The Short Story Archives - Page 18 of 31

Roman Fever

August 21, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Roman Fever (1934) is one of the most famous and frequently reprinted of Edith Wharton’s short stories. It first appeared in her collection of stories The World Over which was published in 1936.

The Colosseum in moonlight

Roman Fever – critical comments

Daisy Miller

This story offers a satirical version of the theme treated by Henry James in his famous novella Daisy Miller. James’s heroine Daisy incautiously ventures out into the Colosseum at night, catches fever, and later dies. His story is one of unfulfilled promise and a life tragically foreshortened.

Edith Wharton’s use of the same scenario is lighter, more satirical, and it has a positive outcome in the creation of Barbara – who is mentioned but never appears in the story. Edith Wharton was a close friend of Henry James and knew his work well. In fact their literary styles are vaguely similar – though James focuses more intensely on the psychological complexities between his characters.

The Colosseum at Night

This image and mise en scene combines two cultural elements which contemporary readers might find puzzling. In the nineteenth century, European locations such as Paris, Rome, and Athens – anywhere south of the English Channel – represented places of general permissiveness and sexual license to visitors from Anglo-Saxon cultures. This included upper-class tourists from both Britain and America.

There was a great deal of what we would now call ‘sexual tourism’ which went along with the Grand Tour – and the levels of permissiveness increased the further south and east the journey progressed. Other works playing with the same theme include Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1905).

At the same time, female tourists on this journey would be expected to maintain the sort of standards which obtained in London and New York. Unmarried women would be chaperoned on all occasions, and certainly not allowed out late at night.

However, the excuse of seeing the Colosseum at night might give a single man and woman an excuse to be alone together – unsupervised. Hence the details mentioned in the story that special arrangements could be made to make the building accessible after its formal closing hours. Alida Slade reminds Grace that –

“It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed, it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You know that?”

Grace Ainsley met Alida’s fiancé Delphin Slade that night, and they had a sexual liaison that led to pregnancy. Her indisposition at the time was described as an ‘illness’, and within two months she was married to Horace Ainsley – just in time for the child (Barbara) to be passed off as a natural product of that union.

Parallels

The architecture of the story is underpinned by a number of very subtle parallels. Alida and Grace originally met each other in Rome many years ago, on a night with a full moon, as the night of the story is to be and as was the night of Grace’s meeting with Delphin.

The two women have daughters Jenny and Barbara who are also friends. They have gone off with Italian aviators and will probably fly back by moonlight. In other words, the daughters are doing the modern equivalent of what their mothers did. Moreover, the daughters too seem to be in competition for the same man – the aviator who is a Marchese, the Campolieri boy who is ‘one of the best matches in Rome’.

The parallels even reach further back in family history. For when Grace Ansley’s great aunt was in Rome many years before, she was also in competition with her sister for the love of the same man, and sent her out on a night-time expedition for a flower – which resulted in the girl’s death.

Roman Fever – study resources

Roman Fever – Capuchin Classics – Amazon UK

Roman Fever – Capuchin Classics – Amazon US

Roman fever – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Roman fever – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Roman Fever – eBook at About.com

Roman Fever – free audioBook – Amazon UK

Roman Fever (and other stories) – Virago edition – Amazon UK

Roman Fever (and other stories) – Virago edition – Amazon US

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Roman Fever – plot summary

Part I
Alida Slade and Grace Ansley, two middle-aged upper-class American women are sitting on the restaurant terrace of their hotel overlooking Rome after lunch. They have known each other for many years, and their daughters (who are also friends) have gone out for the afternoon.

The two women compare their own youthful experiences of Rome with those possible for young women of their daughters’ generation. They are ostensibly full of sympathetic understanding for each other, but actually there is an understated competition between them in matronly feeling and virtue.

Part II
A great deal of their concern centres upon the traditional worry of catching fever in Rome as a result of incautious excursions in public after sunset. Alida Slade suddenly recalls that Grace Ansley once caught a severe chill in such circumstances many years before.

Furthermore, she knows that Grace went out to meet Delphin Slade in the Colosseum at night, even though he had just become engaged to Alida herself. She even remembers the exact words of the letter inviting Grace to meet him there – because as she suddenly decides to reveal, she wrote the letter herself.

It is clear that the two women were in competition for the same man. Alida claims that she wrote the letter as a sort of joke – so that Grace would turn up at the Colosseum and be left wandering around alone late at night, waiting for somebody who wouldn’t turn up.

But Grace reveals that she replied to the letter and she did meet Delphin Slade, and they did visit the Colosseum by night. The two women are forced to acknowledge the full scale of rivalry and animosity between them.

They then revert to a form of competitive and patronising sympathy for each other. But Grace plays her trump card by obliquely revealing that her daughter Barbara was the product of this one night’s romantic liaison.

