Edith Wharton's the Custom of the Country: A Reassessment (Gender and Genre)

EDITH WHARTON’S THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY: A REASSESSMENT

Gender and Genre

Series Editor: Ann Heilmann Editorial Board: Mark Llewellyn Johanna M. Smith Margaret Stetz

Titles in this Series 1 Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton 2 Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton and SueAnn Schatz (eds)

Forthcoming Titles Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century Sigrid Anderson Cordell

www.pickeringchatto.com/gender

EDITH WHARTON’S THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY: A REASSESSMENT

edited by Laura Rattray

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2010

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010 © Laura Rattray 2010 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Edith Wharton’s The custom of the country: a reassessment. – (Gender and genre) 1. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937. Custom of the country. I. Series II. Rattray, Laura. 813.5’2-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781851962242 e: 9781851961740

∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in Great Britain at MPG Biddles Group

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Editorial Note List of Contributors List of Figures Introduction – Laura Rattray 1 The Custom of the Country: Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly – Susan Goodman 2 When the Reading Had to Stop: Readers, Reading and the Circulation of Texts in The Custom of the Country – Shafquat Towheed 3 ‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’: Wharton’s Business of Fiction, 1908–12 – Bonnie Shannon McMullen 4 Worst Parents Ever: Cultures of Childhood in The Custom of the Country – Carol J. Singley 5 Crude Ascending the Staircase: Undine Spragg and the Armory Show – Emily J. Orlando 6 ‘It’s Better to Watch’: Compulsive Voyeurism in The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth – Jessica Schubert McCarthy 7 A ‘Mist of Opopanax’: Mapping the Scentscape of The Custom of the Country – Pamela Knights 8 Landscape with the Fall of Undine – Margaret P. Murray 9 Girls from the Provinces: Wharton’s Undine Spragg and Cather’s Thea Kronborg – Julie Olin-Ammentorp 10 Men at Work in The Custom of the Country – William Blazek 11 ‘Lost in Translation’: Financial Plots and the Modernist Reader in The Custom of the Country – Hildegard Hoeller Notes Index

vi vii ix xiii 1 15 29 43 59 71 87 101 115 127 143 157 169 193

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Excerpts from Wharton’s writings are reprinted by permission of the Estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis agency. The editor would like to thank the British Academy; Marta Fodor of ArtResource; Thomas Haggerty and Joanne Hardy of the Bridgeman Art Library; Karen Mansfield of the Worcester Art Museum; and Cassandra King of Design and Artists Copyright Society.

– vi –

EDITORIAL NOTE

All page references to The Custom of the Country are to Scribner’s original 1913 edition and appear in parenthesis within the text.

– vii –

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

William Blazek is Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool Hope University. A founding co-editor of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, he has also co-edited two essay collections: American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (2005), with Michael K. Glenday; and Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night (2007), with Laura Rattray. His other publications include essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, World War I literary culture, and modernism. He recently published two essays on Edith Wharton’s war writings and is currently working on representations of the Western Front in Anglo-American fiction. Susan Goodman is the H. Fletcher Brown Chair of Humanities at the University of Delaware. She specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Biography. Her books include Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (1990), Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle (1994), Ellen Glasgow: A Biography (1998, 2003) and Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, 1880–1940 (2003). With Carl Dawson, she has co-authored two biographies: William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (2005) and Mary Austin and the American West (2009). Her current project is a cultural history of the Atlantic Monthly from 1857 to 1925. Hildegard Hoeller is Professor of English at the Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the author of Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (2000), co-author with Rebecca Brittenham of Key Words for Academic Writers (2004) and editor of The Norton Critical Edition of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (2008). Her articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature have appeared in American Literature, American Literary Realism, African-American Review, American Transcendental Quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Studies in American Fiction, Dreiser Studies, Edith Wharton Review and others. She is currently serving as the President of the Edith Wharton Society. Pamela Knights is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. As well as conference contributions and encyclopedia entries on – ix –

x

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Wharton, she contributed the chapter, ‘Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence’ to The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, edited by Millicent Bell (1995); introductions to The House of Mirth (1991) and Ethan Frome (2004); and contributed chapters to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, co-edited with Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan (2007). She has recently published The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (2009), and the chapter on Edith Wharton in A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, edited by David Seed (2009). Her other major area of interest is children’s literature, and she has served on the executive board of the International Research Society of Children’s Literature, and is currently Executive Editor of the Society’s new journal, International Research in Children’s Literature. Jessica Schubert McCarthy is the Blackburn Fellow at Washington State University. Her PhD dissertation, ‘Genre Bending: The Work of American Women Writers, 1860–1925’, examines the ways authors such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Ellen Glasgow challenge and complicate generic definitions. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing and she is currently on the editorial staff of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticisms. Bonnie Shannon McMullen has taught English literature at universities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, including more than twenty years’ tutorial teaching at colleges of the University of Oxford. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature, with a particular interest in the short story. Recent work on this genre is focused on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story career, with an essay appearing in Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night (2007). She also contributed to A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007). She is the author of several scholarly journal essays on John Howison, Edgar Allan Poe and George Eliot, in addition to contributions to the Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (2000) and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Margaret P. Murray is Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Western Connecticut State University. Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of American regional literature and American women’s writing. She is the co-editor of Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (1992) and co-author of Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1990). She is currently Vice President of the Edith Wharton Society and is Assistant Editor of the international journal the Edith Wharton Review. Murray was the director of the major Wharton conference held at the Mount in 2008. Julie Olin-Ammentorp is a Professor of English and of Gender and Women’s Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is the author of Edith

List of Contributors

xi

Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (2004) and of essays on Edith Wharton, Henry James and Willa Cather. Her articles on Wharton have been published in the volumes American Literary Mentors (1999) and Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe (1993). She is a past President of the Edith Wharton Society. She is currently working on a comparative study of Wharton and Cather, and on the role of place in Cather’s fiction. Emily J. Orlando is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she teaches American literature, transatlantic aestheticism and women’s studies. She earned her PhD in American literature at the University of Maryland and served for five years as Assistant Professor of English at Tennessee State University. She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008), as well as articles on literature and visual culture that have appeared in the collections New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance (2006) and Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007), and the journals American Literary Realism and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (forthcoming). Laura Rattray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Hull. She has teaching and research interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, women’s writing and publishing history. She has taught and researched widely on the life and work of Edith Wharton, including time as a postdoctoral fellow researching the Wharton archives in Europe and the United States. She is the editor of the two-volume The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009), and is currently editing the volume Edith Wharton in Context. Other recent publications include articles on Wharton, Josephine Johnson, the Hollywood novels of Horace McCoy and a co-edited collection of essays, Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night (2007), with William Blazek. She serves on the editorial board of the Edith Wharton Review and on the executive board of the Edith Wharton Society. Carol J. Singley is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (1995) and editor of three volumes on Wharton: a New Riverside Edition of The Age of Innocence (2001), The Oxford Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (2003) and The House of Mirth Casebook (2003). She is past President of the Edith Wharton Society. Currently she is examining constructions of kinship in American literature. She is co-editor of The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (2003) and is writing a book on the centrality of adoption in the American literary experience. Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at the Open University, and project supervisor for The Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 (http://www. open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/). He is editor of The Correspondence of Edith Wharton

xii

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

and Macmillan, 1901–1930 (2007) and of the new Broadview Literary Edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (2010). He is co-editor of The History of Reading: A Reader (2010), The History of Reading, Vol. 1: International Perspectives, c.1500–1990 (2011) and of The History of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (2011). He writes extensively on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture, and is currently writing a study on Vernon Lee’s reading.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Rock of Doom (c. 1876) Figure 2. Alphonse Marie Mucha, The Times of the Day: Evening Contemplation (1899) Figure 3. Arthur B. Davies, Sleep Lies Perfect in Them (1908) Figure 4. Edvard Munch, Vampyr II (1895–1902) Figure 5. Francis Picabia, Udnie (Young American Girl, or the Dance) (1913)

