The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

Overview

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307949547
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Series:	Vintage Classics Series
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	418,192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, during the American Civil War. Wharton published her first short story in 1891; her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, in 1899; a novella called The Touchstone in 1900; and her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, in 1902. The book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. She died in 1937.

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the editor of The Portable Edith Wharton.

Date of Birth:

January 24, 1862

Date of Death:

August 11, 1937

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France

Education:

Educated privately in New York and Europe

Read an Excerpt

Book One

1

"Undine Spragg!-how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a prematurely wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid "bell-boy" had just brought in.

But her defense was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to smile on her visitor while Miss Spragg, with a turn of her quick young fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to read it.

"I guess it's meant for me," she merely threw over her shoulder at her mother.

"Did you ever, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg murmured with deprecating pride.

Mrs. Heeny, a stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed the mother's glance with good-humored approval.

"I never met with a lovelier form," she agreed, answering the spirit rather than the letter of her hostess's inquiry.

Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs in one of the private drawing rooms of the Hotel Stentorian. The Spragg rooms were known as one of the Looey suites,and the drawing room walls, above their wainscoting of highly varnished mahogany, were hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe. In the center of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human use, and Mrs. Spragg herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if she had been a wax figure in a show-window. Her attire was fashionable enough to justify such a post, and her pale soft-cheeked face, with puffy eye-lids and drooping mouth, suggested a partially melted wax figure which had run to double-chin.

Mrs. Heeny, in comparison, had a reassuring look of solidity and reality. The planting of her firm black bulk in its chair, and the grasp of her broad red hands on the gilt arms, bespoke an organized and self-reliant activity, accounted for by the fact that Mrs. Heeny was a "society" manicure and masseuse. Toward Mrs. Spragg and her daughter she filled the double role of manipulator and friend; and it was in the latter capacity that, her day's task ended, she had dropped in for a moment to "cheer up" the lonely ladies of the Stentorian.

The young girl whose "form" had won Mrs. Heeny's professional commendation suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from the window.

"Here-you can have it after all," she said, crumpling the note and tossing it with a contemptuous gesture into her mother's lap.

"Why-isn't it from Mr. Popple?" Mrs. Spragg exclaimed unguardedly.

"No-it isn't. What made you think I thought it was?" snapped her daughter; but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish disappointment: "It's only from Mr. Marvell's sister-at least she says she's his sister."

Mrs. Spragg, with a puzzled frown, groped for her eye-glass among the jet fringes of her tightly girded front.

Mrs. Heeny's small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity. "Marvell-what Marvell is that?"

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Edith Wharton: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

The Custom of the Country

Appendix A: Edith Wharton’s Outline and Notes for The Custom of the Country

1. “Undine chronology”
2. “Final version”
3. Additional Notes

Appendix B: Edith Wharton’s Correspondence about The Custom of the Country

1. To Morton Fullerton (15 May 1911)
2. To Bernard Berenson (16 May 1911)
3. To Bernard Berenson (6 August 1911)
4. To Charles Scribner (27 November 1911)
5. To Bernard Berenson (2 August 1913)

Appendix C: From Edith Wharton’s Autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934)

Appendix D: Contemporary Reviews

1. Nation (15 May 1913)
2. New York Times Review of Books (19 October 1913)
3. Independent (13 November 1913)
4. Athenaeum (15 November 1913)
5. Bookman (December 1913)
6. Times Literary Supplement (2 April 1914)
7. Forum (November 1915)

Appendix E: Women and Marriage

1. From Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (1811)
2. From Robert Grant, “The Art of Living, IX: The Case of Woman” (1895)
3. From Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination (1896)
4. Letter from Edith Wharton to John Hugh Smith (12 February 1909)
5. From Emma Goldman, “The Traffic in Women” (1910)

Appendix F: Competition and Consumerism

1. From Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
2. From Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
3. From George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)
4. From Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)

Appendix G: Aestheticism

1. From Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)
2. From Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination (1896)
3. From Henry James, The American Scene (1907)

Select Bibliography

Reading Group Guide

INTRODUCTION

Edith Wharton published her ninth novel, The Custom of the Country, in 1913, just after she had finalized her divorce and moved permanently to France. Somewhat naturally, it is a book about divorce, still considered an indecent topic for literature at that time. Wharton explores with satire and wisdom divorce as a distinctly American custom on the eve of the twentieth century. Near the end of the novel, matrons of French society (of the famous Faubourg Saint–Germain district) look on in horror as a parade of wealthy American women, twice– or thrice–married, attempt to infiltrate aristocratic society.

Nothing is more scandalous to them than the introduction to their group of Indiana Frusk, a plumber's daughter and former wife of a modest Midwesterner, now newly married to the wealthy financier

James Rolliver. As the novel's heroine, the unscrupulous Undine Spragg, learns from the Marquise de Trezac, formerly Miss Wincher of Potash Springs, a husband may have “friends” of the opposite sex but divorce from his wife is “out of the question” (p. 437). Throughout the novel, Undine both adapts and calls into question these various customs of marriage and divorce.

