The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

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Places Discussed

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*New York City

*New York City. On the eve of the twentieth century, New York City is the focus of young Undine Spragg’s dreams. Her determination to marry into the top level of American society is attained there by slow, deliberate, steps, culminating in her marriage to Ralph Marvell, the scion of an old New York family. Once their incompatibility and the Marvell family’s diminished fortunes become clear, she flails about, looking for excitement and a more advantageous arrangement. What she learns of New York “society” mores enables her eventually to succeed. She knows where one needs to be seen in New York: at the opera house, at the painter Claud Popple’s studio, at fashionable milliners’, and at fine restaurants.

Although Edith Wharton provides short, vivid descriptions of New York City scenes, the role she gives to place in this novel is as much about “social space” as about the details of actual physical settings. Undine’s New York City includes only Manhattan, and only people with recognizably northern European-derived names and appearances—this in an era when immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were pouring into the city.

*Washington Square

*Washington Square. New York neighborhood in which the Marvell family town house is located. Undine views it as a symbol of Old New York aristocratic society, whose strictures and values she can neither accept nor understand.

Stentorian Hotel

Stentorian Hotel. New York hotel in which Undine and her parents are living when the novel opens. The hotel represents at least two things: the uprooting Undine’s parents endure in order to launch her socially, and Undine’s first, mistaken groping toward attaining social status, as when she asserts that the best people live only in hotels, not fixed abodes.

Spragg’s office

Spragg’s office. New York office of Undine’s father. It is shown in brief scenes as a place that only men enter. Business arrangements, both legitimate and questionable, are made there, in a setting far from the eyes—and interests—of their wives and daughters.

*Paris

*Paris. France’s leading city is the site of fashionable Americans’ annual migration for holidays. Social displays, entertainment, shopping, and meeting the more disreputable or daring of Europe’s remaining nobility are the main attractions of such sojourns. Undine likes Paris and tries to go there when she tires of New York. However, in Paris too her activities are largely confined to shopping, café-going, and nightlife, with occasional motoring trips into the countryside. On one occasion, when she worries about being perceived as a bore in conversation, she spends a morning at the great art museum known as the Louvre, but her experience there confuses her more than it enlightens her.

Chelles home

Chelles home (shehl). Spacious old Parisian house belonging to Raymond de Chelles; most of it is rented out. After marrying Raymond, Undine discovers that an entire proud, tradition-bound world of French aristocrats exists behind the gaudy attractions that delight rich Americans. Raymond is not averse to mounting occasional social events in the city, but he expects Undine to spend most of her time at the remote château of Saint Desert, where constant rain and ancient tapestries intensify her frustrations at being bored and trapped.

Apex City

Apex City. Fictional town in which Undine grows up and where she meets Elmer Moffatt, her first and fourth husband. Critics have speculated that Apex City’s location could be either Kansas or Nebraska; however, Wharton was not familiar with the Midwest and probably had no specific city in mind for a model. Apex City is a mix of small city stereotypes, such as its Baptist church and the walk down Main Street....

(This entire section contains 681 words.)

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Paradoxically, the small-town values from which Undine escapes later enable her to come full circle and remarry Moffatt when she tires of life with her French husband. When she protests that the Roman Catholic Church forbids divorce, Elmer points out that she was born a Baptist, and that “we’re differently made out in Apex;” he wants her as a wife, not a mistress.

Literary Techniques

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In The Custom of the Country, Wharton presents a broad panorama of life in the United States and France during the first decade of the twentieth century. She uses a variety of techniques to develop her material, so her novel is not easily classifiable, but the genres that are most appropriate are the picaresque novel and the novel of manners in which emphasis is placed on the customs and values of different social classes. In the picaresque novel of the eighteenth century, a male rogue moved through a series of adventures in which he was always triumphant. There frequently was an element of burlesque in which the characters he encountered were presented in broad strokes emphasizing their foibles. These elements can be seen in The Custom of the Country, only the picaro has been replaced by a picara. Undine Spragg, with her tireless energy, passes through a number of experiences. Her ability to imitate and adapt to the manners of the social sets she finds herself with gives her a chameleonlike quality which makes her an excellent vehicle for exposing the weaknesses of society. Whatever reverses she seems to encounter, she always emerges triumphant over her circumstances, and she always emerges intact, basically unchanged.

The tone of the novel is not consistent, and some readers find this an unnerving element. Thus, in her delineation of the disintegrating marriage of Ralph and Undine, Wharton writes in a realistic mode, carefully presenting the story of two people who discover too late that they are unsuited to each other. At the other extreme, she presents other elements in Undine's life as a burlesque. For example, there is the rise of Indiana Frusk Binch Rolliver whose progress through several husbands parallels Undine's, even though Indiana's natural equipment is decidedly second class. Undine notes when she meets Indiana in Paris that "one of her shoulders was still higher than the other." The satire can be savage at such moments. The inconsistency in tone reinforces Wharton's presentation of a world in transition in which there is no standard by which the characters may judge each other or themselves. The tone of particular scenes then veers from the melodramatic (the depiction of Ralph's suicide) to the farcical (the newspaper account of Undine's divorce from Chelles in Reno followed by her hasty remarriage to Moffatt). These contrasting elements suggest almost a tabloid view of American culture in which widely divergent elements coexist side by side like the sensational stories in a daily newspaper.

