Mrs. Ansley's Yarn:
Fabrication in Edith Wharton's Roman Fever
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
West Valley College, 2003
Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever is a tale of double treachery as revealed in the conversation of two society matrons on holiday in Italy. Alida Slade and Grace Ansley have renewed their long acquaintance after the deaths of their husbands, and are now sitting on a terrace reliving their youthful memories of Rome while their daughters are away on a double date. Alida not-so-secretly considers Grace a frump, although she is mildly jealous of her vibrant daughter Babs. Because the story is told from haughty Alida’s point of view we tend to see Grace as she does, as a nice, dull, quiet, relatively frumpy but irreproachable woman of society. As the sun sets, Alida confronts her with knowledge of a rendezvous letter Grace had received from Alida’s fiancé, Delphin, during their last Roman holiday 25 years earlier. Alida claims to have written the treasured letter herself, hoping to lure Grace to the Colosseum, where the evening air would sicken her. Grace’s response to this revelation is initially subdued and then pitying, which antagonizes Alida. She sneers that she, after all, was the one who married Delphin, leaving Grace with only the memory of a forged letter. At this point we have acquired such a thorough distaste for Alida’s personality and values that we are rooting for Grace to make a snappy comeback. It seems poetic justice, then, when she reveals that she conceived her enviable daughter Babs that night.
But did she?
The symbolism Wharton employs in leading up to this revelation would indicate otherwise. Though scholars treat Grace’s statement as authentic information, and dwell exclusively on its implications as such, there is ample linguistic and metaphorical evidence that her claim was not one of extracted truth but of a vengeful lie, a willful and retaliatory falsehood inspired by 25 years of repressed resentment and jealousy. Our sympathies do initially tend to gravitate toward Grace, but close retrospection reveals that she is not as dull and innocent as Alida’s description of her would have us believe. Neither was she ever as licentious as she finally asserts. Grace is making the whole thing up.
Certainly she had the motive. That she loved Delphin, and still does, is evident from the inflection in her remark that the view of Rome would always be beautiful, “to me” (4). Whether her love was suppressed or expressed, single-sided or reciprocal, it is clear that she had deep feelings for him. It must have been unbearable to live so many years across the street from the man she loved, and to see him raise a family with her friend; it must have been equally unbearable to be married to someone she presumably did not love as much. Furthermore, any woman would have smouldered under Alida’s perpetually smug condescension. Her malicious remark about a speak-easy being a more interesting neighbor had most likely made the rounds to Grace, as Alida herself surmised – “she hoped not, but didn’t much mind” (Wharton 7).
However, Grace had seldom, if ever, seen the Slades since they moved to Park Avenue. It is only now, when old memories are being played out on the same stage and by the same actresses as 25 years earlier, that the old feelings are roused. Grace keeps her reflections to herself until Alida, maternally jealous of Babs Ansley, wonders aloud “how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic” (11). This insult is the final straw for Grace, and from this point forward there is a change in her tone. She has always had the motive to hurt Alida – but now there is a fine point on it. A needle point, to be exact.
This brings us to the means. While Grace certainly had the submerged wit and intelligence to come up with such a brutal, end-all comeback, Wharton lets us in on the process with carefully chosen references to Grace’s knitting. Though a popular metaphor for analysis, her knitting is rarely if ever discussed as a symbol of weaponry; most scholars see it as a symbol of her frumpiness, or a way to disguise her self-consciousness. Yet how can the relevance of these two sharp objects, “half-guiltily”(4) removed from a black bag and stabbed through a twist of red silk, be anything less? Grace begins to mentally spin a yarn and fabricate a story that will hook and needle her friend – a story that will stab her in the heart. The word guiltily is significant; the handbag’s resemblance to a doctor’s bag is no coincidence, and neither is the word play in her next sentence. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill” (4) she says, and it is at this point, long before the characters have silently analyzed each other’s weaknesses, that we can retrospectively recognize the premeditative, emotionally murderous nature of Grace Ansley.
Always motivated and now armed, Grace lacks only opportunity, and it will soon come knocking. However, the perfection of timing and setting can best be grasped by pausing to gain further insight into the backgrounds of these two treacherous perpetrators, for both of them contribute to the many “ruins” in this story. Reviewing the thoughts and cultural context of these two women will set the stage for their demise, and reveal the cues between the lines of their stilted conversations.
The two women had been widowed just months apart, and had reunited in their sorrow, each now reduced to being the “modest appendage of a salient daughter” (7). Alida, who had been proud of being Delphin’s equal, of her Park Avenue address, and of her social talents and calendar, feels bereft of her identity – something she can’t imagine dull Grace caring about. She silently scoffs at how the vibrant Babs could have been produced by “those two nullities” (6) Grace and Horace. Alida’s own daughter, Jenny, is not the type to need “managing,” and Alida wishes she were a little less predictable, a little less safe and certain, so that she might have someone in her life to look out for. She is a manipulator of situations and people, and Jenny is just too boring – she even kept Alida “out of draughts, made sure that she had taken her tonic” (8). This phrase will acquire new significance when, later in the story, Alida reveals her long-ago scheme to send Grace into a fever-inducing draught. Her son, who might have proven more exciting, died young, and now Alida has no men in her life at all. She resents the idea that Babs will bring a man back into Grace’s world – perhaps during this very holiday.
