Roman Fever

In 1878, Henry James published Daisy Miller, a novel about a flirtatious American girl who flouts society’s rules and dies from malaria contracted during a moonlight visit to the Colosseum. One of James’s best-known stories, then as now, Daisy Miller pits the United States against Europe, liberty and enthusiasm against custom and convention, innocence against experience, and the future against the past. The story is told from the perspective of Frederick Winterbourne, an American ex-patriot, whose persistent misreading of Daisy and her conduct has fatal consequences.

Written more than 50 years later, “Roman Fever” is an explicit reworking of James’s famous tale. Wharton and James were close friends, so there is no doubt that she was familiar with Daisy Miller. Separate from any personal connection between the authors, “Roman Fever” engages with the plot of Daisy Miller. In James’s story, Daisy is warned against meeting a Roman suitor at the Colosseum at night for two reasons: the danger of contracting malaria, one strand of which was called Roman Fever, and the impropriety of an unchaperoned encounter between an unmarried girl and a man.

Situating James’s story two generations later, Wharton offers a different outcome than the one that Daisy’s innocence, and earlier conventions, required.