Principal characters

Mrs Grace Ansley	a middle-aged American woman
Horace Ansley	her husband
Barbara	her daughter
Mrs Alida Slade	a middle-aged American woman, and long term friend
Mr Delphin Slade	Alida’s husband, a corporation lawyer
Jenny	Alida’s daughter

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Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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The Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Sanctuary

January 30, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Sanctuary was first published in 1903, and is thus only Edith Wharton’s third published fictional work, after the two earlier novellas The Touchstone and The Valley of Decision.

Sanctuary – critical comment

Structure

The structure of the tale is relatively simple – and is closely connected with what seems to be its principal meanings. The narrative is divided into two parts which are connected by the presence in both of Kate Orme-Peyton. In the first part Kate is presented with a moral dilemma. Her fiancé Denis inherits money from his step-brother Arthur by morally underhand means.

Arthur’s wife and child have been disinherited. Denis has known about the existence of Arthur’s wife all along, and yet he has not revealed the fact at the court proceedings. He is prepared to accept the tainted inheritance, even though he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of Arthur’s wife and child – because the wife has taken their lives in despair.

Denis has looked after his step-brother Arthur (just as Dick will look after Paul) – but he has betrayed him nevertheless, by withholding knowledge of the marriage during the court proceedings. He has also tried to buy off the wife and salve his own conscience by offering her money – which she refuses.

Kate is appalled by this behaviour and what she sees as a lack of moral fibre. She suggests to Denis that he has a duty to own up to the truth publicly and that he should forfeit the money. When he refuses to do so, she ceases to love him and puts the marriage on hold.

But she then conceives of her grand sacrificial scheme. She realizes that Denis is likely to marry somebody else and have a child ‘born to an inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be born with some hidden physical taint’. Rather than that, she decides to marry Denis and bring up his child under her own protection.

In the second part of the tale she has therefore raised her son Dick in this self-sacrificing manner, and her husband Denis has proved himself a moral wastrel after all by squandering his inheritance. But she now fears a repetition of the same events, which are directly paralleled in the case of Dick and his close friend Paul Darrow. The friend dies, leaving Dick an inheritance of the architectural designs which could win the competition. These designs have even been passed over to Dick quite willingly, and there is a temptress in the sidelines (Clemence Verney) urging him to profit from this morally dubious act.

His mother is anxious that he will succumb to the temptation, but does nothing to directly interfere. In the end we are asked to believe that his mother’s moral influence prevails – though it is stretching credibility when Dick renounces the prospect of marriage to Clemence only twenty-four hours after becoming engaged to her – and at that point the tale takes on a distinct suggestion of nineteenth century melodrama, with a last-minute resolution to the drama.

A Freudian interpretation

Edith Wharton was over forty when she wrote Sanctuary. She had no children of her own, and her marriage to her husband Teddy was less than satisfactory – but it is difficult to find anything in her private life that would explain or throw light on the extraordinary illustration of the Electra complex which this tale reveals.

Kate Orme is radiantly happy with her fiancé at the start of this tale, but then discovering that he is morally flawed, she rapidly falls out of love with him. Nevertheless, she decides to marry him so that he will not marry and father a child with someone else (from whom he is likely to conceal his moral turpitude). Kate reasons to herself that by taking on his ‘sin’ she can prevent it from being passed on unknown to another generation.

In other words, she embarks upon a path of controlling biologically and psychologically the next generation. We do not have an account of the intervening years, but when Dick Peyton emerges as a young architect on Fifth Avenue, presumably twenty-odd years later, the bond between him and his mother is pitched at a very serious emotional level. She has travelled to France and lived with him during his post-graduate studies at the Beaux-Arts. She wishes to control his actions; she disapproves of his fiancée Clemence and they dispute quite openly over the ability to influence him.

Eventually, Dick reverses his actions and allegiances, and allies himself with his mother – knowing that he is sacrificing his success as an architect and his prospective marriage to Clemence. He is resisting the compromising lure of easy success – for morally good (though scarcely credible) reasons – but the decision ties him even more closely to the mother who has had his destiny in mind before he was even born.

We do not know what happens beyond the text, but by the end of the tale Kate Peyton emerges as a successfully controlling mother figure (with good motives) whose feckless husband is dead and who has a somewhat unhealthily close relationship with her son. It is reasonable to see this as an illustration of the Jocasta complex first proposed by Raymond de Saussure in 1920 – which may be described as ‘different degrees of attachment, including domineering but asexual mother love – something perhaps particularly prevalent with an intelligent son and an absent or weak father figure’.