Grace, on the other hand, sizes up Alida much more simply: she’s “awfully brilliant, but not as brilliant as she thinks” (8); certainly not as brilliant as Grace will soon prove herself to be. She, too, finds Jenny pretty but less interesting than Alida, toward whom we detect a condescending attitude. Knowing what we know about her love for Delphin, we can see her long-buried resentment surfacing. Wharton knew what she was doing: the name Grace (“mercy”) is an ironic misnomer, but if we rearrange the letters in the names Grace Ansley and Alida Slade, we can spell both slander and scandal.
Wharton has also given us, in her succinct descriptions of the ancient Roman ruins, the lighting and the tools with which to explore the history of Grace and Alida. The scenes upon which they gaze throughout the story give us just enough clues to correlate the characters to the structures, and their relationship to the lighting. When the story begins, the two women are sitting on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking Rome. They cross the terrace together and lean over the parapet: this implies that they begin this episode on equal ground, both of them pushing their protective boundaries side by side, both of them looking down on the ruins of the Palatine and the Forum from an equal height. Alida refers to this view of history as one “we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years,” which is all the more accurate in light of her knowledge about the forged letter. This view of the Roman past parallels their own: that of aristocracy, destruction, death, and burial.
The Palatine was a part of the Palace of the Caesars. It would have been the Park Avenue of Rome, an ancient uptown where the nobility resided in the most elegant homes, and it represents Alida’s obsession with status, money and image. It is also the location of the House of Livia, the powerful wife of Augustus. She, like Alida, had enjoyed near-equal status with her husband, had lost a son, and was involved in a marriage made publicly scandalous by the birth of a daughter (Augustus’ wife had borne him a daughter on the day he divorced her to marry Livia). The well-traveled, well-educated, and Rome-loving Wharton would most certainly have been familiar with this information; in addition, she was reportedly intrigued with the rumors that her own birth may have been illegitimate (Bloom 27).
The Forum was historically a place where Romans spoke their minds, often with greater emphasis placed on how something was said than what was said. This historical use sets the precedent for the women’s conversations, but it is the Forum’s more modern use as a necropolis that defines Roman Fever’s primary theme, and Alida’s eventual state, of total ruin. Not at all coincidentally, the surname Slade means “a long flat slip of ground between hills” (Slade), and the Forum is actually located on “the marshy land between the hills” (Rome). Alida will speak out, in her own way, and as a result will add her self-important reputation to the rising Slade body count. She is the Forum.
The story continues, loaded with more architectural and lighting references. Underneath the two women, the voices of their daughters are overheard on the stairs below as they literally descend from their mothers. (The author’s reference to Bab’s “invisible companion” is a derogatory assessment of Jenny, who is not just invisible at the moment, but to society as well.) Babs’ mocking suggestion that they “leave the young things to their knitting,” followed by Jenny’s protest “not actually knitting” (Wharton 3) and clarified by Babs to be a figurative expression, indicates that she is aware of the complexity of the relationship between the two older women.
The Italian aviators with whom the daughters are consorting were introduced to them at the Embassy, a place of refuge and diplomacy. By contrast, this afternoon they are in Tarquinia, a necropolis – perhaps an omen that their relationships, too, are doomed to extinction. They will be flying back by moonlight. This is the first of many references to atmospheric lighting, and its metaphorical illumination of relationships past and present. When Alida wonders aloud if the girls are as sentimental about that orb as the women once were, Grace questions Alida’s capability to nurture sentiment. Never mind what the daughters are doing – it is the mothers who are up to no good.
When paying off the waiter to let them remain and enjoy the view Alida explains that she and her friend “were old lovers of Rome” (5), a comment that steadily gains weight in the conversations to follow. Alida, in arranging for them to be left alone, is reenacting arrangements she unwittingly made for Grace and Delphin long ago.
The view reminds them that without their husbands they are at a loss, literally and figuratively. As they silently analyze each other, “it seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them” (9). Memento Mori is Latin for “Remember that you must die.” This is an omen about the future of this relationship. Though the author states that it has been a friendship, these two are anything but old friends; in fact, they’ve always hated each other. Society has been the parapet that keeps them from tumbling out of bounds, their husbands their “pillars” that held them up, so that they repressed their anger. Those restrictions will be lifted now that they are away from New York, emerged in their pre-marriage past, and without their husbands.