While the French may consider divorce a common American disease, America has its own Faubourg, called Washington Square, where dissolved marriages are viewed with equal scorn. We see this clearly in the novel's opening section. Undine's father, having made a small fortune in the Midwestern town of Apex, takes aim at New York high society. After two years of missteps, the Spraggs find their entree through the possible marriage between their daughter Undine and the romantic yet ineffectual Ralph Marvell, heir to one of New York's oldest families. In order to reach these elevated heights she must conceal a sensitive fact about her past: she was once married and divorced to a roughand– tumble youth back in Apex. In fact, Undine was once engaged to another man of Apex and, later in New York, to an Austrian riding instructor who was later exposed as a fraud. These facts have the potential to upset the Spragg/Marvell union. Ralph's mother provides some dinner table advice to Undine: “a divorced woman is still—thank heaven!—at a decided disadvantage” (p. 307). That roughand– tumble youth, Elmer Moffatt, arrives in New York with his own outsized ambitions and he agrees to exchange his discretion for an introduction to Old New York by Undine.

The marriage of Ralph and Undine vividly establishes the binary relationship between Old New York and New York's nouveaux riches, two groups vastly different in their means, their habitations, and their values. The Marvells, Fairfords, and Dragonets all trace their roots to the country's Founding Fathers. They live in comfortable but modest townhouses around Washington Square, near Greenwich Village. The men all receive an Ivy League education and then “lapse into more or less cultivated inaction,” exhibiting “a tranquil disdain for mere money–getting” (p. 297). Their only concern is with preserving their lineage and their time–honored traditions. In contrast to them stand the Driscolls and Van Degens, families whose wealth derives from suspicious financial transactions and market speculations. They build immense, garish mansions on New York's Upper West Side, which can barely contain their restless energy and insatiable appetite for new material objects. As the Princess Estradina comments late in the novel, referring to Undine and her class of social upstarts, “You appear to live on change and excitement” (p. 517).

The relationship between these two groups is often couched in terms of competitive, even Darwinian, survival. By the time Wharton started writing The Custom of the Country, Darwin's biological theories of evolution were being applied to human society; these ideas had great resonance among her readers. Ralph at one point refers to his mother and grandfather as “Aborigines . . . doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race” (p. 297). Later, after it is clear that his wife has abandoned Ralph and their child in search of a wealthier husband in Europe, his good friend Charles Bowen—a character whose name and observational skills invoke Darwin himself—claims that “poor Ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces” (p. 482). Finally, Ralph's cousin Clare, who is also entangled in a loveless marriage to a paragon of the nouveaux riches, despairingly says to Ralph “you and I are completely out of date” (p. 482). In this contest between social species, Ralph and his breed are no match for the likes of Undine, who possesses that essential Darwinian talent for survival, an “instinct of adapting herself to whatever company she was in” (p. 341).

Ralph's suicide conveniently clears the way for Undine, now a widow and not a divorcee, to marry the French nobleman Raymond de Chelles. In this section of the novel, Wharton draws a satiric portrait of the French aristocracy in its demise, a portrait in contradistinction to that of the invading American plutocracy.

It quickly dawns on Undine that the wealth and power of the Faubourg Saint–Germain is just as illusory as that of Washington Square. Whatever wealth they possess is tied up in the expensive maintenance of their estates and their outdated traditions. Without the financial help of American heiresses like Looty Arlington, who marries Raymond's profligate brother, their existence is threatened. At the appropriately named estate of St. Desart, Undine grows bored and eventually forces a conflict with Raymond by arranging the sale of the family's prized tapestries. In the argument that ensues, the differences in the values of the two classes— the old French and the new American—are shown in vivid relief. “In America,” Undine declaims, “we're not ashamed to sell what we can't afford to keep” (p. 523).

Undine, ever the serial nuptialist, accepts the proposal of the buyer of the tapestries, none other than Elmer Moffatt. Moffatt emerges at the novel's end with Carnegie–like wealth and ambition. He has shrewdly and aggressively manipulated a series of men—from Undine's father to Ralph to Harmon Driscoll—on the way to achieving tycoon status. Though he still speaks like a street tough he is now considered a “gentleman . . . [and] the greatest American collector” of European art (p. 524). Moffatt even demonstrates a rare affection for Undine's neglected child Paul. It would seem that, at long last, Undine has met her match (again) in the Darwinian game of survival and that she will either retire in marital bliss or receive her longoverdue comeuppance. Wharton, however, will have none of these options, keeping her heroine true to her life of ceaseless striving. On the novel's last page, Undine yearns to become an ambassador's wife, and readers can have little doubt about her ability to achieve that goal, no matter the cost.
 

