Roman Fever Symbolism Essay

Every day we use symbols. Astrology symbols, street signs, the little men and women on bathroom doors, really almost all signs with images instead of words serve to communicate information more efficiently. Literary symbols are more complex than just an image we are familiar with, like the cartoon figure of a man or woman to mark bathrooms. When reading a story we can often miss symbols. Re-reading a story to look for deeper meanings is always recommended, especially as symbols can have more than one meaning. However it is always better to miss a symbol than overanalyze a story.
Authors use symbols to be able to make their short stories meaningful in the small space provided, they compress meaning into every word. Literary symbols work to add …show more content…
As the story opens Grace begins knitting something from red crimson silk. Grace is described as “small and pale,” which contrasts with the color and quality of her knitting, placing importance upon it (Wharton 1). The crimson silk represents Grace’s internal passion and the knitting represents the tangled, interwoven lives of the two women. When Alida reveals that she knows that Grace went to meet Delphin Grace’s knitting “slid in a panic-stricken heap to the ground”, this symbolizes fall of the knitting to the ground symbolizes the collapse of their friendship as all the contention between them about Delphin is brought …show more content…
The entire context of the story supports that these are in fact symbols, by the title itself pointing to Roman fever and the emphasis on knitting during key points in the conversation between the two friends. Symbolism plays an important role in Roman Fever as it highlights and reinforces what is going on in the story, the use of symbolism with Roman fever is especially effective because the it is multi-faceted as well as being both literal and symbolic. In literature symbol plays an important role in simplifying complex ideas and dynamics enough to be able to input them into a short