Welcome classmates and other interested readers! This website is a presentation of our group collaborative analysis on Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever”. The site is the result of a literary project in which we divided the work and research evenly between the group members according to their particular interest and talents. The goal for our group was to achieve a literary analysis that demonstrated thoughtful reading, research, and reflection of “Roman Fever”. The focus of this project is to give the audience of our website an insight into Wharton’s work.
Our group decided to format our presentation in the form of a website so we could expand our audience beyond just Dr. Reiss and our American Literature classmates. Arjun Thakur volunteered to work on the website because he is a skilled website designer. He formatted the site to be simple and easy to navigate. It was his responsibility to add and organize the literary elements to the website as he received them.
Shawn Olsen focused on the historical and cultural context of “Roman Fever”. He focused on researching the societal factors that could have influenced Wharton’s writing. By looking at the cultural norms of Edith Wharton’s time period, he was able to relate certain themes and underlying motifs to the ideologies of the early 20th century.
Biographical details of Wharton’s life were researched by Melissa Zarnoch. She found that many aspects of Wharton’s life were directly reflected in her writing. Most importantly, she chose to focus on Wharton’s selection of setting and how she portrayed her views of society through her two main characters, Ansley and Slade. Wharton had very strong opinions about the society she was raised in and exposed her feelings through the actions and attitudes of the women in this short story. Since Wharton’s literature was based on her personal experiences, Melissa found Wharton’s opinions on high class society and culture to be the most significant points of “Roman Fever” to analyze in relation to her life.
Collaborative research on significant literary features was done by Brittany Crosby and Kelly Bowers. Brittany enjoys “dissecting” literary works, and therefore chose to work on the literary elements portion of this project. She illustrated the prevalence of the idea of sexual threat and history repeating itself throughout this short story. These themes are illustrated through the metaphorical meaning of the title, in which Roman fever actually means sexual promiscuity and threat. In addition, the battle between two “friends” and their struggle to force each other out of the other’s lives illustrates the idea of sexual threat. Finally, the theme of history repeating itself is pronounced both in the two women's constant battle for love and eventually in their daughters' behavior. These two literary elements are very important throughout “Roman Fever”. Kelly focused on the literary element of foreshadowing. She showed how Edith Wharton used foreshadowing to aid the reader in figuring out the surprising twist at the end of the story, giving enough clues to the reader to figure out what happened twenty-five years earlier.
Michael Anderson chose Alice Hall Petry and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney to focus on as two critics of Edith Wharton’s story. He used their ideas to explore the deeper meaning of the act of knitting and to further our understanding of the title of “Roman Fever”.
Visual and media support was provided by Brian Kujawski. As group members posted their writings onto our webpage, Brain read over these writings and researched to find visual support for the text. We felt it was important to include visual support because many people are visual learners and my not recall information from a particular passage; however, if they can see a picture in their heads, they can be reminded of the information in the written text. Also, being as this story has a particular setting, gathering pictures of Rome gave readers who may not be familiar with the city a visual image of the setting.
Rachel Hannah’s job was to edit the literary aspects as they came into their final form. Once she received them, she edited them as necessary and sent them back to the original author to be approved. Once approved, they would be sent to Arjun to be posted on the website.
This project was created entirely through online communication, our group never met in person. Instead, we used group chats and discussion boards to keep each other updated, stay organized and swap files we were working on. We hope you enjoy reading our interpretations and analysis of Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever”!