Grace stops fidgeting with her bag and meditates. It is possible, considering the context, that she is contemplating continued suppression of her feelings, especially when she suggests bridge at the Embassy. This means, perhaps, not the game but the crossing of a breach, especially since they might run into their daughters and their dates there. But when the offer is declined, she hastily withdraws the suggestion and “furtively drew forth her knitting” (10) instead. Grace is now heading off in another direction – and packing heat. As they watch the “long golden light beginning to pale” (10), a reference to the beginning of the end of their long though limited friendship, Grace lifts her knitting up to her eyes – the same way an archer or a marksman would lift his weapon. Her target is in sight.
Opportunity begins to ripen when Alida brings up the topic of Roman fever. Her references to the “danger hour” and the “cool hour after sunset” are synonymous with what is happening here on the terrace. When Grace suddenly begins murmuring over her knitting: “One, two, three—slip two; yes” this is more than just her way of avoiding a sore subject. She could be remembering the triad of 25 years ago, and the two who slipped away that night, but there is no strong indication that this really happened. More likely, she is counting up the damage she can inflict upon Alida by destroying her memories of Delphin, damaging her precious reputation, and exponentially exacerbating her existing jealousy over Babs. No doubt she will also drive a wedge between Alida and Jenny, who will never stand up to Babs after Grace delivers her final blow.
Alida stares from “the ruins which faced her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum” (11). There are indeed ruins facing her – emotional ruins. The Forum tells us that her illustrious name and self-image are about to be buried. The fading glow on the church fronts tells us that the luster of her marriage is about to be dulled, and the reference to the once blood-soaked Colosseum foreshadows just how that will be done. Grace is about to do battle.
These clues are for the reader, not Alida. She is busy imagining that her friend’s daughter, Babs, is as sneaky and competitive as her mother was 25 years earlier. She even considers that Grace might have sent the girls off together simply to highlight Babs’ more vivid personality. She laughs, and at the sound, Grace drops her knitting; it is difficult to plan mayhem to the tune of laughter. But Alida’s laugh is not the healing sort. She admits to finding humor in the thought that “two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic” (11).
Motive is intensifying, and means are at hand, but the opportunity has not yet reached its prime. Grace’s hands “lay inert across her needles” (12) and she stares at “the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendour at her feet.” This is not about knitting and Roman architecture; this is about her desire to emotionally wound Mrs. Delphin Slade, the living, flesh-and-blood accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor. Alida hurriedly backs off and admits that she is envious – that she’d prefer that Jenny were brilliant rather than an angel who would make a wonderful nurse “if I were a chronic invalid” (12). Grace, who could have assured her that Jenny was both angelic and brilliant, instead credits Babs with being brilliant and angelic. Resentment and jealousy, long festering, are about to burst open – further evidenced by the line “Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting” (12).
Alida ponders that if she didn’t know Grace so well, she might think that the “lengthening shadows of those august ruins” (12) were invoking memories for her, too. “But no; she was simply absorbed in her work” (12). Absorbed, indeed, in plotting the ruin of one particularly august facade. She has never liked Alida’s condescending attitude and snide comments, and insulting Babs is the last straw. She stands and leans against the parapet, thus elevating herself above Grace and pushing the safety zone they have always maintained in their relationship. The Colosseum’s “golden flank was drowned in purple shadow” (13), and it was “the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven” (13). Here is the crux of the story, the turning point. From this moment on, the relationship takes a decided turn for the worse.
Alida reintroduces the topic of Roman fever, and reminds Grace of the “delicate throat” the latter had had as a girl. (Wharton herself had typhoid fever as a child, and was very ill in Rome just three years prior to the publication of Roman Fever (Poupard 539).) She talks about Grace’s great-aunt, who had sent a younger sister to the Forum for a night-blooming flower; later the sister had died of fever. Alida is about to reveal that she had done the same wicked thing – treacherously sent Grace out after Delphin. Clearly the author knew that a delphinium is a night-blooming flower and a symbol of ardent attachment (Delphinium).
Alida interrogates Grace about her memories of that night long ago, but Grace deflects the questions with the comment that the most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. As the bottled-up story pours out of Alida, Grace’s “bag, her knitting and gloves” (15) – her surgical supplies – slide to the ground, and she looks at Alida “as though she were looking at a ghost” (15). She has her supplies, and is already wearing a mask of deception. The fatal operation – the excision of Alida’s heart – is about to begin.
As they stand in the “last golden light” (16) of their so-called friendship, Alida states “I horrify you” because she wants to horrify Grace. But Grace will not give her the satisfaction; she says that she wasn’t thinking of Alida, just that the letter had been her only one. Alida is upset with herself for “inflicting so purposeless a wound on her friend” (17), and tries to justify her behavior as something she had done in a fit of insecurity, never imagining Roman fever to be a real threat to Grace. Her original intent had been to punish her by leading her astray. Of course, in the end, it is Alida who is punished by being led astray.