Ideas for Group Discussions

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The Custom of the Country lacks two things that are normally considered prerequisites for a popular work of fiction: a sympathetic leading character whom a reader may identify with, and a clear moral center of consciousness by which the actions of the leading characters may be judged. The absence of these two elements may account for why the novel is a puzzling experience for many readers who bring certain expectations to it as a work of realistic fiction. These two missing elements may also account for the novel's success. Wharton is tackling much of the same territory as she did in The House of Mirth (1905; see separate entry), but in this novel she does not have a heroine who is ill-suited to a transitional society that has lost its moral center. Rather she has an ambitious, amoral, conniving, emotionally unresponsive female protagonist who is oblivious to the moral confusion about her and who takes advantage of every opportunity for advancement offered her. Discussions might be organized about the underlying social forces that produce and make possible an Undine Spragg, about the differences between male and female options in the early-twentieth-century American society, about the role of art in a commercial society, about the decline in European aristocratic values, and about the simple traditional Midwestern values that appear to be Undine's base line for judgment.

1. Epic, satire, and caricature have all been terms that have been applied to The Custom of the Country. Consider why they are or are not appropriate.

2. It is common for critics to call Undine Spragg a monster. Is this fair? If so, what is it that makes her monstrous? If she were a man making his way on Wall Street, would she be deemed a monster?

3. Consider the history of other girls from Undine's youth: Indiana Frusk, Mabel Lipscomb, and Nettie Wincher (later Mme. de Trezac). All of these women serve at various times as Undine's confidantes and rivals. How do they help the reader identify Undine as an American type?

4. Consider Undine's relations with her parents and her son. Are they simply the actions of a spoiled, cold-hearted young woman who lacks any tender feelings, or are they a reflection of a distinctly "American" attitude toward life?

5. How do the physical types of Ralph Marvell and Elmer Moffatt reflect their characters? Compare them to the male characterizations in The House of Mirth.

6. Compare the customs and values of old New York society represented by the Marvells and Dagonets with the customs and values of the French aristocracy represented by the de Chelles family.

7. Explain the relationship between Clare Van Degen and Ralph Marvell. Do they seem childlike? Are they financially astute?

8. Why does Peter Van Degen let Undine down? Is his behavior essentially moral, sentimental, cowardly, or exploitative?

9. Mrs. Heeny with her clippings is a continuing figure through the novel. What use does Wharton make of the idea of newspaper coverage in this novel?

10. How do you respond to Ralph Marvell's suicide? What person(s) or thing(s) should be held responsible for this act of self destruction?

Social Concerns

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The main settings of The Custom of the Country are New York and Paris, but the economic center is Apex City, Kansas. During the course of the novel, fortunes are made and lost in Apex City, and the winners of these fortunes spend their money in New York and Paris. Although no scenes take place in Apex City, what happens there determines much of the action in the other locations.

The natives of Apex City possess the classic American virtues of self-reliance, seemingly boundless energy, and business opportunism: Undine Spragg moves from Apex City to New York and then Paris with the aim of finding a place at the top of the social ladder while Elmer Moffatt goes from penniless young man to the world's greatest collector, capable of raising the price of pearls by fifty percent when he decides to buy them. These characters possess a practical business sense and drive which enables them to change and dominate (some would say destroy) the older societies they come into contact with. They look askance at complicated European living arrangements, and they are quite indifferent to the underlying values and social structures which govern the old New York families or the French aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain district. As Raymond de Chelles, Undine's third husband states, she and other Americans "come among us [i.e., the French] speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; . . . we're fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honorable for us!"

Before she sets her sights on conquering Paris, Undine tackles New York society, which has been a part of her consciousness from her early days in Apex City. Her imagination "had been nurtured" on stories that appeared in the daily press of New York's old families and Fifth Avenue high society. Undine's immediate goals seem rather simple and easy to accommodate. She wants two things: "amusement and respectability." Being materialistic and competitive by nature, she also wants to be assured that she is more affluent than anyone else. The combination of these relatively simple goals make her into a juggernaut, leaving a host of ruined lives in its wake. At the end of the novel, having moved to Paris, Undine is remaking (or should one say remodeling) the world to accommodate her presence in it. Ensconced in her own Parisian hotel (a new one that has all the latest conveniences), in possession of the famous Chelles tapestries, and married to a large, crude man who can buy her anything she wants, Undine finds that her most pressing problems are that her husband does not fit into the picture she would present to her dinner guests and that she cannot become an ambassador's wife because her status as a divorced woman disqualifies her for that position.

Literary Precedents

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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 Phillips, and Theodore Dreiser. All these writers created leading female characters who did not automatically accept the subservient, maternal role allotted to women in the popular, sentimental fiction of the day. Undine's reaction to becoming pregnant, her neglect of her child, her need to dominate, and her absorption in herself make her a quintessential "new woman."

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