The Custom of the Country | Literary Precedents
Blake Nevius has called The Custom of the Country Wharton's most Balzacian novel. He mentions Balzac's Pere Goriot (1835) and Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847- 1848) as particular antecedents. Undine Spragg, like Eugene de Rastignac and Becky Sharp, has a greedy, grasping energy, and her adventures reveal a society in which the old orders have become soft and weak.
The Custom of the Country can also be seen as Wharton's contribution to the idea of the "new woman," which had become popular in the novels of Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, David Graham...
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