– xiii –

76 78 79 82 84

INTRODUCTION Laura Rattray

The Custom of the Country, first published on 18 October 1913, has been described as Edith Wharton’s ‘most powerful’ novel, ‘her greatest book’, her ‘most ambitious masterpiece’ and a ‘tour de force’.1 Charting the career of the American-branded Undine Spragg of Apex, Wharton presents her readers with the modern material girl, a young woman surrounded by dazzling lights and mirrors, her sights set firmly on the centre of the social gaze. While The House of Mirth’s precarious insider Lily Bart fatally spirals down the social scale, ‘thrown out into the rubbish heap’ and all its attendant horrors,2 Undine Spragg, the outsider, indefatigably works her way up and forces a way in. At the novel’s remarkably open-ended close, Undine has realized her dazzling success (while never recognizing its casualties) only to discover ‘under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remain[s]’ (p. 594). Undine Spragg Moffatt Marvell de Chelles Moffatt’s career of acquiring and discarding husbands debars her from the role of Ambassador’s wife – the one part, she tells herself, for which she was really made. While Wharton herself would come to regard The Custom of the Country as one of her finest works, its genesis proved the most protracted and disrupted of any novel in her long and prolific career. As the author toiled on the manuscript in fits and starts between 1907 and 1913, progress was regularly interrupted, and the novel intermittently set aside in favour of other writings. During the period in which The Custom of the Country took shape, Wharton – displaying her familiar dexterity across a gamut of literary genres – published two collections of short stories (The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories, Tales of Men and Ghosts), a travel book (A Motor-Flight through France) and a volume of poetry (Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse) in addition to her novels Ethan Frome and The Reef. Yet, throughout, The Custom of the Country remained a work for which its creator had ambitious plans. In May 1908, Wharton wrote to her friend Sara (Sally) Norton of having ‘taken up again [her] sadly neglected great American Novel’.3 By May 1911, she was ‘working steadily at “The Custom,”’ though ‘still only revising’: ‘I can’t tell any longer whether I’m really improving it, or only undergoing an attack of scrupulosis’ she wrote to former lover turned –1–

2

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

sometime-friend Morton Fullerton.4 The same month Wharton informed the art historian Bernard Berenson she was at work on ‘a real magnum opus … a vast novel … piling up the words as if publishers paid by the syllable’.5 In August 1911 she continued ‘digging away’ at ‘the Big Novel’ with ‘dogged obstinacy’.6 When Scribner’s Magazine began its serialization of The Custom of the Country in January 1913 (the serial ran from January to November), the novel remained incomplete. By August 1913, the ‘hard grind’ at her last chapters had ‘used [her] up’, leaving Wharton ‘simply dead tired, from having always, these last months, a little too much to do’.7 In fact, neither professional nor personal conditions had been propitious – with 1913 also marking the culmination of a dramatic, at times traumatic, period in the author’s life. During the years she worked on The Custom of the Country, Wharton was attempting to cope with what she diplomatically described as her husband’s ‘nervous excitability’8 and the humiliations his behaviour inflicted, not least the use of his wife’s money to support a mistress.9 This was the period in which Wharton embarked on a tumultuous affair with Morton Fullerton, only for it to end badly, and in which she separated permanently from America, selling the Mount, her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. There had been a rift with both Wharton’s brother Harry and, painfully, with Henry James. Crucially, 1913 brought completion of The Custom of the Country but also Wharton’s divorce decree, marking a very public end to her twenty-eight-year marriage. As reporters circled, she assured herself in a letter to Fullerton that ‘the public’ at least could not access the register of the French courts, where the decree had been lodged, and that those reporters would ‘soon tire of their vain researches’. A comment in the same letter ironically underscored the dichotomy of Wharton as a woman fiercely protective of her privacy and a media-savvy writer always concerned to see the maximum publicity and exposure for her work: ‘It’s a tiresome moment to traverse – but no more … I must get back to work! – Undine is already making the press ring – I hope she’ll keep it up’.10 Though her letter dismissed the event as merely ‘tiresome’, a private notebook entry betrayed the year’s heavy emotional toll. In a visceral recounting of a nightmare experienced in October, a ‘horror struck’ Wharton sees a ‘Demon’ throw before her from ‘a great black trunk’ a succession of shapeless ‘Black Horrors’, conjuring up the personal vicissitudes of the year (‘I knew what they were: the hideous, the incredible things that had happened to me in this dreadful year, or were to happen to me before its close’).11 Yet real life for Wharton would prove in many respects a series of ‘adventures with books’ – a phrase she employed twice as titles of fragmentary, abandoned reminiscences12 – and, throughout, writing remained at its heart. Though she once described reading most reviews of her work as comparable to ‘watching somebody in boxing-gloves trying to dissect a flower’,13 the author took an

Introduction

3

avid interest in her critical reception and sales – and among her papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library are files of reviews of The Custom of the Country supplied by Scribner’s and her British publishers Macmillan. The New York Herald promised ‘a graphic picture of modern life both here and abroad’, while a full page advertisement in the Atlantic Monthly opted for three punchlines: ‘Recounts the Career of a Beautiful, Ambitious American Girl / Forms a Graphic Revelation of American Society To-Day / Already the Most Discussed Novel in America’. Sections of the British press, meanwhile, smugly distanced themselves from American social conduct, with the Leeds Mercury pronouncing the novel ‘of American application … deal[ing] with the “habit” of divorce which prevails across the Atlantic’.14 The Saturday Review concluded Mrs. Wharton has assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack between the covers of a six-hundred page novel. It is a sordid society into which we are introduced – a set of vulgar Americans, blatant and pushing, whose only standard of values is the dollar.15

Wharton herself was no stranger to the value of the dollar, Scribner’s paying a royalty advance of $7,500 for The Custom of the Country and $6,000 for serial rights, with half of the novel’s 30,000 copies of the first American edition having sold in advance of official publication.16 Reviewers were both fascinated and repelled by the incessantly self-gratifying exploits of Undine Spragg. She was perceived as ‘an ideal monster’, ‘sexless’, ‘absolutely unmoral [sic]’, ‘absolutely selfish, logical and repulsive’, ‘the most repellent heroine we have encountered in many a long time’ and ‘ a mere monster of vulgarity’.17 In his essay ‘Justice to Edith Wharton’, Edmund Wilson would seal the deal, famously labelling Undine ‘the prototype in fiction of the “gold-digger,” of the international cocktail bitch’.18 More recent readings highlight Charles Bowen’s observation to consider the character not as a monster per se, but as ‘a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph’ (p. 208). Readings with a greater social consciousness include those by Elizabeth Ammons, who perceives Undine as a ‘naïf ’ revealing Wharton’s ‘criticism of leisure-class marriage’; Susan Goodman, who concludes ‘Undine is tragically limited by a society that does not value intelligence or eloquence in women until after they are safely married’; and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, who regards her as a product of the reader’s own misogyny.19 ‘If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable’ (p. 266), observes the narrator of the soulless Undine, the name inspiring both mythical water-nymph and hair-waver marketed by the Spraggs. Restless, relentless, four-times married, yet entirely lacking in desire or affection (she spectacularly fails the maternal litmus test by forgetting the birthday of her young son), Undine exists only for an audience. Wharton’s fiction parades a cast of ver-

