Edith Wharton: The Custom of the Country
$135
Edith Wharton documented the Gilded Age with an unsurpassed clarity. Born into one prominent family and marrying into another, she knew better than most what it meant to be numbered among the elite—and she drew on this knowledge in her writing, both fiction and nonfiction alike. Her account of the ethical consequences of the era’s conspicuous consumption is essential reading, especially today.
Of all her works, though, it is The Custom of the Country (1913) that feels the most prescient. If the main character, Undine Spragg, a character in a contemporary novel, she would be on a mission to become an influencer. Alternately insufferable and intriguing, a twenty-first-century Undine would attract many, many followers.
In the novel, Undine seeks the late-nineteenth-century version of this more modern goal—a marriage that will install her as a featured star of the society page. Her pursuit of this outcome is relentless, its path littered with victims.
Because this is Wharton, Undine’s sometimes-comic career is presented in tandem with serious discussions of the state of marriage, social priorities and expectations, and the ways that ambition and desire resist fulfillment.
So the novel isn’t precisely a “light” read, but the story of Undine’s determined social climbing, her successes, failures, and marriages is summer-reading adjacent as, despite her many flaws, Undine charms. In this delve, we’ll explore this consummate novel of manners, focusing on how its careful manipulation of delight and disillusion raises questions about the form itself.
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Elizabeth Duquette
Elizabeth Duquette has been teaching nineteenth-century literature for more than twenty years, formerly at Gettysburg College and now sometimes at Portland State University. She is an editor for American Art, and the author of American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon (2023) and Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America.
