32 pages • 1 hour read
Fever
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Symbols & Motifs
Water
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racist violence.
The story uses the motif of water to highlight the interconnectedness of humans with each other and nature, an intimacy that is often denied by social structures like racism and colonial slavery. In the story, Wideman references the water that carries slave ships from Haiti to Philadelphia, with many passengers dying below deck on the journey; the mosquitos that thrive and breed in standing water, spreading the contagion; and Water Street and its surrounding alleys filled with swampy dilapidated housing on the Delaware River. Wideman writes that “[f]ever descends when the waters that connect us are clogged with filth. […] The waters cannot come and go when we are shut off one from the other” (132). The passage suggests that water is a metaphor for the natural features of life that connect humankind. Rendering structures like slavery and racism as “filth” that disrupts these natural connections, Wideman portrays the way water has both life-giving potential and deadly power.
Bodies
“Fever” contains frequent images of bodies, using these to symbolize the city, the moral bankruptcy of colonial slavery, and the long-term consequences of anti-Black racism. Rush and his assistant dissect bodies, searching desperately for the cause of the fever in hopes of finding its cure. Breaking bodies down into infinitely smaller pieces, Rush and his assistants objectify the bodies of the sick and dead, failing to witness their humanity and suffering.
Wideman includes passages that imitate Rush’s cold attitude, giving the description of a dead autopsied body that might appear in a medical chart: “The liver weighs 1720 grams. The spleen weighs 150 grams. The right kidney weighs 190 grams. The left kidney weighs 180 grams. The testes show a glistening white tunica albuginea. Sections are unremarkable” (147). The final sentence emphasizes this point. Rather than discovering some hidden truth about the fever, the turning of the body into a set of objects is of no “remarkable” consequence. Anti-Black racism renders this body a set of discrete and measurable parts to Rush.
The Grotesque
Wideman’s “Fever” consistently uses vocabulary and imagery that emphasizes the grotesque and ugly features of the world. This motif includes descriptions of diseased bodies, mass death, and a city in crisis. However, it functions to highlight both significant ethical questions raised by the city’s response to the fever and history’s memory of its response: the dispassionate nature of Dr. Rush, Allen’s disgust with the city’s neglect of people of African descent, and the dark underbelly of a city that was meant to be a “beacon of hope.”
When Allen and Dr. Rush visit Bush Hill, where a gravedigger is moving bodies, they witness a gruesome scene involving a dead body that had “burst, spraying Wilcox like a fountain,” resulting in a “reeking stench” (145). Wilcox, like Allen, is an African American called to serve the city after being blamed for the fever initially and is tasked with the gory work of dealing with the dead. The scene is designed to strike horror and portray the transformation of humans into objects: dead bodies that can barely be handled with care.
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By John Edgar Wideman