4

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

satile actresses, skilfully changing roles as the occasion demands. Undine lives for the limelight: ‘she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light’ (p. 21). At the early Dagonet dinner, she found that to seem very much in love, and a little confused and subdued by the newness and intensity of the sentiment, was, to the Dagonet mind, the becoming attitude for a young lady in her situation. The part was not hard to play (p. 91, my italics)

Wharton’s hopes of a playwriting career may have been thwarted, but her fascination with the stage and with playwriting continued to reap rich rewards. Theatrical settings and motifs are pervasive in her fiction, the perfect venue for her female protagonists to display themselves and be displayed. As Undine’s performance in the opera box will illustrate, elaborate social scenarios are frequently enacted in the auditorium rather than on stage.20 In her article for the Atlantic Monthly in 1907, Anna A. Rogers wondered ‘Why American Marriages Fail’.21 It was a question Wharton was addressing in her own life, and Rogers’s answers, examined by Susan Goodman in the opening essay of this collection (women’s failure to realize that marriage is her work in the world; her growing individualism; her lost art of giving), would have offered any successful, professional, financially independent female writer little relief. As each of her husbands will discover to his cost, Undine Spragg simply has nothing to give. The status of divorced women had long intrigued Wharton in her writing: in her abandoned early novel, Disintegration, divorcee Alice Clephane is ostracized, only to remarry and buy her way back in as Alice Wing; in the 1904 short story ‘The Other Two’, twice-divorced Alice Haskett Varick simply moves on to husband number three. Wharton’s unfinished play, The Arch, features a twenty-eight-year-old woman, Rose, who has scandalized society by divorcing her first husband and taking a second – the successful architect George Adrian. In the early scenes, Rose is presented as a woman adopting an individual, honourable moral code; by the end she is charged with causing all the miseries through her loose, corrupting standards, specifically her ‘preaching the gospel of divorce’ – a judgement Rose appears to accept: she is ‘inwardly aghast at what she has done’.22 Undine Spragg, on the other hand, having no self can have no self-doubt, ‘Wharton’s deeply ironic novel prov[ing] that divorce is the logical mechanism for market expansion, providing women with the means to forge nuptial careers based not on a single liaison but on successive – and ever more successful – unions’.23 Though part of the narrative is set in France, as Undine moves her marital campaign to Paris, Wharton regarded The Custom of the Country as an ‘intensely American’ tale.24 No writer would prove more effective at capturing American society in transition, with Ralph Marvell memorably viewing his mother and grandfather as ‘Aborigines’, ‘vanishing denizens of the American continent

Introduction

5

doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race’ (pp. 73–4). As Emily J. Orlando astutely observes in her essay ‘Crude Ascending the Staircase: Undine Spragg and the Armory Show’, when Ralph in turn is left behind, the narrator fittingly places Undine aboard the iconic ‘Twentieth Century’ train (below, p. 83). Wharton locates most of the action of The Custom of the Country in an early twentieth-century world, her notes for the novel including a precise timing of important events, labelled the ‘Undine Chronology’. (The author evidently laboured over the timings, making a series of painstaking corrections: ‘Married in March 1900/ Paul born Feb. <January> 1901/ Birthday scene Feb <January> 1903. / Goes abroad for June <May> 1903/ Goes off with Van D. in July 1903/ January/ Goes to Dakota gets divorce’).25 Indeed several contributors to this collection underline The Custom of the Country’s remarkably prescient concerns: ‘the media’s ability to shape human beings’ perceptions of themselves and their societies’, ‘the rise of “image”’, ‘economic and business shifts to a society of spectacle’, corporate corruption, the ‘portent of a future as shaped by Undine and her sort – the society of spectacle, auguring late capitalism’ (below, pp. 18, 103, 113). Read against our recent economic and banking freefall, the novel appears alarmingly prophetic. Carol J. Singley defines it as ‘a contemporary jeremiad that rails against reckless materialism’, while Robin Peel rephrases ‘Orwell’s account of his own dystopian novel’ to label The Custom of the Country ‘both a prophecy and a warning’.26 In the years since publication, The Custom of the Country has attracted an array of critical readings. Elizabeth Ammons interprets the work as ‘one of America’s great business novels’, throwing ‘a brilliant, satiric light on the institution of marriage, stripping it of all sentiment and sentimentality’.27 Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Shari Benstock and Aaron Worth, among others, view it as a novel about ‘energy’, Wolff asserting ‘One thing and only one is genuinely fixed; and that is a preoccupation with energy. Psychic energy – power, assertion, drive, ambition. This, more even than Undine herself, is the subject of the fiction.’28 R. W. B. Lewis reads the novel biographically, seeing the author ‘revealed, quite startlingly, in the characterization of Undine Spragg’ which suggests her ‘antiself ’, ‘what Edith Wharton might have been like if, by some dreadful miracle, all her best and most lovable and redeeming features had been suddenly cut away’.29 Debra Ann MacComb defines The Custom of the Country as one of Wharton’s ‘divorce novels’, positioning the text against the backdrop of a ‘divorce industry’ seen to function as an extension of the ‘marriage economy’ by ‘recycling women back onto the marriage market after exacting from them both their time and money’.30 Cecelia Tichi characterizes the work as ‘arguably Wharton’s most thoroughgoing socially Darwinian narrative’; Ticien Marie Sassoubre suggests it ‘should be read as a novel about changing property relations and the ways in which those property relations are constitutive of personal identity’, while Can-