Grace, though, is so quiet that Alida feels isolated. She tries to get another rise out of her by stating “You think me a monster! (17)” but Grace only reiterates her loss of a genuine letter from Delphin. It frustrates Alida not to get the satisfaction of Grace’s apology or horror. Alida’s jealousy kicks in again, and she begins to think of Grace as the true monster – something Wharton soon proves her to be. Alida dwells on how her rival must have loved Delphin, and accuses her of trying to win him and failing, Alida is resentful at Grace’s quiet assent, and is disappointed that she can’t get a rise out of her. She begins to backpedal, to justify her right to make accusations and pursue the point after so many years. She believed that the letter hadn’t been taken so seriously, particularly since Grace rushed off “out of pique” (18) to marry Horace. Grace again gives quiet assent.
Now dusk descends, “darkening the Seven Hills” (18) which represent the seven reputations within these two families. Lights twinkle and flicker out; faded flowers are carried away and replenished; footsteps come and go on the deserted terrace. This is the end of the long illusion, the end of their time together, the end of their mutual treachery. They sit in the dark, losing their view of Rome and of love and of friendship. A plump tourist suddenly appears asking “if any one had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker [Travel Guide]” (19) (Baedeker), but it cannot be found. This odd little scene carries great significance. The bond has been broken; the restraint is gone. The conventions of society, which have controlled the direction of their relationship for 25 years, are not in effect in this time and place. Alida and Grace are going to have to face (their) history on their own. They sit in their dark, deserted corner, each trying to decide her next move.
Alida, still backpedaling, says that she must have meant it as a joke. Grace seeks clarification, and Alida explains that she had laughed that evening long ago, imagining Grace waiting in the dark alone, hiding, possibly getting ill as a result of the cool air in the Colosseum.
Here is where motive, means and opportunity finally coalesce. Grace “had not moved for a long time [in the figurative sense, 25 years]. But now she turned slowly toward her companion” (19) and told Alida that Delphin had actually been there – that the two of them had, after all, rendezvoused. Alida responds with the outburst, “you’re lying!” (19) – which is true. As Grace continues with her lie, her “voice grew clearer, and full of surprise” (19). She uses words like “of course” and “naturally” to emphasize the validity of her claim that she and Delphin had actually met each other in the Colosseum that night, words with a hollow ring. When Alida rightly questions how Delphin would have known about the arrangement, since he did not write the invitation letter, Grace “hesitates, as though reflecting” (19) – she is actually thinking fast – and answers that she had responded to the letter, and he had responded to her response. Alida is devastasted. She had never considered that Grace might reply to the fictitious letter. Grace says that this lack of foresight was odd, but in truth it is far odder that Delphin would not have questioned her response to a letter he never wrote. Grace sees, though, that she has gained the upper hand; she rises to her feet and draws her fur scarf about her. This is reminiscient of Alida’s “delicate throat” comment earlier in the conversation, and Grace “clasped the fur about her throat” (20) as she tells her she feels sorry for her. The image of a “sheep in wolf’s clothing” comes to mind.
She might have stopped there, leaving Alida to imagine those long-ago embraces, reveling in the torture they would inflict upon her. But when Alida laughs that “after all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter he didn’t write” (20), Grace pulls out the big gun – and because Alida has already confessed her envy, Babs is the automatic weapon of choice. Motive, means and opportunity are flashing in big lights all over the terrace. Turning toward the door – exiting the stage, descending to a new depth, departing on her own terms – Grace takes a step, turns back, and delivers the blow that Babs was conceived that night in the Colosseum.
Touché.
Then she begins to move ahead, toward the stairway – the same stairway on which the girls’ voices had been heard at the beginning of the story, laughing at the idea of their boring old mothers knitting away up top. The knitting is left behind. It is no longer needed.
Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, the retrospective view of Roman Fever implicates Grace Ansley in a vengeful scheme to reduce Alida Slade to ruin – and the scheme works. The name of Slade, buried under slander and scandal, will never again be resurrected. Grace has won, simply because Alida has finally lost what she had lorded over her for so long: her man, her marriage, her image, her reputation. She is left with placid Jenny, the nursemaid – and she certainly needs one now.
One must never underestimate those frumpy, irreproachable knitters.
Works Cited
“Baedeker Travel Guides.” Cartographica Neerlandica. Created 7/26/1998. Accessed 5/13/03.
<http://www.orteliusmaps.com/baedeker.html>
Bloom, Harold, ed. Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
“Delphinium.” The Language of Flowers.” Baack’s Florists and Greenhouses. Retrieved
5/8/03. <http://www.baacks.com/thelanguageofflowers/list.html>
Poupard, Dennis, ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. TCLC 9. Detroit: Gale
Research Co., 1983.
“Rome.” Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved 5/8/03.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps/arch/rome.html>
“Slade.” Last Name Meanings Dictionary. MyFamily.com, Inc. Copyright 2002. Retrieved
5/8/03. <http://www.last-names.net/index.asp>
Wharton, Edith. Roman Fever. New York: Scribner-Simon & Schuster, 1997.
