My mother said the novel was like the Kardashians but it’s more like the Real Housewives of New York, specifically LuAnn de Lesseps, the daughter of a Connecticut contractor who snagged herself a French Count while modeling abroad and shot up to ‘socialite’ status, and then reality TV star status. Undine Spragg, the antiheroine of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, is as voracious a social climber as LuAnn, arriving in New York with her stridently Midwestern parents ready to conquer the scene using a mixture of her indomitable acquisitive will and outstanding beauty. “She was going to know the right people at last – she was going to get what she wanted!”
The Custom of the Country is under-read and under-appreciated compared to her other New York The (blank) of (blank) novels, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, and it’s likely due to their central characters. While Lily Bart (of Mirth) and Newland Archer (of Innocence) are both tragically flawed characters, they inspire pity if not outright sympathy from a reader. Lily is a little self centered, but her mistakes are borne out of naïveté more than anything, and Newland’s social myopia effaces an inner wounded idealism, but Undine has no such redeeming qualities: she is obsessed with money and even more obsessed with things, fancy dresses and jewelry, nice houses, nicer vacations, above everything else always something more. She wants to be seen (because of her beauty), and wants to be seen in the finest luxuries (because of her greed). Beyond that, nada, zilch: society and its trappings mean nothing to her, art is boring (unless you can own it), family traditions and legacy have no value, and romantic or familial love are simply a means to more things. She’s got captivating eyes, but they’re completely dead to the world. “Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.” Elizabeth Hardwick, in her magisterial survey essay “Mrs.Wharton in New York”, calls Undine “a witch of ignorance, insensitivity, and manipulation.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Evan Reads to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.