Roman Fever

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1934

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Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

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Literary Devices

Point of View

Wharton strategically manipulates the point of view in “Roman Fever,” heightening the power of the reversal in the story’s final sentence. The story is told by an omniscient narrator who provides an overview of the scene and the characters not so different from the view the women have over Rome. Although the narrator has access to the minds of both Grace and Alida, the story focuses more on the latter’s thoughts and feelings. Where the story devotes several paragraphs to the explanation of Alida’s judgments of Grace, a single paragraph conveys Grace’s feeling that Alida’s life had been “full of failures and mistakes” (753). Alida’s thoughts are freely shared with the reader, while Grace is generally viewed externally, her inner world communicated via physical reactions, like standing or looking away. Wharton’s exploitation of a limited point of view thus positions Alida as the person more fully in charge, which is then powerfully overturned by the story’s end.

Setting

The story takes place on a restaurant’s terrace, overlooking the city of Rome, between the end of the lunch service and the beginning of the dinner service. The terrace is secluded but not fully private, as restaurant employees work silently in the background. Indeed, shortly before the story’s climax, the narrator shifts away briefly from the main characters’ conversation to describe the space—vases of flowers being replenished, a former diner looking for a lost “rubber band,” “steps coming and going”—an interlude that reestablishes the distance between the past and present as well as the distinction between social classes (760). The height of the terrace allows the women to survey Rome from a distance, a spatial representation of the retrospection at the core of their conversation. Restaurants are, at the same time, facsimiles of a home’s dining room, available for rent. That neither Grace nor Alida is in her own home makes it possible for the story of their shared past to emerge.

Irony

In its most basic sense, irony is a literary device in which someone says one thing and means another. When Barbara jokingly refers to the mothers as “young things,” she relies on irony for humor (749). The subsequent clarification about figurative language (“Well, I mean figuratively”) introduces the possibility that irony will be a key literary device for “Roman Fever.” At times across the story, the gap between what Alida thinks and what she says can seem the result of social convention. It would be rude, after all, to tell a companion that knitting when confronted with a glorious view is pedestrian. Alida thinks but does not say: “She can knit—in the face of this! How like her” (755). Indeed, the extreme propriety and restraint of the two main characters make irony inevitable. The women are so proper that they hardly ever say that they mean. For them and the reader, finding meaning involves constant scrutiny between the lines. The shock of the final line, “I had Barbara” (762), comes in part from Grace’s clear meaning and intention breaking in upon a relationship characterized by shadows and innuendo.

Reversal

Greek tragedies typically include a moment at which circumstances undergo a sudden and complete reversal. After this profound inversion, or peripeteia, the drama moves quickly to its conclusion, which necessarily involves a new ordering of the characters, their self-conceptions, and the relations between them. “Roman Fever” is not a traditional tragedy—there are no great losses or early deaths. It is closer to a comedy of manners—a humorous story about the social codes that govern human interactions. It ends, nonetheless, with an abrupt reversal of the kind familiar from tragedy. Alida doesn’t technically lose anything. But she is shockingly exposed to truths she may wish she didn’t know. This reversal forces a fundamental reorientation of the characters, the relations between them, and the rules that organize these connections. While the point of view used in the story allows Alida to emerge as the bolder character, the revelation that Delphin is Barbara’s father leads the reader to revise this assessment, as well as others the reader might have formed across the story.

Consider the ungenerous “amusing” story that Alida circulated about Grace years earlier. She says, “I’d rather live opposite a speak-easy for a change; at least one might see it raided” (751). The snide humor turns on the idea that the “irreproachable” Grace and her family could have nothing to hide. The reversal with which “Roman Fever” ends, makes clear not only that Grace did indeed have secrets, but also that if any household was “raided,” it was Alida’s.