Life Stories Of Grace And Alida example essay topic

In the short story called The Roman Fever brings up many metaphoric ideas that make this story effective. After analyzing this short story, there were many ideas that ran through this story, but three main metaphoric ideas really stuck out to me. The metaphor of the illness, that deals with hate and life, the sexuality rivalry, and the surprise ending that the reader does not expect. This story is very effective because of how the life stories of Grace, and Alida affected their two daughters, and explaining how they have been guarded, because of the way their mothers were raised.

This story is based around Grace and Alida's girlhood and Grace's illness after a nighttime sightseeing trip. After reading the story the personal conclusion that was derived was that the status of illness in the story is metaphoric rather than material; the transgressively sexual content of Roman fever is developed by its modern parallel in the "cold" Grace catches, whose implied outcome marks it as a cover story for a quite different bodily condition. While Roman fever probably refers to malaria, the metaphoric use of illness in this story to me corresponds with the historical treatment of cholera. When reading about the roman fever in the early nineteenth century, many physicians were said to believe that the person who caught cholera had "predisposed himself to the disease" through sin, including "sexual excess".

The transgression of sexual mores and the transgression of other values, sisterhood or friendship, are so intertwined in this story that the definite meaning of the title is unclear. So when Grace Ansley came up sick because she went to the Forum many things ran through people's minds because of what physicians were said to believe. Roman fever may be a metaphor for transgressively sexuality, for sexual rivalry, or even for the hostility among women that the social pressures of courtship catalyze. You can believe this because of what Alida did to Grace trying to get her away from her fianc'e. During the time the two women were talking about their childhood Alida reveals to Grace her knowledge that Grace had really gone to the Forum to meet Alida's fianc'e, Delphin Slade. This is why the sexual rivalry was impelled by a mixture of jealousy, guilt, and vengeful satisfaction, Alida declares that she, not Delphin, wrote the letter summoning Grace to the meeting.

These three main metaphorical meanings have has many if not great effect on the two marriageable daughters, because when the two daughters leave for a un- chaperoned outing, they talk to each other about how they were raised and what each of them went through. The two daughters talk of how carefully their mothers guarded them, and how their own mothers were in turn warned of Roman fever to keep them in at night. Besides many metaphoric ideas running through this story, there is a very interesting but surprising ending that was not expected. The initial crisis is followed by a much more powerful one when Grace makes her own revelations about that night at the Forum.

Grace does not understand why Alida did the things she did. During the time the two girls went on their journey and the women were sitting and talking Alida told Grace about what she did because she believed that Grace would laugh about it. Alida told her; I told you because "I suppose I did it as a sort of a joke". But from everything Alida told Grace we should be able to assume Grace did not think it was a good "joke", because it made her look like she had done something dirty, and that is not what grace wanted people to think.

As the conversation came to an end, Grace remembered that Alida talked a lot about not having a close relationship with her daughter and, how she wishes that she had something to fall back on since Delphin is now dead. When Grace was leaving she turned and said "I had Barbara", (pg 193) meaning, even though you set up the whole meeting with dolphin and I, to make me look bad, I still had Barbara, Delphin's daughter.