Form

This is a difficult piece of work to place in terms of literary form. The narrative lacks the range and the social depth of even a short novel, and for that reason it is often categorised as a novella – the story of young woman who discovers ‘the moral sewage that surrounds her’ (Houghton Mifflin). But Kate has made this discovery half way through the tale, and spends its second part making what turns out to be a successful act of resistance to it. She does not learn anything new in the second part of the narrative: she merely hopes that her passive moral stance will prevail – which is does. This is not the shape or the structure of events shared by classic novellas.

It also does not have the densely concentrated complexity of a novella, apart from the similarity of the two ‘inheritances’. And given that the events are stretched over the time scale of two generations, it lacks the temporal unity and the compression of events required by the novella form. Yet it is more ‘shaped’ than simply a long story – and might therefore better be classified as a tale – a form sufficiently elastic to accept anything which is squashed into it. However, others might wish to argue that the structural parallels of the two temptations and the continuity of Kate’s presence constitute the case for it being considered a novella.

Sanctuary – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Sanctuary – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Sanctuary – plot synopsis

PART ONE

Part I. Arthur Peyton has died under dubious circumstances after a long illness, leaving his inheritance to his step-brother Denis, who has been engaged to Kate Orme for two months. Denis arrives to see Kate with the news that a woman claiming to be Arthur’s wife has killed herself and her child, having lost an inheritance claim in court against the family, who denied that Arthur was married.

Part II. Kate has lived a protected life and now feels that she is facing the grim realities of the world. But when she expresses her sympathetic understanding of the dead woman’s situation to Denis, he reveals that he knew all along that Arthur was married.

Part III. The woman previously nursed Arthur through his illness, married him, and bore him a child. A lawyer has pursued her claim for inheritance in court, but lost the case. Arthur made over his inheritance to Denis, but no witnesses to this agreement are traceable, and Denis could face jail for misleading the court. Kate feels that Denis is responsible for the deaths of two people and is bitterly disappointed in him.

Part IV. Denis’s mother visits Kate to pleads his case, based upon the supposition that he is honourable and innocent. Kate feels socially pressured, but feels that she must stand by a decision to postpone the marriage.

When her father returns home from business, he reveals to Kate a similar scandal in another remote part of their family. Kate reflects on the element of corruption lurking beneath the polite surface of life. She then persuades herself that she might expiate Denis’s sin by marrying him – so that he does not pass on his tainted inheritance to some other woman’s child.

PART TWO

Part I. A generation later Kate’s son Dick is in an architecture practice on Fifth Avenue. Denis has died long ago, after squandering the inheritance. Kate has devoted herself protectively to her son, who she fears might have inherited his father’s weakness of character. Dick has entered an architecture competition along with his industrious friend Paul Darrow. Dick also wishes to impress a female admirer, Clemence Verney.

Part II. Kate discusses ambition and architecture with Miss Verney at Dick’s office tea party. Then she discusses Miss Verney with the clever but gauche Paul Darrow, who has completed his own competition entry designs. Both of them suspect Miss Verney of being an ambitious social climber.

Part III. Dick has not completed his competition designs, and is running out of time. Darrow falls ill with pneumonia, and Dick hastens to look after him. Kate feels guilty that she has sacrificed everything for her son, when he now appears to shirking his responsibilities to his chosen profession. But then Darrow dies, and it transpires that he has generously left Dick his own competitions designs to use.

Part IV. Dick inherits all Darrow’s effects, and decides his own competition plans are not good enough to submit. His mother protests, and asks to see both sets of designs so that they can judge. But he does not comply with her request, and she fears that all her vigilant protection of him will come to nothing.

Part V. Next day Dick leaves for the office without discussing the matter. Kate fears that his weak character will lead him into the easy temptation of passing off Darrow’s designs as his own. She meets Miss Verney at a concert, where the young woman admits her interest in Dick and her ambition on his behalf. Kate reveals the issue of Darrow’s bequest, but Miss Verney argues that this fully justifies Dick’s appropriation of the designs as his own for the competition.

Part VI. Two days later Dick decides to dine out, but then his business partner Gill calls at the house looking for him. He phones to Miss Verney’s house, and the conversation reveals to Kate that Dick is using Darrow’s sketches to complete his own competition entry. When Dick arrives home, it is to announce his engagement to Clarence Verney.

Part VII. Kate feels that Miss Verney has triumphed over her in the struggle for Dick’s conscience.However, Miss Verney has stipulated that the engagement should not be made public until after the competition result has been announced.

Part VIII. On the eve of the competition judgements Kate goes to the opera, spots Miss Verney, and retreats in defeat. She calls at Dick’s offices on her way home. There he reveals that after a long struggle he has felt his mother’s silent influence prevailing, and has decided to give up the competition – and by implication his engagement to Miss Verney as well.

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