The first time I read Edith Wharton’s novel “The Custom of the Country,” which was published in 1913, I felt at once that I had always known its protagonist and also that I had never before met anyone like her. The values of Undine Spragg—who, in the course of the novel, makes a circuitous and sinister journey from Midwestern rube to ruby-drenched new-money empress—are repulsive, and her attempts to manipulate public attention are mesmerizing. For my money, no literary antiheroine can best Undine—a dazzling monster with rose-gold hair, creamy skin, and a gaping spiritual maw that could swallow New York City. People like her have been abundant in American culture for some time, but I never feel invested in their success; more often, I idly hope for their failure. With Undine, however—thanks to the alchemical mix of sympathy and disdain that animates Wharton’s language in the novel and allows her to match Undine’s savagery with plenty of her own—I find myself wanting her to get everything she desires.
When “The Custom of the Country” begins, Undine is a desperate newcomer to New York, two years sprung from the fictional town of Apex. A string of abortive attempts at romance and sophistication have landed her, and her parents—nineteenth-century A.T.M.s, who fearfully attempt to tranquilize their beastly daughter with diversion and finery—at a hotel called the Stentorian, in what they call the “Looey suites.” This is the fanciest setting to which their unconnected souls can lay claim. Undine and her mother are reliant on their masseuse and manicurist, Mrs. Heeny, to decipher the codes and hierarchies of aristocratic New York. A dinner invite from a Mrs. Fairford brings the deepest sort of existential consternation that Undine can muster: she’d read in the newspaper that “pigeon-blood notepaper” with white ink is the fashion, but Mrs. Fairford used plain white paper. Perhaps, Undine worries, the Fairfords are not the entrée into the society pages that she seeks.
“Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative,” Wharton explains, in the first of many passages that, in Twitter parlance, might best be described as the author dragging Undine to hell. Wharton goes on: Undine “wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.” The main thing Undine has going for her is that she’s gorgeous—her looks “as vivid, and almost as crude” as the electric lights that blaze in her arriviste hotel room. She “might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light,” Wharton writes. (She is, in fact, such a creature. Undine is at peace only when illuminated by attention: without it, the reader quickly comes to understand, our heroine would turn to dust.) Undine hangs out in front of her mirror, glittering at herself, picturing an imaginary audience: her “incessant movements,” Wharton notes, are the result of her belief that it was the “correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity.” She gets Mrs. Heeny to verify the precise social standing of Mrs. Fairford, and bullies her father into buying her a new dress.
Undine’s ascent begins with this delectable mismatch between her shallow, ridiculous perceptions and her unbelievably savvy instincts. It doesn’t matter that she’s tacky enough to find the Fairford home shabby, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and ferns and wood fire where (she thinks) elaborate gilding and orchids and a gas log ought to be. It doesn’t matter that she not only hasn’t heard of any of the new art exhibitions that are talked about at dinner but is barely aware that art exhibitions exist—or that she thinks Phèdre is pronounced “fade,” or that the only book she’s read recently is “When the Kissing Had to Stop.” Undine gets the essentials: that to be beautiful, for a woman, is to be seen, which is to be wanted, which is to be handed the ability to exploit an economic system. She knows that she can parlay one material commitment from a man into another, as if she were at a medieval marketplace exchanging salt for bread. And, crucially, Undine’s insight into the machinery she manipulates is largely unconscious. As she “often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement; she honestly wanted the best,” Wharton writes.
Undine attracts the attention of Mrs. Fairford’s brother, Ralph Marvell; the Marvells are an old New York family that has retained its vaunted reputation but little of its wealth. Ralph makes a classic mistake: having been taught to imagine that white women are naturally innocent, he sees the purest virtue in Undine’s beauty. He imagines “society careering up to make a mouthful of her, and himself whirling down on his winged horse.” Without him, Ralph thinks, Undine would be “easy prey to the powers of folly.” He proposes marriage, and Wharton, describing a dinner at the Marvell family home, takes another opportunity to fillet her protagonist, even as she keeps us hooked on Undine’s magnificent, incorrigible selfishness. She “was in love, of course,” Wharton writes. “It was pleasant, when she looked across the table, to meet Ralph’s gray eyes, with that new look in them, and to feel that she had kindled it; but it was only part of her larger pleasure in the general homage to her beauty, in the sensations of interest and curiosity excited by everything about her, from the family portraits overhead to the old Dagonet silver on the table—which were to be hers too, after all!”
It is not long before Ralph discovers that his attention has lost its power to trigger Undine’s graces, but he has already been conquered and committed—Undine has converted his ardor into what little money it can bring her. Still, with this beautiful creature at his side, his senses are invigorated. He dreams of being a writer, and one day experiences an epiphany in the Italian countryside. He rushes to Undine and exclaims, “It’s the meaning of life that I’ve found, and it’s you, dearest, you who’ve given it to me!” She starts to cry. She cannot begin to process what Ralph is saying, as her brain cannot admit the idea that another person might possess an inner life or nurture goals that differ from her own, which begin and end with being wealthy and happy and admired. Undine says that she’s tired of Italy. She wants to go to Switzerland, where it’s fun.
It’s not great for women to have to live in a culture that funnels money and power through men, as Wharton demonstrates in her most famous novels—“The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth”—by telling stories about women whose choices are restricted by patriarchal systems. The thrill of “The Custom of the Country” is that, in this story, it’s bad for men—for anyone, really—to have to live in a culture with Undine. At one point, Mrs. Fairford has a conversation with Ralph’s friend Charles Bowen, who delivers the novel’s effective thesis: that the “average American looks down on his wife,” and that, for many a wife at the turn of the twentieth century, “money and motors and clothes are simply the big bribe she’s paid for keeping out of some man’s way!” Undine is the “monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph,” Charles argues, adding that Ralph is the victim. He’s right. In this novel, the tables turn.
Wharton’s portrait of Undine is so acute that it frequently flickers across time into the contemporary. “Every hour was packed with what she would have called life,” Wharton writes. From Mrs. Heeny carrying around a packet of high-society press clippings to Undine calling her press agent to “do a paragraph” on the unveiling of her own new portrait, the novel documents the beginning of the rise of the American fame economy. Undine’s “conception of enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity—the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security.” At a dinner party, she shines with the “revolving brilliancy that collective approval always struck from her.”
Undine’s life is organized around maintaining her beauty, showing off her carefully dressed figure, gaining as wide and prominent an audience of admirers as possible, and increasing the net worth that allows her to do these three things. Her world, consequently, is sorted into three categories of people: assets, impediments, and those who, being neither, effectively do not exist. This is an awful and embarrassing way to live, and yet, more than a century after “The Custom of the Country” was published, Undine’s habits, given a superficial makeover, could be rebranded not just as aspirational but feminist. Today, she would learn how to defend her life story as that of a woman going after what she wants and getting it—and what could be more progressive than that? This pitch would be bullshit, but plenty of people would believe it. Our twenty-first-century Undine would have a million followers on Instagram. She’d be a Page Six legend. We would give her what Wharton understood that a woman like Undine wants, above everything: the satisfaction of knowing that others are watching her every move.
This piece is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of “The Custom of the Country,” out this month.
