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| Author | Edith Wharton |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
Publication date | October 1913 |
| Preceded by | The Reef |
The Custom of the Country is a 1913 tragicomedy of manners novel by the American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern girl who attempts to ascend in New York City society.
The Spraggs, a family of newly wealthy midwesterners from Apex, arrive in New York City to advantageously marry off their beautiful, ambitious, and temperamental daughter Undine. Attracted to glamour and extravagance Undine has a hard time making inroads into the high status old money social circles she wishes to enter. Her beauty catches the attention of several men who offer her a tantalizing glimpse into their world. Ralph Marvell, who is descended from the Dagonets, an old money family, becomes attracted to Undine. Convinced that Undine is a simple and plain spoken girl who would be ruined by her elevation in society, he resolves to quickly woo and marry her. However, Marvell is an unsuccessful lawyer and a would-be poet, and his family no longer has great reserves of cash. Before the marriage, his grandfather informs Mr. Spragg that Spragg will have to financially support the couple. Mr. Spragg asks Undine to end her engagement but Undine, now aware that the Marvells and the rest of their social circle highly value sexual purity and frown upon broken engagements and divorce, refuses to leave Ralph, and her father relents to the marriage. Shortly before her wedding, Undine encounters an acquaintance from Apex named Elmer Moffatt. Undine begs him not to make their acquaintance known as it could compromise her relationship with Ralph. Elmer agrees, but later, he approaches Mr. Spragg and leverages the fact that the Spraggs are embarrassed to know him to coerce Mr. Spragg into a business deal that profits them both greatly.
Ralph and Undine marry quickly and honeymoon in Europe. Although Ralph dotes on Undine, their relationship quickly comes into conflict. Neither one of them enjoys the other's activities and his attempts to be a moderating influence on her extravagance is ignored. Worst of all his finances do not permit the lifestyle Undine desires. After Undine's father is unable to send them money Undine forces Ralph to extract money from his sister and her husband which Ralph resents. At the end of their honeymoon Undine discovers that she is pregnant. She is horrified by the news and Ralph realizes he is as well.
Four years later, Undine misses her son Paul's birthday, causing Ralph to realize that he is no longer in love with her. The couple are deeply in debt due to Undine. She resents Ralph for his lack of funds, and he resents her for forcing him to work. Unable to cover her bills, Undine accepts a loan from Peter Van Degen, the nouveau riche husband of Ralph's cousin Clare. Peter is a known philanderer, and Undine flirts with him, hoping that an affair will extract more financial aid. However when Peter abruptly leaves for France, Undine realizes that she would be happier if she divorced Ralph and married Peter. Undine fakes an illness so that Ralph will send her to France to recover. While there, she convinces Peter to leave Clare and marry her.
After Undine and Ralph's divorce, Peter reunites with Clare and refuses to see Undine. She later learns from a friend that, while Clare never would have agreed to a divorce, the reason that Peter dropped Undine was that he discovered Ralph was deeply ill and was pleading for her to come home. Peter's fear that Undine would do the same to him led him to end their relationship.
Her circumstances and social status greatly reduced, Undine returns to Paris, where she is fortunate enough to meet Raymond de Chelles, a French count, who falls in love with Undine. The de Chelles are Catholics and frown upon Undine's marriage and divorce. Undine discovers that an annulment is possible but does not have the financial means to procure one. She runs into Elmer Moffat who suggests that she use her legal hold on her son Paul to extract the money from Ralph.
Ralph, whose family has been raising Paul since his divorce, is shocked to discover that Undine now wants him to live in France with her. His cousin Clare points out that, rather than legally fight for custody, he should offer Undine a large amount of money to keep Paul. Ralph borrows from his inheritance and goes to Elmer Moffat in the hope of doubling his money. However the funds do not come through in time, and at the same time, Elmer informs him that he and Undine were married years ago in Apex. In shock and grief, Ralph commits suicide. His son is his sole heir, and when the funds Ralph invested finally do come through, they are controlled entirely through Undine who, through Ralph's death, is able to marry Raymond.
Undine is soon dissatisfied with Raymond, too. The de Chelles are hidebound aristocrats, their wealth tied in land and art and antiques that they will not consider selling, and Undine cannot adjust to the staid customs of upper-class French society. She also resents having to spend most of her time in the country because her husband cannot pay for expensive stays, entertainment, and shopping trips in Paris.
Undine at last runs into Elmer Moffat, now extremely wealthy and successful. They renew their acquaintance, and Undine realizes that he is the only man she really loved. She suggests that they begin an affair, which will be tolerated by her husband and his family as long as they are discreet. To her surprise, Elmer refuses and insists that he will only renew their relationship if she divorces Raymond and marries him.
Now, married to the crass midwestern businessman who was best suited to her in the first place, Undine finally has everything she ever desired. Still, it is clear that she wants even more: In the last paragraph of the novel, she imagines what it would be like to be an ambassador's wife, a position closed to her owing to her divorces.
