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.
Background
Literary Context: Daisy Miller by Henry James
In 1878, Henry James published Daisy Miller, a novel about a flirtatious American girl who flouts society’s rules and dies from malaria contracted during a moonlight visit to the Colosseum. One of James’s best-known stories, then as now, Daisy Miller pits the United States against Europe, liberty and enthusiasm against custom and convention, innocence against experience, and the future against the past. The story is told from the perspective of Frederick Winterbourne, an American ex-patriot, whose persistent misreading of Daisy and her conduct has fatal consequences.
Written more than 50 years later, “Roman Fever” is an explicit reworking of James’s famous tale. Wharton and James were close friends, so there is no doubt that she was familiar with Daisy Miller. Separate from any personal connection between the authors, “Roman Fever” engages with the plot of Daisy Miller. In James’s story, Daisy is warned against meeting a Roman suitor at the Colosseum at night for two reasons: the danger of contracting malaria, one strand of which was called Roman Fever, and the impropriety of an unchaperoned encounter between an unmarried girl and a man.
Situating James’s story two generations later, Wharton offers a different outcome than the one that Daisy’s innocence, and earlier conventions, required. Where Daisy’s behavior was driven by a desire for personal freedom, leading her to ignore sound counsel, Grace goes to the Colosseum to meet the man she loves. Wharton suggests that sexual encounters, even when socially transgressive, need not merit retribution, let alone death, as was typical in previous Anglo American novels.
James first wrote to Wharton after reading her first full-length novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). He praised her treatment of 18th-century Italy, calling the book “accomplished, pondered, saturated” but urged her to turn her gifts to “the American subject” (828). “There it is round you,” he argued. “Don’t pass it by—the immediate the real, the only, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for. Take hold of it and keep hold and let it pull you where it will…Do New York!” (828). As the masterpieces The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) indicate, Wharton took James’s advice—but she also followed his lead when, years after his death ended their friendship, she again set a story in Italy.
Authorial Context: Edith Wharton
Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862, during the Civil War, to parents well-established in the upper echelons of New York society. Her experience with Rome began early in her life when the family spent 1867 living in the city. From an early age, she was drawn to literature, recalling later the “secret ecstasy of communion” to be found in books. In the late 1870s, she published her first works, poems, and made her debut in society.
Over the next few years, marriage prospects monopolized the young woman’s attention. After a failed engagement to Henry Stevens, she married Edward (Teddy) Wharton in 1885 at Trinity Chapel in New York, the appropriate start for a life amongst the city’s fashionable set. Settled in marriage but not happily, Wharton returned to her writing, beginning with poems and then expanding to stories, works of nonfiction, and eventually novels. International travel occupied a large portion of the couple’s time each year, although they owned homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.
Teddy became seriously ill in the late 1880s. Increasingly confined to The Mount, the couple’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, it became clear that he would never recover from the illness that afflicted him. After years of steady deterioration in their relationship, the couple divorced in 1913. In 1911, as her marriage was failing, Wharton moved to Paris. Europe remained her home until she died in 1937. Although many American expatriates returned during World War I, Wharton threw herself into European relief organizations and wrote a harrowing account of the experience of modern warfare, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915).
Wharton wrote more than 16 full-length novels, seven novellas, 10 collections of short stories, plus poetry and nonfiction. Of these many works, the most famous is arguably The Age of Innocence which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Wharton was the first woman ever to receive the prize. While her reputation was established by her incisive depictions of the New York social world in which she lived, she explains in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), that she was profoundly shaped by “the glories of Rome,” a location that engaged her imagination across her life (Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. D. Appleton-Century, 1934).
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By Edith Wharton
