grace uses knitting to occupy herself as a kind of nervous
fidgeting to cover any signs of guilt she may have concerning her past. Also, knitting
enables her to be distant without actually seeming as though she is ignoring questions and
answers. It further is an aid for Grace in avoiding eye contact with Alida. Perty also notes
that as Grace gains more confidence through the progression of the story, she relies less

and less on her knitting. In fact, by the end of “Roman Fever,” she has abandoned it
knitting and leaves it for Alida to pick up as she walks away. This implies that Grace no
longer needs to knit and Alida will soon turn to the activity as a pastime. Petry examines
knitting as a symbolic imagery pattern in the effort to elaborate the point that “Roman
Fever” is a multi-layered piece that deserves more critical attention.
1. “It is curious that so widely-anthologized a work has generated such a paucity of critical
interest, and even more curious that the few appraisals which it has received have been so
tepid ” (163)
2. “The implication clearly is that the ladies are physically, emotionally, and intellectually
capable of nothing more than the traditionally passive, repetitive and undemanding task of
knitting. By having the daughters patronize their mothers in this fashion, Wharton is
predisposing the reader to perceive the ladies as stereotypical matrons; and the rest of the
story will be devoted to obliterating this stereotype, to exposing the intense passions which
have been seething in both women for more than twenty-five years.” (163)
3. “The ‘evidently’ is eloquent, for although Grace may seem embarrassed by her hobby,
the physical objects themselves tell a far different story about her: she has chosen
‘crimson’ silk, an intensely passionate color; and the skein has been ‘run through’ by
needles, a startlingly assertive image. The sensuality and forcefulness suggested by her
knitting materials will help render plausible her passionate moonlight tryst with Delphin
Slade twenty-five years earlier, as well as her capacity to stand up to the vicious taunts of
Alida, the ‘dark lady’ (833) of the piece.” (164)
4. “Alida’s palpable annoyance suggests that Grace’s knitting is more than just an evasion
tactic: those needles are effective psychological weapons against a woman who is
deliberately tormenting her for having once loved Delphin Slade. In fine, the fact that
Grace knits under duress indicates that she is vastly different from the pale, cringing
matron of the story’s opening paragraphs.” (165)
5. “As the story closes, Grace realizes that she has the upper hand, having not only slept
with Delphin, but also given birth to the daughter Alida so covets. Grace’s newly dominant
status is signified by changed body language; but more importantly, Grace is no longer
associated with knitting. She departs from the restaurant terrace apparently without

bothering to pick up her dropped knitting materials. Further, she wraps her throat in a scarf
not a knitted scarf, but one of sensuous fur. And as a subtle underscoring of the reversal
of the two women’s roles, it is the defeated Alida who picks up her hand-bag presumably
to do some knitting (of the usual mundane kind) of her own.” (166)
Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “Edith Wharton’s Case of Roman Fever.” Wretched
Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: P. Lang, 1993. 313–31.
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney's “Edith Wharton’s Case of Roman Fever” looks at the meaning of
the title of “Roman Fever” as both ironic and autobiographical. Sweeney takes care
throughout the article to provide both and explanation of the title within the historical
context of Rome and the fear of Roman fever, as well as the technical, medical
phenomenon of this malady. Sweeney also provides an excellent summary of Wharton’s
story. Another interesting aspect of this article is the discussion of Henry James, “Daisy
Miller” as a possible influence on the writing of “Roman Fever,” and the relationship
between James and Wharton. Sweeney further examines the relationship Wharton
experienced between literature and sexuality. Also, she provides a discussion of the role of
letter writing and “secret letters” found throughout the works of Edith Wharton. In sum,
Sweeney provides a very accessible article concerning many different thematic and
autobiographic elements found in “Roman Fever,” as well as providing an interesting
examination of the historical context in which this story was written.
1. “The term [roman fever] evokes contagion, promiscuity, even sexual disease as well
as other ‘different things’ that women experience in Rome in Wharton’s story. (‘Fever’ itself
connotes excitement, passion, and irreducible desire as much as it does high body
temperature.) And because contagious malaria was usually fatal, Wharton’s title also
alludes to the punishment for such indiscretion. “Roman fever” thus functions as a
metaphor for both the seductive nature of illicit knowledge and the punishment for
experiencing it.” (315)
2. “Wharton’s visits to Rome in 1932 and 1934 inspired the story’s setting, imagery, and
tone. For Wharton, as for her characters Grace Ansley and Alida Slade, returning to Rome
was “another instance of backward glancing” (Lewis, Edith Wharton, 522), marked by
ambivalent memories of an earlier visit that evoked, in turn, a former marriage in

Wharton’s case her 1903 trip to Italy with her husband Teddy.” (316)
3. “ In 1932 and 1934, when Wharton revisited Italy, the violent history inscribed in the
ruins of the Roman arena was echoed by Mussolini’s Fascist government. It must have
seemed as if Rome, too, was doomed to keep repeating the strife of earlier generation.
These many, often contradictory, meanings make the Colosseum a particularly appropriate
symbol, in ‘Roman Fever,’ for women’s ambivalence toward forbidden knowledge.” (318)
4. “The absurd notion of Wharton as a mere disciple or imitator of James was thoroughly
laid to rest some time ago; yet this does not mean that Wharton and James did not
influence each other, or that Wharton never responded to James’ fiction in her own. Given
the close friendship between these two writers, it is astonishing that until not no one has
noticed the similarities and differences between ‘Daisy Miller,’ James’ first critical and
popular success, and ‘Roman Fever, one of Wharton’s most widely anthologized stories
However, the most profound difference between ‘Roman Fever’ and ‘Daisy Miller’ is that, in
Wharton’s story, experiences prohibited to women are textual as well as sexual.” (319)
5. “Roman fever was the punishment for disobedience in the cautionary tale that Grace
Ansley’s mother told her, and roman fever, apparently, was exactly what Edith herself
suffered when mother once allowed her the wrong sort of reading.” (321)
6. “In Wharton’s fictional world, such love letters are as potent as a box of matches. They
remain powerful even though unread or unreadable, and they affect characters’ present
lives even though written in the past. One the one hand, love letters enable women to