6

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

dace Waid contends it ‘is about the destruction of the writer who is seduced by the siren song of a false muse’.31 As the New York Times Review of Books had promised in October 1913, ‘The Custom of the Country is a book which will arouse some dissension and much discussion’.32 Dissension and discussion have also been aroused regarding the novel’s form. Robin Peel reads The Custom of the Country as ‘a disguised eighteenth-century novel of sensibility, designed to show what happens when those without empathy or the semblance of virtue inherit the earth’.33 Hermione Lee, on the other hand, observes that ‘Custom looks expansive, like a nineteenth-century novel. Balzac, Thackeray, Trollope, even Dickens, come to mind.’34 Recent scholarship has debated the degree of Wharton’s engagement with the modernist aesthetic35 – a debate Hildegard Hoeller applies to The Custom of the Country in the final essay of this collection, ‘“Lost in Translation”: Financial Plots and the Modernist Reader in The Custom of the Country’. The years from 1907 to 1913 may have been among the most difficult in Wharton’s personal and professional life, but they were also among the most innovative, prompting one to wonder whether the writer divorced not only her husband in this period, but also her customary narrative techniques. Of the two other novels produced in the gestation years of The Custom of the Country, much has been written on the ambitious and ambiguous framing structure of Ethan Frome (1911),36 which ensures – in Margaret Murray’s apt summation in her essay ‘Landscape with the Fall of Undine’ (below, p. 117) – that narrative veracity hangs by a thread. (In her memoir A Backward Glance, Wharton expressed exasperation at having been ‘severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale’.)37 Others have commented on experiments with perspective in The Reef (1912), notably the withholding of Sophy Viner’s point of view, the narrative refusing throughout to present her directly to the reader.38 While Peel views The Custom of the Country as a return to form, its ‘rhetoric’ suggesting ‘the triumph of orthodoxy’, others have focused on the novel’s ‘difficult and disorienting’ qualities.39 In 1915 Percy Lubbock searched vainly for ‘a controlling and unifying center’ in a book that was ‘all too good for Undine’.40 Wolff writes of the novel’s ‘insistent contradiction’, its ‘deliberate unsettling of every comfortable conviction’, Wharton ‘toss[ing] the narrative vantage about with a virtuoso’s nonchalance’, ‘shifting the focus of our gaze’. ‘Nothing is fixed’, ‘[t]here are no clarifying summations’, ‘no fixed set of principles according to which we may systematically evaluate [the novel’s] characters’.41 This is a novel in which important events are delayed or withheld from the reader – not least a first marriage and past life in Apex. In a world of change, uncertainty and false muses, omniscience and authority are often denied. In the final scenes of the text, the reader views Undine’s youngest casualty, her son Paul, piecing together his family narrative from Mrs Heeny’s

Introduction

7

clippings – a series of sibylline fragments that he, like the reader, must interpret for himself. Indeed Wharton’s own composition methods assumed a layered, patchwork, piecemeal design. Work would customarily begin with handwritten sheets in pencil or pen (sometimes both on the same page), often heavily corrected and revised in pen, pencil and even, on occasion, coloured crayon. In a very physical process, the author proved an early advocate of cut and paste, with many manuscript sheets having strips of paper pasted on the original; or an original page might be cut up before being reattached to additional segments to remake a ‘whole’. On occasion, a reader of Wharton’s manuscripts can only marvel that her lyricism survived the patchwork, layered composition. The processes may have involved cutting and pasting (and the writer wryly makes Abner Spragg the inventor of ‘Goliath Glue’), but there is nothing rough or unpolished about The Custom of the Country’s design. The author’s keen attention to detail is everywhere in evidence; even under the immense pressure of completing the novel when its serialization was well under way, Wharton made a series of ‘minute, but continual’ revisions noted by Lee as ‘all in the interests of toning-down any romantic magazine-touches and making the whole thing drier’.42 Lack of sentiment remained the order of the day for a writer who, as Peel keenly observes ‘could conduct a devastating critique of the marketplace while eagerly monitoring its sales’.43 The purpose of this new collection of critical essays is to provide a focused, single-volume, twenty-first-century reassessment of Wharton’s 1913 novel. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence have both attracted numerous volumes of criticism in recent years. To list only a selection: on The House of Mirth, these include the Norton Critical Edition (1990), Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (St Martin’s, 1994), New Essays (Cambridge, 2001), Casebooks in Criticism (Oxford, 2003) and Routledge Guides to Literature (2008); while The Age of Innocence has seen essays collections in the New Riverside Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), the Norton Critical Edition (2003), and Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations (Chelsea House, 2005). The Custom of the Country, by contrast – though increasingly acknowledged as arguably Wharton’s finest work – has not until now been the subject of a collection of critical essays. Contributors to this volume write from a variety of national and transnational perspectives, and they draw upon modern critical approaches that demonstrate recent scholarship in areas such as cultural theory, narratology, book history and the visual arts. The editor has solicited contributors to write essays that will be accessible to a wide but mainly academic audience (from junior undergraduates upwards), while taking into account new paradigms in Wharton studies that are developing in the twenty-first century. Writers include: the authors of Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, Edith Wharton’s Writings from

8

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

the Great War, The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton, Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction; the editors of The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930; and members of the executive and editorial boards of the Edith Wharton Society and the international journal the Edith Wharton Review. The opening essays address a wide range of literary, cultural and periodical contexts for the protracted development of Wharton’s novel. Susan Goodman begins with ‘The Custom of the Country: Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly’, an exploration of the author’s dialogue with the magazine which continued to play a Promethean role as a monthly messenger of culture during the years that Wharton struggled with the manuscript of The Custom of the Country. As constructed from a mosaic of Atlantic Monthly issues from 1907 to 1913, the world can be characterized as increasingly preoccupied with definitions of cultures and national identities, and Wharton’s ‘conversation’ with the magazine, posits Goodman, took place within her own, larger (often prescient) anxieties about culture itself. Goodman’s research illuminates the engagement of both novel and magazine in contemporary debates about nationalism, race, class and globalization, and illustrates Wharton’s own at times conflicted sense of loyalties to particular parties and positions. Expertly charting the evolving ‘process of cultural transmission when the notion of culture is itself changing’ (below, p. 25), The Custom of the Country, when read against the Atlantic Monthly, becomes ‘a Cassandra’s cry to a country [Wharton] both loved and disdained’ (below, p. 28). While Wharton may have echoed Rebecca Harding Davis’s sentiment in considering ‘being read by the Atlantic audience part of the pay’,44 the ever-astute businesswoman, notes Shafquat Towheed in ‘When the Reading Had to Stop: Readers, Reading and the Circulation of Texts in The Custom of the Country’, was ‘relentless in pressing her publishers to advertise [the novel] as widely as possible in the popular press’ (below, p. 40). In a detailed examination of both reading material and the material acts of reading in the text, Towheed presents The Custom of the Country as insistently ‘self-referential in its consciousness of the power of mass journalism to shape its readers’ (below, p. 39), recreating the American world of print in the first decade of the twentieth century. The plot of this serialized work is shown to be dependent upon the reading of periodicals and newspapers in a country where the most important customs are played out on the pages of the popular press. Examined as Wharton’s ‘most self-conscious exercise in engaging with the marketplace’ and ‘her most explicit musing on the proliferation of print (and its consequences)’, The Custom of the Country becomes in Towheed’s study ‘a work of rare, sociological, even anthropological

