32 pages • 1 hour read
John Edgar WidemanFever
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: John Edgar Wideman
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racist violence.
John Edgar Wideman is a writer and professor best known for his commitment to reckoning with African American history in literature. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wideman attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he would later teach the university’s first courses in African American literature. He was an accomplished student, athlete, and writer from a young age, earning international recognition on all fronts, including being named a Rhodes Scholar by Oxford University. His personal experience and family history have played a large role in shaping the social critique in his writing.
Despite his fame and success, Wideman was subject to forms of institutional racism that shaped his family life and writing. Most significant for Wideman was his brother’s criminalization and incarceration, which he wrote about extensively in his 1984 memoir, Brothers and Keepers. Wideman’s brother, Robert, was involved as an accomplice in the robbery and accidental death of a neighbor. Although the neighbor’s death was largely a consequence of inadequate healthcare services in Pittsburgh, and Robert himself was only a witness to the shooting, the Pennsylvania courts found him guilty of second-degree murder. Wideman’s memoir examines the criminal justice system and the experience of life in prison, particularly for African Americans. Like “Fever,” the book uses an experimental form, moving between multiple voices, including those of Wideman and his brother.
Wideman’s 1989 short story collection, Fever, from which this story is taken, marked the beginning of the most prolific period of his career. Wideman’s next novel, Philadelphia Fire, published in 1990, picks up where “Fever” leaves off by chronicling and dissecting the bombing of Osage Avenue in 1985. The unprecedented police bombing of the 6200 block of Osage Avenue was ordered by Mayor Goode, who sought to violently halt the activity of the Black liberation group called MOVE. Like the yellow fever epidemic, the incident exposed the deep hypocrisies of the city’s leadership and its merciless attempt to silence Black dissent. Wideman’s novel focuses on a main character who attempts to find a child survivor of the bombing.
Wideman’s work continues to focus on the experience of African Americans as they move through and are impacted by the criminal justice system and other American institutions.
Historical Context: The Yellow Fever
In 1793, yellow fever brought to the fore issues of racial prejudice and the impacts of colonial slavery on the ostensibly free city of Philadelphia. The fever lasted about 100 days, beginning in late July and continuing through November. As one of the hottest and dampest cities on the eastern seaboard, Philadelphia was surrounded by stagnant swamps and is framed by two major rivers. Since the fever is transmitted through mosquitoes, the humid summer months combined with cramped and dilapidated housing near the city’s ports created the perfect conditions for the fever to thrive. As has often been the case in the history of plagues and epidemics, the chaos and fear surrounding the fever led to an anti-social, individualist attitude among the wealthy and those with means to escape to the countryside. Controversy around the origin of the fever, how it might be treated, and who received care all exacerbated and laid bare the inequalities among white and Black people living in the city. Philadelphia was the epicenter of American medicine and a city with a thriving free Black population; the fever exposed the underlying prejudices that structured its day-to-day life.
Many at the time believed that the fever was brought to Philadelphia from the West Indies, especially from Santo Domingo, where uprisings of enslaved people had brought thousands of self-liberated people and enslavers to the city. Dr. Benjamin Rush, too, claimed that people of color were immune to the fever. The rumor shifted an undue burden onto free Black people who managed to survive the fever’s initial spread, as Rush and others called on them to act as undertakers, gravediggers, and caretakers. Allen and others answered the call. Despite these sacrifices, the epidemic’s official chronicler, Matthew Carey, falsely accused the city’s Black population of selfishness and even causing the epidemic. Wideman’s story is dedicated to Carey, positioning his fictionalized retelling as a response to the “libelous account” that unjustly denigrated the “unselfish, courageous labours” of the Black nurses and undertakers who saved the city from peril (127).
Wideman’s choice to narrate “Fever” largely from the perspective of Richard Allen is also significant, as Allen was a major public figure and leader of the free Black community in Philadelphia. Allen and his colleague Absolam Jones wrote a pamphlet refuting Carey’s slanderous claims and defending the sacrifices that they and many other Black people made to save the city from absolute calamity. Wideman features excerpts from this pamphlet in the early pages of his story. His retelling, overall, contributes to the literary history of the fever and African American culture in Philadelphia, particularly as it draws parallels between the city’s past and present treatment of Black communities.
Literary Context: Plague Literature
John Wideman’s 1989 story “Fever” participates in a literary tradition of plague literature. Epidemics have long prompted writers to produce collage-like or pastiche renderings of events. Literary texts have attempted to show how these crises inspire doubt and anxiety about the stability of the status quo, shaking structures that people take for granted by revealing them to be a fragile house of cards. The most significant example is Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a fictional account of the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague in London. Defoe’s narrator incorporates both real and invented statistical data, city officials’ safety recommendations, and one survivor’s recollections. Together, these illustrate the inability of official institutions to document or capture the “truth” or reliably act with beneficent authority. Like Defoe, Wideman’s text inspires doubt in the infallibility of the social institutions that are meant to keep society functioning safely. While much of Defoe’s critique took aim at religious and mercantile institutions, Wideman targets the role of racial ideology in the management of the crisis, the distribution of resources, and even the advancement of medical science. This critique appears in both the content and form of the narrative, as Wideman demonstrates the ways that the “truth” of the matter evades authoritative modes of discovering and recording facts: All bear the trace of an anti-Black racial ideology.
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