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Roman Fever |
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written
by sunyuh / 09.12.2005 |
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Assignment |
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Edit lived in New York, divorced and moved to Paris. She was a part of the upper society that Slade and Ansley would have been in. She knew this world, and usually wrote about it in a perspective that was startling to the world outside of it.
This is too general, and perhaps on an absolute scale untrue, but Rome (and perhaps most of the world) has been built on differing shades or morals, lies, betrayals, and truths. The two ladies, “…looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval (Wharton, 1).” Regardless of its history, the two of them can agree beforehand that the Forum is beautiful in its present, in its fragments and decay.
This isn’t to say that the past is unimportant when standing in the present, and future. But sometimes it is. As cruel as it is, we cannot see or feel the burning of Rome during Nero’s time, the countless wars—no one today blames Romans for their source in architecture and arts. Even with ‘truths,’ there is only so much that the past can offer. This is not a justification for Rome, for Ansley, or Slade. But there is a daughter, there was a letter, and there exists the Forum.
Usually, in Wharton’s novels (ex, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth) there are protagonists. In this story, it is almost as if both characters are antagonists of a kind. Slade’s character is too easy to unfold. She is loud, talks too much, is annoying. But why make an antagonist out of Mrs. Ansley, shy quiet, nice Ansley? The sympathy could go either way; the betrayal only one.
The Forum is the foreshadow of the lives the two ladies have been leading. The countless stories of betrayal between brothers, friends into enemies, enemies into friends—all absurd in a way, yet for a reason that can be explained only if one is the protagonist (power, daughters, memories).
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