Introduction

9

insight into the complex and multifaceted reading universe of early twentiethcentury America’ (below, p. 41). Wharton first came to international recognition through her short stories. They remained at the core of her writings throughout her career, a commercial hub of her ‘business’. In The Writing of Fiction she would famously characterize the short story, at its finest, as ‘a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience’.45 Wharton confessed to Robert Grant in November 1907 that she ‘always obscurely felt … [she] didn’t know how to write a novel’, that in approaching a longer work she lacked ‘the sense of authority’ with which she took hold of a short story.46 As The Custom of the Country stalled, the short story genre continued to serve its author well. In ‘“Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story”: Wharton’s Business of Fiction, 1908–12’, Bonnie Shannon McMullen reads the eighteen short stories Wharton wrote between 1908 and 1912 as a map of the evolution of the author’s creative progress towards The Custom of the Country. Through an examination of the individual stories, their chronology and motifs, McMullen concludes that: ‘With its containment and concentration, the story form provided the shaft, or column of light … illuminating the twisting path to the realization of her 1913 novel’ (below, p. 58). The next set of essays is focused on readings and representations of the figure of Undine Spragg and the systems that produced her. In ‘Worst Parents Ever: Cultures of Childhood in The Custom of the Country’, Carol J. Singley directs attention to family dynamics, reading the text as the story of the early twentieth-century child in family life. This novel, more than any other by the writer who had a lifelong interest in the welfare of the young, illustrates the effects of parenting on childhood, contends Singley, with Undine the ‘most conspicuously parented of all Wharton’s characters’. Undine ‘can be no more and no less than the culture that produced her’, and in The Custom of the Country the author ‘explores social and moral disintegration in the modern American family and voices concern that the direction parenting was taking boded ill for the nation as a whole’ (below, p. 60). Wharton joins the wider cultural dialogue regarding the place of the child in early twentieth-century American society, while simultaneously presenting ‘a fantasy of childhood that runs counter to [her] own experience’ (below, p. 64). In Singley’s reading, the ‘custom of the country … refers not only to social conventions but to changing customs in parenting’ – the results manifested in the figure of Undine and her subsequent mistreatment of her own son Paul. Emily J. Orlando and Jessica Schubert McCarthy consider the novel and its central female protagonist within a context of visual arts and representation. In her essay ‘Crude Ascending the Staircase: Undine Spragg and the Armory Show’ Orlando illuminates the compelling correspondences between The Custom of the Country and modernism in the visual arts, specifically by positioning its central

10

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

female protagonist against the backdrop of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show. Exhaustively covered in the press, the Armory Show exhibits attracted epithets of ‘monstrous’, ‘childlike’, ‘immoral’, ‘unconventional’ and ‘depraved’ – the very adjectives, observes Orlando, that were hurled at the heroine of The Custom of the Country ‘unveiled (or unleashed) the same year: the social-climbing, gold-digging, reliably vulgar Undine Spragg … clawing her way up … the hallowed staircases of old New York’ (below, p. 71). While much has been made of Wharton’s interest in, and impressively vast knowledge of art, notably her allusions to the Italian Renaissance and neoclassical and nineteenth-century painting, Orlando redirects attention to Wharton’s interventions in modern visual culture, through a character who mirrors in ‘compelling and perhaps unintentional ways, the crude, invasive, vulgar, unwelcome, unsettling, monstrous flavour of modern art’, a heroine both setting the stage for the modern woman and reflecting ‘our own discomfort with change’ (below, p. 85). Wharton tellingly writes of Undine, ‘Over a nature so insensible to the spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail’ (p. 235). Indeed, displaying a ‘compulsive desire to be visually engaged’, Undine, observes Jessica Schubert McCarthy, is a ruthless modern ‘celebutante’ whose ‘most amorous relationship is not with any individual but with the society that takes her in with its eyes’ (below, p. 96). Like Lily Bart before her, Undine demonstrates a compulsive awareness of herself as a visual object ‘by repeatedly posing and performing’ in society’s ‘house of mirrors’ (below, pp. 91, 94). In her essay ‘“It’s Better to Watch”: Compulsive Voyeurism in The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth’, McCarthy aligns the two novels to trace ‘Wharton’s perception of visual culture’s evolution in the early twentieth century’ (below, p. 100). By employing multiple references to sight and seeing, Wharton is shown to implicate readers in the culture that destroys Lily but nurtures Undine, while the narrative design of The Custom of the Country lures readers into the role of voyeur, forced to confront a reflection of their own complicity in Undine’s creation. In both cases, Wharton ensures all are compelled to keep watching. In ‘A “Mist of Opopanax”: Mapping the Scentscape of The Custom of the Country’, Pamela Knights redirects attention from visual to non-visual sensation in the novel, specifically by charting its osmographical terrain. Through her engagement with the languages of olfaction in the early years of the twentieth century, Wharton is shown to anticipate ‘features only now being systematized in modern cultural studies’ (below, p. 101). ‘[S]mells and scents – deployed selectively, according to her own prescription – would be crucial to structure and to character’ throughout the author’s career, posits Knights, so that ‘the operations of smell can heighten for the reader the significant histories of Wharton’s major characters, and help to calibrate her representation of larger sociocultural

Introduction

11

territory, and the dynamics of change’ (below, pp. 102, 101). With reference to The House of Mirth and the Vance Weston novels establishing coordinates for the variants the author uses across many of her writings, Knights presents The Custom of the Country as ‘a supreme example of Wharton’s precision and nuance across a broad olfactory spectrum’ (below, p. 104). Marking the stages of characters’ trajectories in The Custom of the Country ‘through spatial olfactory tropes’, ‘osmic topography’ is depicted as underpinning the novel’s ‘ambitious narrative structure’ (below, p. 109). Moving from scentscape to landscape, Margaret Murray and Julie OlinAmmentorp address the novel anew in relation to literary genre. In ‘Landscape with the Fall of Undine’, Murray challenges generic definitions of both The Custom of the Country as a picaresque novel and of Undine Spragg as the requisite picaroon. Murray counters: ‘Ultimately, the picaroon is a charming rogue who succeeds; however, Undine is witless, vicious in her narcissism, careers from one tier of upper-class society to another, completely disingenuous, ruthless, distasteful to the reader and, ultimately, a failure. She is not the subject of The Custom of the Country’ (below, p. 115). After charting the means by which Undine entered ‘the “critical imaginary”’ as a picaroon (below, p. 116), via Blake Nevius and successive generations of Wharton scholars, Murray eliminates Undine as the primary focus and proceeds to explore the text outside the paradigms of the picaresque novel. Choosing instead ‘to focus on the title [the author] gave the book, what is left is the conduct of Edith Wharton’s peers’, ‘the panorama of detail’, the ‘crevasse that separates the manners of modernism and Romanticism’, the world in which the character is immersed (below, pp. 125, 115, 121). While many remain preoccupied with Undine Spragg, in Murray’s reading The Custom of the Country is revealed to be ‘a masterful study in misdirection’ (below, p. 117). In ‘Girls from the Provinces: Wharton’s Undine Spragg and Cather’s Thea Kronborg’, Julie Olin-Ammentorp takes as her starting point a 1948 essay by Lionel Trilling in which he identifies ‘“a great line of novels which runs through the nineteenth century as … the very backbone of its fiction”, that is, the novel about “the Young Man from the Provinces”’ (below, p. 127). Sadly neglected, observes Olin-Ammentorp, is the subgenre’s ‘younger sister’, ‘the novel about the girl from the provinces’ (below, p. 127) – an epithet applied in her essay to The Custom of the Country and its near contemporary, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915). The author links the ways in which both texts ‘play variations on the theme of the young man from the provinces, chronicling the careers of ambitious young women who leave the provinces of their childhood to try for success in the sophisticated, confusing, and morally complex world of the great city’ (below, p. 127). Dealing ‘with “the modern actuality” of their own time and with the perennially fascinating narrative of the young person leaving the provinces’ to seek a fortune in the city, such stories, it is suggested, retain their appeal,