West Valley College, 2003
Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever is a tale of double treachery as revealed in the conversation of two society matrons on holiday in Italy. Alida Slade and Grace Ansley have renewed their long acquaintance after the deaths of their husbands, and are now sitting on a terrace reliving their youthful memories of Rome while their daughters are away on a double date. Alida not-so-secretly considers Grace a frump, although she is mildly jealous of her vibrant daughter Babs. Because the story is told from haughty Alida’s point of view we tend to see Grace as she does, as a nice, dull, quiet, relatively frumpy but irreproachable woman of society. As the sun sets, Alida confronts her with knowledge of a rendezvous letter Grace had received from Alida’s fiancé, Delphin, during their last Roman holiday 25 years earlier. Alida claims to have written the treasured letter herself, hoping to lure Grace to the Colosseum, where the evening air would sicken her. Grace’s response to this revelation is initially subdued and then pitying, which antagonizes Alida. She sneers that she, after all, was the one who married Delphin, leaving Grace with only the memory of a forged letter. At this point we have acquired such a thorough distaste for Alida’s personality and values that we are rooting for Grace to make a snappy comeback. It seems poetic justice, then, when she reveals that she conceived her enviable daughter Babs that night.
But did she?
The symbolism Wharton employs in leading up to this revelation would indicate otherwise. Though scholars treat Grace’s statement as authentic information, and dwell exclusively on its implications as such, there is ample linguistic and metaphorical evidence that her claim was not one of extracted truth but of a vengeful lie, a willful and retaliatory falsehood inspired by 25 years of repressed resentment and jealousy. Our sympathies do initially tend to gravitate toward Grace, but close retrospection reveals that she is not as dull and innocent as Alida’s description of her would have us believe. Neither was she ever as licentious as she finally asserts. Grace is making the whole thing up.
Certainly she had the motive. That she loved Delphin, and still does, is evident from the inflection in her remark that the view of Rome would always be beautiful, “to me” (4). Whether her love was suppressed or expressed, single-sided or reciprocal, it is clear that she had deep feelings for him. It must have been unbearable to live so many years across the street from the man she loved, and to see him raise a family with her friend; it must have been equally unbearable to be married to someone she presumably did not love as much. Furthermore, any woman would have smouldered under Alida’s perpetually smug condescension. Her malicious remark about a speak-easy being a more interesting neighbor had most likely made the rounds to Grace, as Alida herself surmised – “she hoped not, but didn’t much mind” (Wharton 7).
However, Grace had seldom, if ever, seen the Slades since they moved to Park Avenue. It is only now, when old memories are being played out on the same stage and by the same actresses as 25 years earlier, that the old feelings are roused. Grace keeps her reflections to herself until Alida, maternally jealous of Babs Ansley, wonders aloud “how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic” (11). This insult is the final straw for Grace, and from this point forward there is a change in her tone. She has always had the motive to hurt Alida – but now there is a fine point on it. A needle point, to be exact.
This brings us to the means. While Grace certainly had the submerged wit and intelligence to come up with such a brutal, end-all comeback, Wharton lets us in on the process with carefully chosen references to Grace’s knitting. Though a popular metaphor for analysis, her knitting is rarely if ever discussed as a symbol of weaponry; most scholars see it as a symbol of her frumpiness, or a way to disguise her self-consciousness. Yet how can the relevance of these two sharp objects, “half-guiltily”(4) removed from a black bag and stabbed through a twist of red silk, be anything less? Grace begins to mentally spin a yarn and fabricate a story that will hook and needle her friend – a story that will stab her in the heart. The word guiltily is significant; the handbag’s resemblance to a doctor’s bag is no coincidence, and neither is the word play in her next sentence. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill” (4) she says, and it is at this point, long before the characters have silently analyzed each other’s weaknesses, that we can retrospectively recognize the premeditative, emotionally murderous nature of Grace Ansley.
Always motivated and now armed, Grace lacks only opportunity, and it will soon come knocking. However, the perfection of timing and setting can best be grasped by pausing to gain further insight into the backgrounds of these two treacherous perpetrators, for both of them contribute to the many “ruins” in this story. Reviewing the thoughts and cultural context of these two women will set the stage for their demise, and reveal the cues between the lines of their stilted conversations.
The two women had been widowed just months apart, and had reunited in their sorrow, each now reduced to being the “modest appendage of a salient daughter” (7). Alida, who had been proud of being Delphin’s equal, of her Park Avenue address, and of her social talents and calendar, feels bereft of her identity – something she can’t imagine dull Grace caring about. She silently scoffs at how the vibrant Babs could have been produced by “those two nullities” (6) Grace and Horace. Alida’s own daughter, Jenny, is not the type to need “managing,” and Alida wishes she were a little less predictable, a little less safe and certain, so that she might have someone in her life to look out for. She is a manipulator of situations and people, and Jenny is just too boring – she even kept Alida “out of draughts, made sure that she had taken her tonic” (8). This phrase will acquire new significance when, later in the story, Alida reveals her long-ago scheme to send Grace into a fever-inducing draught. Her son, who might have proven more exciting, died young, and now Alida has no men in her life at all. She resents the idea that Babs will bring a man back into Grace’s world – perhaps during this very holiday.