The title phrase is discussed in the novel. Charles Bowen asserts to Laura Fairford that it is "abnormal" that Ralph Marvell does not share his business life with his wife Undine. He does not "let her share in the real business of life" nor "rely on her judgment and help in the conduct of serious affairs". He believes that this behavior is typical of American men who, unlike Europeans, spend money on their wives but undervalue them as individuals, while living passionately in their business lives. To do otherwise, says Bowen, would be "against the custom of the country". (Chapter XV)
Edith Wharton said the title of the novel came from a play by English playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, titled The Custom of the Country, in which the term referred to the droit du seigneur, the claim of a ruler to have sex with a subordinate female before her husband. [1]
Julian Fellowes has cited The Custom of the Country as an inspiration for his creative work, including Downton Abbey . Upon receiving the Edith Wharton Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts, Fellowes said: "It is quite true that I felt this was my book; that the novel was talking to me in a most extreme and immediate way. I think it's a remarkable piece of writing. In Undine Spragg, Wharton has created an anti-heroine absolutely in the same rank as Becky Sharp, Scarlett O'Hara, or Lizzie Eustace. Undine has no values except ambition, greed and desire, and yet through the miracle of Wharton's writing, you are on her side. That's what's so extraordinary about the book...I decided, largely because of her work, that it was time I wrote something." [2]
In 2020 American filmmaker Sofia Coppola announced she planned to develop a miniseries adaptation of the work. [3]
Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country acts as if she is entitled to a rich, luxurious lifestyle. One scholar writes: "Her rise through the ranks of New York society from the nouveau riche demonstrates her ability to use marriage and divorce in order to achieve her desire for social dominance." Undine has allowed a "consumerist society" to shape her personalities as the scenery changes throughout the book. "Wharton personifies consumer culture through Undine Spragg, demonstrating how individual agency gets lost when involved in the system." [4]
The word "undine" was created by the medieval author Paracelsus, who used it for female water spirits.[ citation needed ]
Ralph Marvell recognizes the poetry in the name and assumes it refers to the poetic French phrase "divers et ondoyant" meaning "diverse and undulating". Mrs. Spragg responds by explaining the mundane origins or her daughters name. Undine was named for "a hair-waver her father put on the market the week she was born", itself taken from "UNdoolay, you know, the French for crimping". (Chapter V) The phrase appears in Montaigne's essay "By diverse means we arrive at the same end": "Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him." [5]
Hecuba was a queen in Greek mythology, the wife of King Priam of Troy during the Trojan War.
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
Joan of Acre was an English princess, a daughter of Edward I of England and Eleanor of Castile. The name "Acre" derives from her birthplace in the Holy Land while her parents were on a crusade.
Undine is a category of elemental beings associated with water.
Undine is a fairytale novella (Erzählung) by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué in which Undine, a water spirit, marries a knight named Huldbrand in order to gain a soul. Published in 1811, it is an early German romance, which has been translated into English and other languages.
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her eighth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'". The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.
The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the end of the 19th century. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."
The Buccaneers is the last novel written by Edith Wharton. The story is set in the 1870s, around the time Wharton was a young girl. It was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937 and published in that form in 1938. Wharton's manuscript ends with Lizzy inviting Nan to a house party, to which Guy Thwaite has also been invited. The book was published in 1938 by Penguin Books in New York. After some time, Marion Mainwaring finished the novel, following Wharton's detailed outline, in 1993.
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The Age of Innocence is a 1993 American historical romantic drama film directed by Martin Scorsese. The screenplay, an adaptation of the 1920 novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, was written by Scorsese and Jay Cocks. The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder and Miriam Margolyes, and was released by Columbia Pictures. The film recounts the courtship and marriage of Newland Archer (Day-Lewis), a wealthy New York society attorney, to May Welland (Ryder); Archer then encounters and legally represents Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer) prior to unexpected romantic entanglements.
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The Touchstone is a novella by American writer Edith Wharton. Written in 1900, it was the first of her many stories describing life in old New York.
The Reef is a 1912 novel by American writer Edith Wharton. It was published by D. Appleton & Company. It concerns a romance between a widow and her former lover. The novel takes place in Paris and rural France, but primarily features American characters. While writing the novel, Edith Wharton visited England, Sicily, and Germany, among other locations. In a letter to Bernard Berenson in November 1912, Wharton expressed regret regarding her novel, calling it a “poor miserable lifeless lump”. She wrote, “Anyhow, remember it’s not me, though I thought it was when I was writing it—& that next time I’m going to do something worthwhile!!”
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The Rescuing Angel is a 1919 American comedy silent film directed by Walter Edwards and written by Edith Kennedy and Clare Kummer. The film stars Shirley Mason, Forrest Stanley, Arthur Edmund Carewe, John Steppling, Carol Edwards and James Neill. The film was released on April 6, 1919, by Paramount Pictures.
Twilight Sleep is a novel by American author Edith Wharton and was first published in 1927 as a serial in the Pictorial Review before being published as a novel in the same year. The story, filled with irony, is centered around a socialite family navigating the New York of the Jazz Age and their relationships. This novel landed at number one on the best-selling list just two months after its publication and finished the year at number 7. Even as a best selling novel Twilight Sleep was not well received by critics at the time, who, while appreciating Wharton as a writer, struggled with the scenarios and characters she had created in the novel. While it was not considered as such in its own time period, today Twilight Sleep is widely considered to be a modernist novel as it employs modernist literary devices, such as an ever changing narration among the novel's characters and a close examination of the characters' self-identities and relationships with one another.
Jane, Lady Mico born Jane Robinson was an English benefactor. The clauses in her will intended to relieve slavery, still manifests itself in the creation of Mico University College in Jamaica. Her almshouses in London continue and her bequest to Fairford's apprentices continues to educate at the Farmor's School.
The Custom of the Country public domain audiobook at LibriVox | International | |
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