ABOUT EDITH WHARTON

One of the major figures in American literature, Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, to a wealthy New York family. As a child, the family moved among family residences in New York, Europe, and Newport, Rhode Island. A precocious child, Wharton read omnivorously in several languages and even attempted a novel at the age of eleven. Her first publication came at the age of thirteen, when a magazine printed her translations of several German poems. Despite Wharton's obvious talents, her

parents did not encourage her to pursue a life in letters.

After the death of her father in 1885, she married Edward “Teddy” Wharton, a Boston banker, who did not share his wife's literary and cultural interests. Theirs was a joyless marriage and in 1907 Wharton began a brief but passionate affair with a journalist named Morton Fullerton. Shortly thereafter she moved to France. Meanwhile, Teddy began embezzling money from his wife's estate to support his own mistress. He became mentally unstable and the couple divorced in 1913. Wharton never remarried.

Wharton published several stories, in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's, before her first novel, The Valley of Decision, appeared in 1902. Her first critical success, and still one of her most beloved works, was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. In her long, prolific career, Wharton published sixteen novels and novellas, eight collections of short stories, several works of nonfiction, and two volumes

of poetry. Her greatest literary achievement was The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She also received the French Legion of Honor for her philanthropic work during World War I, and in 1923, she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale. Wharton was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died of a stroke in her home in France in 1937.
 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

The critic Edmund Wilson once famously called Undine Spragg an “international cocktail bitch” (quoted from: Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton [New York: Knopf, 2007] p. 799.) Is there anything sympathetic about Wharton's heroine? Do you agree with Wharton's biographer that she is “a victim of the system [of American greed] as well as a successful product of it” (Lee, p. 428)?

Why does Ralph kill himself? What does he mean in his last statement “this will make it alright for her”?

What drives Undine? Is it wealth, social status, or something else?

What makes Undine irresistible to men? While she's a woman of means, and often wealthy, she is not a typical American heiress. Beauty is one thing, but is there anything else to account for her appeal?

The Custom of the Country shares many parallels with the novel Washington Square by Wharton's friend and mentor Henry James. Compare the two portraits of Old New York found in these novels.

Lily Bart, the heroine of Wharton's The House of Mirth, experiences an entirely different social trajectory from Undine's. What if anything do these two characters have in common?

The critic Harold Bloom claimed that The Custom of the Country was “rather an unpleasant novel to reread,” and Janet Malcolm, referring to the novel, once remarked that Wharton was “an artist from whom we shrink a little.” Did your experience reading the novel share anything with these statements? Is there something distasteful and yet compelling about the rise of Undine Spragg? (quoted from: Elaine Showalter. “Spragg: The Art of the Deal.” Ed. Millicent Bell. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995] p. 89.)

Charles Bowen, analyzing the troubled state of modern American marriages, concludes, “Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in them” (p. 363). Is this the great flaw in failed marriages? Consider the characters and relationships described in the novel.

Related to above, the chivalric notions of marriage, as espoused by Ralph, “a modern man in medieval armour” (p. 493), are shown to be obsolete and foolish. What then is the point of marriage in Wharton's universe? Is there any space for notions of love and sentiment?

What role do popular media and technology play in the novel? Consider the various press clippings avidly collected by Mrs. Heeney and the growing popularity of the motor car.

Compare the society of Washington Square with that of Faubourg Saint–Germaine in Paris. Where do they differ in their attitudes toward women and culture generally? What makes each of them ultimately unbearable to Undine?

On page 531, Raymond delivers the only speech of rebuke spoken directly to Undine, saying “you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper.” Are his criticisms fair and accurate of Undine and her American expatriates? Does Raymond deserve our sympathy?

Editorial Reviews

"Edith Wharton's finest achievement."
—Elizabeth Hardwick

From the Publisher

"The Custom of the Country satirizes much that Wharton thought was wrong with the US at the turn of the century: serial divorce, rampant consumerism and materialism, indifference to art and literature, and a proudly provincial attitude toward the traditions of Old New York and European culture. Combined with Sarah Emsley's incisive and well-researched introduction and notes, this excellent new edition of the novel includes well-chosen readings ranging from selections by Charles Darwin and Thorstein Veblen to excerpts from novels by Harold Frederic and Anita Loos that shed light on Wharton's audacious protagonist, Undine Spragg. The result is a volume that not only restores the social and economic contexts for the novel but sharpens the reader's appreciation for Wharton's satire in this book, the most savage–and the most humorous–novel of her long career."

Donna Campbell Washington State University

This is an excellent edition of what I consider to be Wharton's best novel, and it is supported by very valuable supporting material. Arguing that the novel is a satire of consumerism, Sarah Emsley offers a particularly good analysis of Raymond de Chelles as one of the few positive forces, and a husband who acts as a counter to the rampant material ambitions which dominate other parts of the novel. Emsley's introduction also provides a succinct and successful summary of Wharton's life and a good survey of the relevant criticism. The edition ends with a series of extremely useful appendices, including Wharton's outline for the novel, examples of contemporary reviews, extracts from Darwin, Veblen and Santayana and sections on Aestheticism and Women and Marriage."

Robin Peel University of Plymouth