12

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

appearing in both ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ forms across the twentieth century and beyond (below, p. 141). In The Custom of the Country and The Song of the Lark, one protagonist transcends her origins; the other ‘is limited by her egocentricity and her provincial blinders’, learning very little. Yet, ‘both draw readers in’ (below, p. 141). The remaining two essays examine the business and financial worlds reflected in the novel, one linked to the consequences for gender relations, the other to narrative form. In his study, ‘Men at Work in The Custom of the Country’, William Blazek identifies Undine’s consumer desires as being ‘generously gratified by American men’s productivity’ – an arrangement shown to expose ‘the shortcomings of a society built on imbalanced gender roles and endlessly repeated market cycles of success and failure, abundance and scarcity, hope and unhappiness’ (below, p. 145). While others have approached this critical territory with a focus on American women, Blazek specifically targets the depiction of American men in the novel. Two dominant themes emerge from the analysis: ‘an expression of the vibrancy as well as the volatility of American business culture, and the ways in which men whose minds are sharpened by the parry and thrust of commercial politics can transfer that public experience to the private sphere’ (below, pp. 145–6). In The Custom of the Country, observes Blazek, it is the male protagonists who ‘exhibit aesthetic sensibilities and an underlying desire for social harmony and more balanced gender relations’ (below, p. 146). While Undine remains ‘insensible to the touch of the heart’, the men of The Custom of the Country ‘largely value variety over sameness, originality over replication, and often aspire to if not fully achieve what Ralph Marvell imagines: “mergings of the personal with the general life”’ (below, p. 146). In the final essay, ‘“Lost in Translation”: Financial Plots and the Modernist Reader in The Custom of the Country’, Hildegard Hoeller enhances recent discussions concerning the extent of Wharton’s participation in modernist scenarios through her reading of the fully fledged, yet obscured financial schemes within the novel. The author ‘chooses as her theme the levels of incomprehension that surround her characters, and the ways in which the world they live in can no longer be understood fully but only vaguely and in fragments’ (below, p. 158). Such fragmentation and loss in translation, contends Hoeller, is particularly linked to the underlying epic financial narrative – that of the Ararat investigation and the Apex consolidation. ‘Wharton – abandoning the narrative conventions of the nineteenth century – stands back and lets us see how her characters and thus we ourselves are lost in translation, unable to read with clarity the epic plots that determine their and our modern lives’ (below, p. 158). In a debate that resonates through the current climate of economic instability, The Custom of the Country ‘focuses on the way in which finance capitalism changes the foundations

Introduction

13

of our lives, the very way of reading and being’ (below, p. 167) – a change, argues Hoeller, that prompted Wharton to turn to a modernist aesthetic. Of all of Wharton’s novels, The Custom of the Country is the work for which one most readily imagines a sequel. Indeed it is indicative of its open-endedness that a number of contributors foresee Undine’s assault – successful or otherwise – on the social barrier to her next career promotion, that of an Ambassador’s wife. There are no indications that Wharton ever envisaged a sequel (although she delighted in the exploits of Lorelei Lee, the comically amoral diarist of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) who moves across America and Europe in search of love, but particularly money (‘kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever’).47 Wharton pronounced Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ‘the great American novel’ – a gift to Loos’s advertisers and a mirror epithet of Wharton’s description to Sara Norton of The Custom of the Country as a work in progress in 1908).48 The year after publication of The Custom of the Country, however, the personal ‘Black Horrors’ of Wharton’s nightmare would metamorphose into global terrors with the onset of the First World War. The author immersed herself in her extraordinary relief work, yet writing continued to occupy her life’s core. Further literary successes stood out in the remaining twenty-four years of Wharton’s career trajectory – not least her Pulitzer-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, and The Buccaneers, left unfinished on her death in 1937. Yet her 1913 novel – complex, profound and compelling – always invites its readers to return. Customs may have changed irrevocably, but The Custom of the Country continues to stand as a remarkable milestone in Edith Wharton’s series of ‘adventures with books’.

1 THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY: EDITH WHARTON’S CONVERSATION WITH THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY Susan Goodman

In 1907, the Atlantic Monthly celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an issue devoted to assuring its own place in literary history. Appreciations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and its first editor, James Russell Lowell, recalled the glory days when an unknown editor named Francis Underwood began soliciting contributors for a Boston-based magazine that would be both literary and anti-slavery. It only remained for Oliver Wendell Holmes to name it. Although Philadelphia boasted Graham’s, Godey’s and Sartain’s and New York Putnam’s, Harper’s New Monthly and the old Knickerbocker, Boston had no strictly ‘literary’ magazine of its own. The closest it came was the North American Review, modelled after the British quarterlies and catering to a highly literate audience. With most popular magazines of the day providing, in the words of one of the Atlantic’s founders, ‘thrice-diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and sketches’, Underwood and his cohorts saw an untapped market in the middle class and middle brow.1 No one could fully realize what the Atlantic would mean to culture-starved householders in small western towns like its third editor, William Dean Howells, or for that matter to the girl who would become Edith Wharton. The year of the Atlantic’s fiftieth anniversary, Edith Wharton rented the George Vanderbilts’ apartment in Paris, where she began a friendship with the professional charmer and journalist, William Morton Fullerton. She entered into the heart of French life both professionally and personally, entertaining members of the French Academy and conducting a clandestine affair with Fullerton that preserved the forms of her marriage to Teddy Wharton. She would know love as she imagined only happy women knew it – to borrow a phrase from The Reef (1912) – and she would also know heartache and betrayal, though the last from a husband she thought could never surprise her and did. As Wharton found a home and herself, her husband spiralled out of control. His behaviour – 15 –

16

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

grew erratic; he embezzled money from her accounts; and he experienced his own Indian summer, travelling with a companion who signed hotel registers ‘Mrs Wharton’. The real Mrs Wharton, who began lobbying friends to support her subsequent divorce, did what she did every day: she wrote. From 1907 to 1913, the date her twenty-eight-year marriage ended by decree, she published Madame de Treymes, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome and The Reef, two collections of short stories (The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Tales of Men and Ghosts), a travel book (A Motor-Flight through France) and a volume of poetry (Artemis to Actaeon). This list does not include the occasional poem (‘Life’, ‘Ogrin the Hermit’ and ‘The Comrade’) or story (‘The Long Run’) for the Atlantic Monthly, her revision of three Atlantic essays, and the writing of an additional last section for A Motor-Flight through France. Nor does it include the work she did on an ungovernable novel that would become The Custom of the Country (1913). Although Scribner’s was her usual outlet, Wharton’s history with the Atlantic went back to the time that her mother sent a handful of her poems to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who showed them to his editor, W. D. Howells. The father of a gifted daughter with literary aspirations, Howells printed one. In 1880, the last year of his editorship, he published five more. The idea of Lucretia Jones acting as her daughter’s agent both belies and reinforces Wharton’s portrait of her mother as an aloof, hypercritical snob who insisted at all times on the best, which in literature the Atlantic represented. More than one author turned down immediate publication with better-paying magazines to make a debut there. Rebecca Harding Davis, for instance, considered ‘being read by the Atlantic audience part of the pay’.2 Her choice, and that of others, had everything to do with prestige or, to quote another contributor, ‘the company I should keep’.3 More than twenty years after her first appearance in the Atlantic, Wharton echoed this sentiment when, fresh from the success of her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), she wondered, ‘Why have you never asked me for a story for the Atlantic? I am tired of waiting’. True, the illustrated magazines usually paid her $500 for a short story; she would, however, be satisfied with the Atlantic’s going rate, ‘first because I have always thought it an honour to appear in the Atlantic and second because I believe it is always advantageous to a writer to get a fresh audience’.4 Much in magazine publishing had changed between Davis’s generation and Wharton’s, even after the onslaught of the illustrated magazines and the Atlantic’s early decision to eschew the costly new technology. Apart from rising manufacturing costs, the Atlantic had to compete with other print outlets, such as newspapers and subscription libraries, for readers who had an ever-increasing array of choices and authors, who typically had more wares than one source could handle. In 1865, for instance, there were 700 American magazines; by 1870 that figure had risen to 2,400. The trend continued to the turn of the twentieth century with the number of available magazines increasing

Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

17

686 per cent between 1868 and 1900.5 Writers could now support themselves by serial publication. By the 1890s, unknown authors could command $5–6 for 1,000 words and the most popular author as much as $150. As Howells explains in ‘The Man of Letters as a Man of Business’ (1893), post-Civil War magazines created a whole class of authors not dependent upon book sales. ‘[T]he best literature’, he argues, now first sees the light in the magazines and most of the second-best appears first in book form. The old-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not reading magazine fiction or magazine poetry make a great mistake and simply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best.6

Howells could not overestimate the service he and his colleagues provided towards the training of discerning readers. Wharton was less romantic about magazine publishing, refusing to appear in a Hearst publication, for example, until the offer became too good to refuse. The Atlantic staked its life on quality – or if not that, the kind of cultural snobbery that scoffed at Hearst publications – and it worked. Despite the ephemeral nature of any accepted value; despite shifting editors with their different weighting of the magazine towards literature, as in Howells’s time (1871–81), or contemporary issues and politics in Bliss Perry’s (1899–1909), the Atlantic managed to retain its reputation for excellence and high culture. Wharton shared certain assumptions about culture with the magazine’s founding fathers and the dynasty of editors who defined their mission as educating the populace. Many of them were Harvard professors, including James Russell Lowell and his close friend and subsequent co-editor at the North American Review Charles Eliot Norton, a man Wharton called her great ‘awakener’.7 These men believed that culture functioned like a river: originating on Mount Olympus – or from Boston, the Atlantic’s home city – it sent forth its fertilizing waters to dry lands south and west. Norton summered in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where every year he invited the country’s leading intellectuals and artists to address the townspeople in the village hall as the major fundraising event for the local academy.8 Wharton regularly motored to Ashfield to see Norton’s youngest daughter Sally and to borrow books she could raid for details about life in eighteenth-century Italy, the setting of The Valley of Decision. Its collection of minutiae about the breeding of lapdogs and the sexual assignations of nuns led Henry James to throw up his hands and plead in capitals: ‘DO NEW YORK’.9 The Custom of the Country might be read as a sequel to her first New York novel, but unlike The House of Mirth (1905), which concentrates exclusively on old New York, it roams as restlessly as its peripatetic heroine, Undine Spragg, from Apex City, Arizona, to Washington Square and then to Paris. With every

18

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

move, Undine acquires and sheds a husband, becoming in turn Mrs Elmer Moffatt, Mrs Ralph Marvell, the Countess Raymond de Chelles and, coming full circle as the novel closes, her own successor: the second Mrs Moffatt. She goes, in other words, everywhere and gets nowhere, which allows Wharton the leisure to cast a critical eye at a range of cultures and topics central to the novel’s interconnected themes of marriage and commerce. With apologies to Henry James, the Atlantic Monthly might be seen as Wharton’s house of fiction to the extent that it offered views into contemporary American culture through different apertures, including fiction, reviews and essays on the arts, science, religion, politics and literature. After the turn of the twentieth century and during the years that Wharton struggled with the manuscript of The Custom of the Country, 1907 to 1913, it carried, apart from articles on contemporary women focusing on marriage and motherhood, a series of looks at France from Laura Spencer Porter’s memoir, ‘My French School Days’ (1909), to Stoddard Dewey’s examination of the Roman Catholic Church’s role in a newly secularized nation, ‘Year in France’ (1911). Wharton’s views from the back seat of her swish Panhard-Levassor ran serially as ‘A Second Motor-Flight through France’ from January through April 1908. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton does more than chronicle the battle between the masses and the classes, in which the Moffatts rise triumphant if discontented with their bargains. She sets that battle for cultural authority partly in and through the filter of print media that encompasses novels with salacious titles (When the Kissing Had to Stop), Sunday supplements and gossip rags, which one Atlantic journalist blamed for the waning moral authority of the press.10 Wharton’s concern about the media’s ability to shape human beings’ perceptions of themselves and their societies seems prescient in the retrospect of nearly a full century. Whereas Lowell thought that he could disseminate culture by sending discounted copies of the magazine to schoolteachers and postmasters, Wharton explores the nightmarish consequences of the power Lowell rightly attributed to the printed word in a day when Abraham Lincoln believed that one favourable piece in the Atlantic would save him half a dozen battles.11 Wharton was not alone in her analysis of the media. In answer to the question ‘what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at every pore with a sense of the world’s demand and supply?’, Howells predicted that the ‘adman’ would become ‘the supreme artist of the twentieth century’.12 Wharton’s answer is Undine, a woman who feels most alive when reading about herself in Town Talk – so much so that she might wonder at her own existence were she not the subject of columns. When Undine first meets Peter Van Degen, for instance, she thinks:

Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

19

who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell’s cousin, the hero of ‘Sunday Supplements’, the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and ‘crack’ sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? (pp. 49–50)

In this world, the sign is more real than the thing itself. ‘Was everything that the dime necromancers told us melodrama?’ an Atlantic author asked in 1907. Much of it unquestionably was. But an age which has seen a nation [Panama] rise from Balboa’s isthmus at the wave of a Prospero wand from Washington; which has recently looked on while a people in the Caribbean committed suicide [an uprising in Cuba led to American intervention]; which is watching Nome’s Argonauts, up under the Pole Star, rival the glories of the Comstock … and which held its breath in November, 1906 [when William Randolph Hearst ran for governor of New York], while Roosevelt … rushed to rescue the nation from a New York editor who had built up an army in a night, has no right to object to melodrama in fiction.13

The dynamic that Wharton established between the press and her characters, or – to poach Howells’s title and dignify Undine’s taste – between literature and life, mirrors her own dialogue with the Atlantic through the pages of The Custom of the Country. Wharton’s novel is about dialogue and the collaborative making of reality. Fittingly it begins by illustrating how dialogues become embedded in cultures. Hers opens with the seventeenth-century playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, from whom she lifted her title. The 1619 play The Custom of the Country has a little of everything and all of it bawdy. One hero is sold to a witch for his sexual services and another flees with his wife to escape ‘droit de seigneur’ (the custom of the country Wharton might have renamed ‘droit de dame’). All’s well that ends well, however, for Fletcher and Massinger somehow manage to end their titillating romp (and avoid censorship) with an endorsement of chastity and marriage. Wharton concludes similarly, though more cynically, with the remarriage of the Moffatts. Ironically, each has been trained through their avariciousness to a different standard. Wharton hints at the day when Moffatt, having evolved aesthetically and ethically through his acts of collecting, will realize the bad bargain he made for Undine. Equally poignant are the times when Undine finds her husband’s ‘misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends’, jarring on perceptions that had developed in her unawares. Now and then she caught herself thinking that his two predecessors – who were gradually becoming merged in her

