“The Custom of the Country” by Edith Wharton (1913)
Edith Wharton, if she was ever out of vogue, is now very much ‘in’ again – talked and written about, her stories adapted to screen. Not so long ago I wrote about House of Mirth, and have recently been prompted (see the embedded video) to read her 1913 novel The Custom of the Country; and, unlike the aforesaid and The Age of Innocence both of which I know well, for the first time.
Written a dozen or so years after House of Mirth, the general contours of The Custom of the Country remain the same – powerful female heroines (are they?) and splendid (or splendidly despicable?) supporting characters; embedded in that particular East Coast milieu of the Gilded Age into which one is either born or gains admittance at great cost, and a graceful exit doomed to fail. But, however overtly similar, it would be wrong to suggest that Wharton is limited in her vision, locked within the same familiar template; for this later novel very well demonstrates how her own path in the ensuing years, culminating in a divorce and self-decreed exile on the other side of the Atlantic, informed her writing life. And despite affinities shared, Wharton’s heroines in these two novels are in opposite trajectories – in House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s once promising outlook is hurtling towards a tragic end, whilst in The Custom of the Country, the irrepressible Undine Spragg is on the ascendant – life as a series of career moves.
Undine is an anti-heroine I would say, a protagonist without virtue – beyond her beauty, feted by some and envied by all – and ruthless in her pursuit of advancement in society; resolute she is for sure, but vacuous and amoral. In a young nation, a hierarchy has already been established – between old money and new, inherited and earned. And though Undine may slip up or miss a step as she ascends the social ladder, when all seems lost, she (unlike Lily Bart) always manages to regain control and live for another day.
The title of the book is not peripheral, and does suggest one of the novel’s main themes – how class structures and behavioral norms operate in different countries. (A Wikipedia entry gives another interpretation, the veracity of which I can not confirm.) Customs are to be adhered to, or challenged, or simply ignored, and Undine successfully adapts each as befits a situation. Abiding to custom, often means deception, improvisation, manipulation; all wiles to which she is adept. Undine marries when she will, and divorces likewise; she keeps company that she shouldn’t for all to see or closeted from the prying eye; when in one place she pines for another, and then another. And that money grows on trees, is for her not an adage, but a wife’s expectation. More generally, there is a way of recognising her actions as a product of the custom of man (and country); as proffered by a Mr. Charles Bowen in a conversation with Mrs. Fairford (Undine’s sister-in-law), which I quote in length because it says so much:
“[…]you say his wife’s extravagance forces him to work too hard; but that’s not what’s wrong. It’s normal for a man to work hard for a woman—what’s abnormal is his not caring to tell her anything about it.”
“…But why? Because it’s against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man’s again—I don’t mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don’t take enough interest in THEM […]
“Why does the European woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? Because she’s so important to them that they make it worth her while! She’s not a parenthesis, as she is here—she’s in the very middle of the picture. I’m not implying that Ralph isn’t interested in his wife—he’s a passionate, a pathetic exception. But even he has to conform to an environment where all the romantic values are reversed. Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman’s drawing-room or in their offices? The answer’s obvious, isn’t it? The emotional centre of gravity’s not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it’s love, in our new one it’s business…”
The Custom of the Country, Chapter XV, Kindle Edition (location 1856-65)
Bowen ends his discourse with this summing up of Mrs. Ralph Marvell (Undine): “…she’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph. It’s Ralph who’s the victim and the exception.” An American perspective as a marriage disintegrates. Some years later, another does likewise, and from the mouth of another husband, Raymond de Chelles, and speaking on behalf of the the French aristocracy:
[…]”And you’re all alike,” he exclaimed, “every one of you. You come among us from a country we don’t know, and can’t imagine, a country you care for so little that before you’ve been a day in ours you’ve forgotten the very house you were born in—if it wasn’t torn down before you knew it! You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about—you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven’t had time
The Custom of the Country, Chapter XLII, Kindle Edition (location 4944)
Accompanying the NY Times Magazine conversation is an excellent and informative essay by Claire Messud, which amongst other things places Wharton’s narrative in a very modern context; lo and behold, the ambitious extremes of American societal acceptance and their clash with Old World tradition still play out today – see Meghan Markle a.k.a. Duchess of Sussex. A wonderful analogy I think – though do I discern a venomous undertone? (Or is that my own disdain in regard to this contemporary farce?)
Though Messud’s opinion of The Custom of the Country is perhaps more generous than my own, reading her piece and the connections she makes between Wharton’s world and the perverse “gilded age” that has been reinvented after a fashion (as if one was not enough!), I do in retrospect identify other aspects of value in the novel. This cultural and social construct, that Wharton exposes with such microscopic precision, allows for a more sympathetic reading of the parade of characters than I was initially prepared to give, even for the appalling Mrs. Undine Spragg Moffatt Marvell de Chelles Moffatt (the book must be read to get the two Moffatts!); for they are all so very much a product of their time and place and situation in life and, whether conforming or not, their actions are ultimately determined accordingly.
Finally, what I would say though, is that when its all is said and done, they all – these Spraggs, Moffatts, Marvells, Van Degens and others – all live and die by a barely disguised social Darwinist dictate, and it remains unclear to me as to whether Wharton’s intent was to expose the limitations of a society beholden to those dictates, or is writing in affirmation of a survival of the fittest behavioural norm in which an Undine can prevaricate and manipulate yet never deviate, and a Ralph with all his misplaced romantic notions an unfortunate outlier (“a pathetic exception” as Charles Bowen says above).