Grace, on the other hand, sizes up Alida much more simply: she’s “awfully brilliant, but not as brilliant as she thinks” (8); certainly not as brilliant as Grace will soon prove herself to be. She, too, finds Jenny pretty but less interesting than Alida, toward whom we detect a condescending attitude. Knowing what we know about her love for Delphin, we can see her long-buried resentment surfacing. Wharton knew what she was doing: the name Grace (“mercy”) is an ironic misnomer, but if we rearrange the letters in the names Grace Ansley and Alida Slade, we can spell both slander and scandal.
Wharton has also given us, in her succinct descriptions of the ancient Roman ruins, the lighting and the tools with which to explore the history of Grace and Alida. The scenes upon which they gaze throughout the story give us just enough clues to correlate the characters to the structures, and their relationship to the lighting. When the story begins, the two women are sitting on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking Rome. They cross the terrace together and lean over the parapet: this implies that they begin this episode on equal ground, both of them pushing their protective boundaries side by side, both of them looking down on the ruins of the Palatine and the Forum from an equal height. Alida refers to this view of history as one “we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years,” which is all the more accurate in light of her knowledge about the forged letter. This view of the Roman past parallels their own: that of aristocracy, destruction, death, and burial.
The Palatine was a part of the Palace of the Caesars. It would have been the Park Avenue of Rome, an ancient uptown where the nobility resided in the most elegant homes, and it represents Alida’s obsession with status, money and image. It is also the location of the House of Livia, the powerful wife of Augustus. She, like Alida, had enjoyed near-equal status with her husband, had lost a son, and was involved in a marriage made publicly scandalous by the birth of a daughter (Augustus’ wife had borne him a daughter on the day he divorced her to marry Livia). The well-traveled, well-educated, and Rome-loving Wharton would most certainly have been familiar with this information; in addition, she was reportedly intrigued with the rumors that her own birth may have been illegitimate (Bloom 27).
The Forum was historically a place where Romans spoke their minds, often with greater emphasis placed on how something was said than what was said. This historical use sets the precedent for the women’s conversations, but it is the Forum’s more modern use as a necropolis that defines Roman Fever’s primary theme, and Alida’s eventual state, of total ruin. Not at all coincidentally, the surname Slade means “a long flat slip of ground between hills” (Slade), and the Forum is actually located on “the marshy land between the hills” (Rome). Alida will speak out, in her own way, and as a result will add her self-important reputation to the rising Slade body count. She is the Forum.
The story continues, loaded with more architectural and lighting references. Underneath the two women, the voices of their daughters are overheard on the stairs below as they literally descend from their mothers. (The author’s reference to Bab’s “invisible companion” is a derogatory assessment of Jenny, who is not just invisible at the moment, but to society as well.) Babs’ mocking suggestion that they “leave the young things to their knitting,” followed by Jenny’s protest “not actually knitting” (Wharton 3) and clarified by Babs to be a figurative expression, indicates that she is aware of the complexity of the relationship between the two older women.
The Italian aviators with whom the daughters are consorting were introduced to them at the Embassy, a place of refuge and diplomacy. By contrast, this afternoon they are in Tarquinia, a necropolis – perhaps an omen that their relationships, too, are doomed to extinction. They will be flying back by moonlight. This is the first of many references to atmospheric lighting, and its metaphorical illumination of relationships past and present. When Alida wonders aloud if the girls are as sentimental about that orb as the women once were, Grace questions Alida’s capability to nurture sentiment. Never mind what the daughters are doing – it is the mothers who are up to no good.
When paying off the waiter to let them remain and enjoy the view Alida explains that she and her friend “were old lovers of Rome” (5), a comment that steadily gains weight in the conversations to follow. Alida, in arranging for them to be left alone, is reenacting arrangements she unwittingly made for Grace and Delphin long ago.
The view reminds them that without their husbands they are at a loss, literally and figuratively. As they silently analyze each other, “it seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them” (9). Memento Mori is Latin for “Remember that you must die.” This is an omen about the future of this relationship. Though the author states that it has been a friendship, these two are anything but old friends; in fact, they’ve always hated each other. Society has been the parapet that keeps them from tumbling out of bounds, their husbands their “pillars” that held them up, so that they repressed their anger. Those restrictions will be lifted now that they are away from New York, emerged in their pre-marriage past, and without their husbands.
