 | A WRITER'S WIT |  G. Belli |
My Book World
Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. With an introduction by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Scribner, 1997 (1913).
Wharton, portrayer of early twentieth-century America, unveils the life of one Undine Spragg who, in time, will marry three men, one of them twice. From the time Undine is a young woman, she is hard to please. She never has quite the clothes she wants, never quite associates with the people she really wishes to. And when someone, like her parents, stretch themselves to make her happy, she is far from grateful. She is like this with each of her husbands, too, the first one an apparent rube from her small New York City suburb. Then, she marries up, a handsome man who might become a poet, but because she doesn’t wish to live on his small trust and make do, he must go to work. Jumping to France, she marries royalty, but even he doesn’t have enough money, and she leaves him, as well. Finally, she marries the rube again (he just happens to be in France), because since the early days he has become a billionaire. And he gives her nearly everything she can dream of, including a fine home to a little son (by husband two) she his ignored since his birth nine years earlier. She attempts to goad this man into becoming an ambassador (on the book’s last page), but when he tells her that she could never become an ambassador’s wife because she is divorced, she is furious. Wharton ends the novel this way:
Wharton, portrayer of early twentieth-century America, unveils the life of one Undine Spragg who, in time, will marry three men, one of them twice. From the time Undine is a young woman, she is hard to please. She never has quite the clothes she wants, never quite associates with the people she really wishes to. And when someone, like her parents, stretch themselves to make her happy, she is far from grateful. She is like this with each of her husbands, too, the first one an apparent rube from her small New York City suburb. Then, she marries up, a handsome man who might become a poet, but because she doesn’t wish to live on his small trust and make do, he must go to work. Jumping to France, she marries royalty, but even he doesn’t have enough money, and she leaves him, as well. Finally, she marries the rube again (he just happens to be in France), because since the early days he has become a billionaire. And he gives her nearly everything she can dream of, including a fine home to a little son (by husband two) she his ignored since his birth nine years earlier. She attempts to goad this man into becoming an ambassador (on the book’s last page), but when he tells her that she could never become an ambassador’s wife because she is divorced, she is furious. Wharton ends the novel this way:
[Undine] had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife: and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for” (509).
Wharton’s novel, some say, is prescient for its time, predicting what American society might become like. And along with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)—whose novels are published at roughly the same time (within a decade)—she limns what can happen to ambitious women who have no place in society except to be some man’s wife.
Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kenneth Patchen
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Jackson
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Rukeyser
FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's Evidence of Love
Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kenneth Patchen
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Jackson
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Rukeyser
FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's Evidence of Love
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