Rome is one of the most beautifully ancient cities in the entire world. Its buildings, stones, and walkways hold a history all to their own, and each one has withstood the ages baring, and yet concealing, all. From the Pantheon and the Spanish Square to other famous monuments like the Colosseum, which serves as ground in the story "Roman Fever" by Edith Wharton, every building has its own piece of Roman secrecy just waiting to be told. Grace Ansley's character, one of the main in "Roman Fever", closely parallels that of Rome. The narration and constant Roman architectural references in the story help to manipulate the view the reader gets of the mysterious Mrs. Ansley and the history that belies her.
             "Roman Fever" is a short story, and being that way, it's a difficult task to develop a character and a relation to the reader without talking at the reader. Wharton, however, cleverly dodges such a bullet by utilizing several literary elements; such as imagery, foreshadowing, allusion, parallelism, and especially narration, to build her characters, more specifically, Grace Ansley. In "Roman Fever", Wharton uses a third person omniscient type of narrative to tell the story of Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley, two "well-cared-for middle age" women on vacation with their daughters in the ancient city of Rome. Wharton, although, places a twist on the narration in that she puts a limit on what kind of insights to the mind a reader may obtain in order to pose a specific impression. Take, for example, Mrs. Ansley, of whom the reader rarely sees the inner workings of her mind. Thus, the reader imagines her character as that of a shy, well mannered one, and is further confirmed of such an assumption by the thoughts of other characters, such as Mrs. Slade's. "Yes; Horace Ansley was – well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York. Good-looking, irreproac...