Grace stops fidgeting with her bag and meditates. It is possible, considering the context, that she is contemplating continued suppression of her feelings, especially when she suggests bridge at the Embassy. This means, perhaps, not the game but the crossing of a breach, especially since they might run into their daughters and their dates there. But when the offer is declined, she hastily withdraws the suggestion and “furtively drew forth her knitting” (10) instead. Grace is now heading off in another direction – and packing heat. As they watch the “long golden light beginning to pale” (10), a reference to the beginning of the end of their long though limited friendship, Grace lifts her knitting up to her eyes – the same way an archer or a marksman would lift his weapon. Her target is in sight.
Opportunity begins to ripen when Alida brings up the topic of Roman fever. Her references to the “danger hour” and the “cool hour after sunset” are synonymous with what is happening here on the terrace. When Grace suddenly begins murmuring over her knitting: “One, two, three—slip two; yes” this is more than just her way of avoiding a sore subject. She could be remembering the triad of 25 years ago, and the two who slipped away that night, but there is no strong indication that this really happened. More likely, she is counting up the damage she can inflict upon Alida by destroying her memories of Delphin, damaging her precious reputation, and exponentially exacerbating her existing jealousy over Babs. No doubt she will also drive a wedge between Alida and Jenny, who will never stand up to Babs after Grace delivers her final blow.
Alida stares from “the ruins which faced her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum” (11). There are indeed ruins facing her – emotional ruins. The Forum tells us that her illustrious name and self-image are about to be buried. The fading glow on the church fronts tells us that the luster of her marriage is about to be dulled, and the reference to the once blood-soaked Colosseum foreshadows just how that will be done. Grace is about to do battle.
These clues are for the reader, not Alida. She is busy imagining that her friend’s daughter, Babs, is as sneaky and competitive as her mother was 25 years earlier. She even considers that Grace might have sent the girls off together simply to highlight Babs’ more vivid personality. She laughs, and at the sound, Grace drops her knitting; it is difficult to plan mayhem to the tune of laughter. But Alida’s laugh is not the healing sort. She admits to finding humor in the thought that “two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic” (11).
Motive is intensifying, and means are at hand, but the opportunity has not yet reached its prime. Grace’s hands “lay inert across her needles” (12) and she stares at “the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendour at her feet.” This is not about knitting and Roman architecture; this is about her desire to emotionally wound Mrs. Delphin Slade, the living, flesh-and-blood accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor. Alida hurriedly backs off and admits that she is envious – that she’d prefer that Jenny were brilliant rather than an angel who would make a wonderful nurse “if I were a chronic invalid” (12). Grace, who could have assured her that Jenny was both angelic and brilliant, instead credits Babs with being brilliant and angelic. Resentment and jealousy, long festering, are about to burst open – further evidenced by the line “Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting” (12).
Alida ponders that if she didn’t know Grace so well, she might think that the “lengthening shadows of those august ruins” (12) were invoking memories for her, too. “But no; she was simply absorbed in her work” (12). Absorbed, indeed, in plotting the ruin of one particularly august facade. She has never liked Alida’s condescending attitude and snide comments, and insulting Babs is the last straw. She stands and leans against the parapet, thus elevating herself above Grace and pushing the safety zone they have always maintained in their relationship. The Colosseum’s “golden flank was drowned in purple shadow” (13), and it was “the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven” (13). Here is the crux of the story, the turning point. From this moment on, the relationship takes a decided turn for the worse.
Alida reintroduces the topic of Roman fever, and reminds Grace of the “delicate throat” the latter had had as a girl. (Wharton herself had typhoid fever as a child, and was very ill in Rome just three years prior to the publication of Roman Fever (Poupard 539).) She talks about Grace’s great-aunt, who had sent a younger sister to the Forum for a night-blooming flower; later the sister had died of fever. Alida is about to reveal that she had done the same wicked thing – treacherously sent Grace out after Delphin. Clearly the author knew that a delphinium is a night-blooming flower and a symbol of ardent attachment (Delphinium).
Alida interrogates Grace about her memories of that night long ago, but Grace deflects the questions with the comment that the most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. As the bottled-up story pours out of Alida, Grace’s “bag, her knitting and gloves” (15) – her surgical supplies – slide to the ground, and she looks at Alida “as though she were looking at a ghost” (15). She has her supplies, and is already wearing a mask of deception. The fatal operation – the excision of Alida’s heart – is about to begin.
As they stand in the “last golden light” (16) of their so-called friendship, Alida states “I horrify you” because she wants to horrify Grace. But Grace will not give her the satisfaction; she says that she wasn’t thinking of Alida, just that the letter had been her only one. Alida is upset with herself for “inflicting so purposeless a wound on her friend” (17), and tries to justify her behavior as something she had done in a fit of insecurity, never imagining Roman fever to be a real threat to Grace. Her original intent had been to punish her by leading her astray. Of course, in the end, it is Alida who is punished by being led astray.
