Roman Fever and Other Stories pdf Edith Wharton Free Download

PERHAPS the most remarkable thing about Edith Wharton’s fiction is the wide range of subjects it addresses. Some of the full-length novels, like Ethan Frome and Summer, deal with the natives of the impoverished New England hill country. Others, like The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, chronicle the sweeping ruthlessness of America’s turn-of-the-century nouveaux riches—an insensitive horde that plundered and vandalized wherever there was a profit to be made. Still others, like The Age of Innocence, scrutinize the rigid pieties of New York’s fading “aristocracy,” the Yankee and Dutch families whose money and power declined after the Civil War. Wharton wrote a “problem” novel about a New England mill-town (The Fruit of the Tree); she wrote a war novel (A Son at the Front); she even wrote a murder novel of sorts (Twilight Sleep). Wharton has often been characterized as a superb satirist; and although it is true that there is a powerful satiric element in most of the major fiction that she wrote, there is something else as well, something more subtle, perhaps, and more delicate: the capacity to understand the nuances of human pain. Much of Wharton’s satire proceeds by demonstrating the ways in which a corrupt social system will inevitably distort character and curtail the possibility for happiness. Indeed, perhaps the universal characteristic in all of Wharton’s work is a profound concern with the ever-changing relationship between individual liberty and social context.

Wharton wrote scores of short stories, and they draw upon the full range of the full-length fictions; what is more, within the context of these more limited works, she was able to experiment with still other forms (she wrote a substantial number of “ghost stories,” for example). All bear her unique stamp—a scrupulous attention to the interplay between individual character and the society that works to shape and constrain it; yet in the shorter fictions, the scope is necessarily more narrow. Thus while a novel can sweep through long periods of time and many strata of society, the short stories generally focus upon a single crucial insight: sometimes this insight is available to the characters themselves (often tragically so); at other times, however, only the reader is able to comprehend the full implications of the small drama that has been played out within the tale.

“After Holbein” is something of a tour de force, a story in which the characters can comprehend little or nothing of their actual circumstances (circumstances that are revealed slowly and horrifyingly to the reader). One might call it a ghost story, for Anson Warley and Mrs. Jasper are but phantoms of a time long past, some species of the living dead. Yet the story does more than merely shock the reader; it raises interesting questions about the spectral world in which these aged shadows enact their drama. What were its values? Are the customs to which the couple cling an adequate or complete rendering of the full amplitude of the now-vanished society in which they spent the better part of their lives, or are Anson Warley and Mrs. Jasper doomed to this form of minor madness because they failed to grasp those elements of their background that might have provided some enduring value?

The short New England tale “The Angel at the Grave” raises some of the same questions (and indeed, might also be deemed a kind of ghost story). One “ghost” is the reputation of the once-distinguished scholar Orestes Anson. Yet there is possibly another “ghost” here, the young woman who “had been born, as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label; the first foundations of her consciousness being built upon the rock of her grandfather’s celebrity.” Angels at a grave are generally pieces of sculpture, graceful and unchanging figures in stone; and it is, perhaps, to this fate that Paulina is eventually brought. Other American authors like Jewett and Freeman had written poignantly about the fate of rural spinsters. Wharton’s story gives the conventional formula a wry twist. Did Paulina sacrifice her own life for a noble cause, or is she—despite the lofty trappings of academic distinction—really no more than the counterpart of those other lonely New England women?

The remaining stories in this collection focus upon the urban and the cosmopolitan worlds. “Xingu” may be the most lighthearted piece of satire Wharton ever wrote. It takes aim at pretentiousness, snobbishness, and above all the kind of “gotten-up learning” that tries to pass itself off as “culture.” Yet even “Xingu” has a sober side and one which is characteristic of much in Wharton’s best work. The shallow group who have erected false standards of self-esteem are all women: one might even say (after a merely superficial reading of the tale), that Wharton had a paradoxically anti-feminist streak in her work. Yet what may seem to be misogynism is, in fact, a subtle, often brilliantly compelling form of satire.

As a woman writer, Wharton did not have direct access to the arenas of power; the women of Wharton’s era rarely became doctors or lawyers or business people, and at a time when the stock exchange in New York seemed to many the very center of the universe, women were explicitly barred from it. Thus, if a woman wished to write social satire, she was constrained to demonstrate the ways in which a corrupt public world eventually disrupted the domestic world. This might seem a crippling handicap; however, in Wharton’s deft hands, it became a strength. Precisely because they had very little real power in the fast-paced world of high finance or international government, women were often the most brutally wounded casualties of duplicity, brutality, and greed in the society as a whole. Wharton created any number of heroines who are difficult to admire (however much we may sympathize with their plight). Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is passive, indecisive, and narcissistic; Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country is manipulative, callous, and crudely ambitious. Insofar as a reader is called upon to judge them, the conclusion would have to lean strongly in the negative direction. Yet Wharton would enjoin the intelligent and perceptive reader to make a further observation.

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