Entries in the Category "roman fever"
Roman Fever and Other Stories
I just read Edith Wharton's Roman Fever and Other Stories, a post-semester pleasure for me.
Everything about Edith Wharton's work is stately, like an antique fainting couch in a museum, its frame hand-carved, its fabric delicately embroidered. But somehow, the stories are not stifling. Some are sly and humorous, like "Roman Fever" and "Xingu," which both make fools of people who think they know more than they do.
What I really love about Wharton, though—and The Age of Innocence, arguably her most famous work, is a great example of this, too—is the way she lays out her characters' conflicts quite transparently, all so readers can admire how inevitably people misunderstand and unwittingly abuse one another. You want to take her characters by the shoulders and translate for them.
I especially love how she dissects marriage, the roles that couples play for each other and how restrictive they can be. "Souls Belated" is an amazing story about how you build a new relationship out of an affair--if you flouted the convention of marriage once, do you just jump back into it? Do you invite the same people to your dinner parties and pretend things haven't changed? "The Other Two" is about a man trying to feel disaffected about doing business with his current wife's last husband. In a way it's all very old-fashioned, but it's also incredibly relatable.
Wharton also never fails to comment on the way people and habits evolve over time. In "Autres Temps..." ("Other Times...") a woman who left her husband twenty years ago, and regretted the social isolation that followed, overhears two young women talking. Through their conversation she discovers that in the ensuing decades, behavior has become so much freer that leaving one's husband for another man has become the thing to do:
All of their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them—her name was Mabel—as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement ring.
The only legitimate criticism I've ever heard of Edith Wharton is that her work is exclusively rich and white. I once read a Marxist critic who complained that "the worker" wasn't present in Wharton's work, that the servants toiled behind the scenes. This is really not to be denied. (Well, I think one of the ladies in The House of Mirth works in a hat shop, but, you know.) Still, I don't find that a valid reason to discount the work she did. She had a narrow lens, sure. But can't we admire the depth of focus?