Grace, though, is so quiet that Alida feels isolated. She tries to get another rise out of her by stating “You think me a monster! (17)” but Grace only reiterates her loss of a genuine letter from Delphin. It frustrates Alida not to get the satisfaction of Grace’s apology or horror. Alida’s jealousy kicks in again, and she begins to think of Grace as the true monster – something Wharton soon proves her to be. Alida dwells on how her rival must have loved Delphin, and accuses her of trying to win him and failing, Alida is resentful at Grace’s quiet assent, and is disappointed that she can’t get a rise out of her. She begins to backpedal, to justify her right to make accusations and pursue the point after so many years. She believed that the letter hadn’t been taken so seriously, particularly since Grace rushed off “out of pique” (18) to marry Horace. Grace again gives quiet assent.
Now dusk descends, “darkening the Seven Hills” (18) which represent the seven reputations within these two families. Lights twinkle and flicker out; faded flowers are carried away and replenished; footsteps come and go on the deserted terrace. This is the end of the long illusion, the end of their time together, the end of their mutual treachery. They sit in the dark, losing their view of Rome and of love and of friendship. A plump tourist suddenly appears asking “if any one had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker [Travel Guide]” (19) (Baedeker), but it cannot be found. This odd little scene carries great significance. The bond has been broken; the restraint is gone. The conventions of society, which have controlled the direction of their relationship for 25 years, are not in effect in this time and place. Alida and Grace are going to have to face (their) history on their own. They sit in their dark, deserted corner, each trying to decide her next move.
Alida, still backpedaling, says that she must have meant it as a joke. Grace seeks clarification, and Alida explains that she had laughed that evening long ago, imagining Grace waiting in the dark alone, hiding, possibly getting ill as a result of the cool air in the Colosseum.
Here is where motive, means and opportunity finally coalesce. Grace “had not moved for a long time [in the figurative sense, 25 years]. But now she turned slowly toward her companion” (19) and told Alida that Delphin had actually been there – that the two of them had, after all, rendezvoused. Alida responds with the outburst, “you’re lying!” (19) – which is true. As Grace continues with her lie, her “voice grew clearer, and full of surprise” (19). She uses words like “of course” and “naturally” to emphasize the validity of her claim that she and Delphin had actually met each other in the Colosseum that night, words with a hollow ring. When Alida rightly questions how Delphin would have known about the arrangement, since he did not write the invitation letter, Grace “hesitates, as though reflecting” (19) – she is actually thinking fast – and answers that she had responded to the letter, and he had responded to her response. Alida is devastasted. She had never considered that Grace might reply to the fictitious letter. Grace says that this lack of foresight was odd, but in truth it is far odder that Delphin would not have questioned her response to a letter he never wrote. Grace sees, though, that she has gained the upper hand; she rises to her feet and draws her fur scarf about her. This is reminiscient of Alida’s “delicate throat” comment earlier in the conversation, and Grace “clasped the fur about her throat” (20) as she tells her she feels sorry for her. The image of a “sheep in wolf’s clothing” comes to mind.
She might have stopped there, leaving Alida to imagine those long-ago embraces, reveling in the torture they would inflict upon her. But when Alida laughs that “after all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter he didn’t write” (20), Grace pulls out the big gun – and because Alida has already confessed her envy, Babs is the automatic weapon of choice. Motive, means and opportunity are flashing in big lights all over the terrace. Turning toward the door – exiting the stage, descending to a new depth, departing on her own terms – Grace takes a step, turns back, and delivers the blow that Babs was conceived that night in the Colosseum.
Touché.
Then she begins to move ahead, toward the stairway – the same stairway on which the girls’ voices had been heard at the beginning of the story, laughing at the idea of their boring old mothers knitting away up top. The knitting is left behind. It is no longer needed.
Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, the retrospective view of Roman Fever implicates Grace Ansley in a vengeful scheme to reduce Alida Slade to ruin – and the scheme works. The name of Slade, buried under slander and scandal, will never again be resurrected. Grace has won, simply because Alida has finally lost what she had lorded over her for so long: her man, her marriage, her image, her reputation. She is left with placid Jenny, the nursemaid – and she certainly needs one now.
One must never underestimate those frumpy, irreproachable knitters.
Works Cited
“Baedeker Travel Guides.” Cartographica Neerlandica. Created 7/26/1998. Accessed 5/13/03.
<http://www.orteliusmaps.com/baedeker.html>
Bloom, Harold, ed. Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
“Delphinium.” The Language of Flowers.” Baack’s Florists and Greenhouses. Retrieved
5/8/03. <http://www.baacks.com/thelanguageofflowers/list.html>
Poupard, Dennis, ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. TCLC 9. Detroit: Gale
Research Co., 1983.
“Rome.” Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved 5/8/03.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps/arch/rome.html>
“Slade.” Last Name Meanings Dictionary. MyFamily.com, Inc. Copyright 2002. Retrieved
5/8/03. <http://www.last-names.net/index.asp>
Wharton, Edith. Roman Fever. New York: Scribner-Simon & Schuster, 1997.