20

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country memory – would have said this or that differently, behaved otherwise in such and such a case. And the comparison was almost always to Moffatt’s disadvantage. (p. 591)

A passage like this one illustrates a principle at the heart of Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), which argues that the elite’s insistence on quality improves the general aesthetic quality of American life by prodding the manufacture of affordable reproductions. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton complicates Undine’s picaresque adventures in several ways: first by giving her only veiled insights into her own character; and, more devastatingly, by the havoc she wreaks on the men who stoop to love her – including her son, Paul Marvell – and on the cultures and concepts they represent. These are defined by Wharton in French Ways and their Meaning (1919) as a sense of proportion, scale and fitness (taste); a wish to preserve communal values (reverence); the fearless examination of one’s world (intellectual honesty); and a codified system of manners that allows the maintenance of social discipline in the teeth of aggression (continuity).14 The note of pathos Wharton lends to the Moffatts’ dual dilemma results from their parallel educations (hers sentimental and his getting and spending) that have changed the ‘relative’ values of others and more significantly themselves. They are not the same people who met and married once upon a time in Apex, but creatures of the mighty world – to echo William Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – half creating what they half perceive. While Wharton’s title sets up an implicit comparison between centuries with their different mores if not between different genres, her subject matter very much concerned the present. She hoped to capitalize and comment on the increasing number of American divorces and the publicity they excited in both the popular and highbrow presses. In 1907, for example, the Atlantic published Anna A. Rogers’s article, ‘Why American Marriages Fail’. The article caused a sufficient stir for the New York Times to summarize and broadcast its controversial analysis of a problem that many observers thought a social contagion as the number of divorce courts in the United States threatened to top 3,000 in comparison to France’s 79, Germany’s 28 and England’s 1.15 Rogers saw three related answers to her question of why marriages, in particular American marriages, failed. They were: 1) woman’s failure to realize that marriage is her work in the world; 2) her growing individualism; and 3) her lost art of giving. According to Rogers, the idolatry accorded to women in the United States had created a disease known as ‘feminine megalomania’, which resulted in the unnatural subordination (meaning ‘emasculation’) of men. ‘The rock upon which most of the flower-bedecked marriage barges go to pieces is the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of Self ’, and to satisfy their recently discovered selves, Undine’s sisters demanded more love, more

Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

21

admiration, more time, more money.16 Rogers’s analysis is cruder than but not substantially different from Henry James’s in a series of essays on the speech and manners of American women, which Harper’s Bazar began running in November 1906 and ended two months before Rogers’s Atlantic article appeared in July 1907. The ‘object of prey and patronage’, James’s women must accept most of the blame for the poverty of American culture.17 Wharton entered this conversation by having her surrogate Charles Bowen ask and answer his own question: 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.

This is not the complete answer, however. ‘Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work?’ Bowen continues. ‘Simply because we don’t take enough interest in them … In America the real crime passionnel is a “big steal” – there’s more excitement in wrecking railways than homes’ (pp. 206–7, italics in original). As The Custom of the Country’s depiction of Mr and Mrs Spragg makes clear (or for that matter, the depiction of Lily’s mother in The House of Mirth), Wharton held parents chiefly responsible for the development of their children, with other forces in society distant contenders. Undine’s lack of compassion, her narcissism and ignorance all stand in contrast to the centuries of tradition and training that produced her second and third husbands, Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles. The representative of old New York, Ralph fatally misreads Undine’s ignorance as innocence, while the more worldly and cynical Frenchman acknowledges his own stupidity and commits her to the guardianship of his mother at Saint Désert in the hinterland of Burgundy. Undine is uneducable to the extent that she wants to be pleased rather than please others. She is the incarnation of Rogers’s description of the American woman who has ‘[n]o exigent duties, no imperative work, no manner expending normally her highly developed hungry energies. That they turn back upon her and devour her is not to be wondered at.’18 Wharton agrees with Rogers that women who receive ‘a man’s mental and muscular equipment in school or college’ need a socially useful outlet for their energies and talents.19 She demurs, however, from seeing that outlet as marriage. The Custom of the Country may be the most pessimistic view of American marriage ever written not only because every partner feels that he or she has been duped into signing a fraudulent contract but because marriage – the foundation of the family and society itself – is no more real in this novel ‘than the poet’s shades in limbo’.20 ‘You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean’, de Chelles tells his wife, ‘we’re fools enough to imagine that because you

22

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honourable for us!’ (p. 545). Unlike Rogers, who feels no sympathy for American women, Wharton makes Undine both victimizer and victim, the terrifying and pathetic product of the society that produced her. Rogers followed her Atlantic article on marriage with one on mothers, ‘Why American Mothers Fail’ (1908), which portrays mothers as the gardeners of the human race who could learn something from Frenchwomen’s reliance on and trust in their sons as they approach manhood.21 In 1908, motherhood was still sacrosanct enough for her only to warn that American mothers would fail – they were not wholly failing yet – if they continued to put their needs above those of their husbands and children. Wharton’s analysis is more straightforward and logical given the trajectory of her heroine’s career. Little Paul Marvell knows that his mother says things that are not true, especially about his French father, Raymond de Chelles. What he does know about his mother he learns from newspaper clippings, which might have been generated by the Moffatts’ publicist. One lists Moffatt’s wedding gifts to his bride: ‘a necklace and tiara of pigeon-blood rubies belonging to Queen Marie Antoinette, a million dollar cheque and a house in New York … an exact copy of the Pitti Palace, Florence’ (p. 586). Paul is still enough of a boy to want his mother’s approval. Slipping his hand into Undine’s, he ventures to tell her of the prize he won that day in composition. ‘Did you?’ she responds before running off to dress for her next party. Moffatt, trying to comfort his crying stepson, tells him: she’s like that, you know; and you and I have got to lump it … If we two chaps stick together it won’t be so bad – we can keep each other warm, don’t you see? I like you first rate, you know; when you’re big enough I mean to put you in my business. And it looks as if one of these days you’d be the richest boy in America (p. 589)

The ellipses are Wharton’s path to Paul’s future, which readers can only hope will end differently from his father’s. Ideally he would escape as far as India and meet a spunky governess by the name of Sophy Viner. But Wharton did not believe in fairy-tale endings: the heroine of The Reef will most likely end her days in drudgery and Paul will grow up to be everything that his father despised or, worse perhaps, a man like his father who lives always with disappointment. Wharton’s conversation with the Atlantic Monthly took place in the context of her larger concerns about culture itself, which her admirer F. Scott Fitzgerald extended with his story of unlimited greed, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ (Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922). If Fitzgerald’s story begs to be read as a comment on the Jazz Age, Wharton’s comments on the years leading up to the First World War. This world, as constructed from a mosaic of Atlantics from 1907 to 1913, can be characterized as increasingly concerned with definitions of culture and national identity. Articles on Japan and the Philippine Islands, Mexico, Ger-

Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

23

many, India, Spain, Italy, Norway, New Zealand, Ireland (its regeneration) and of course France offered points of comparison with the pieces on the American South, socialism, immigrant women and contemporary politics – several written by a professor of political science named Woodrow Wilson, whom Wharton would vilify for his policy of non-intervention during the First World War. The magazine introduced a more pronounced note of social conservatism as it enlarged its coverage of other cultures and the forces at play in its own. A short list of article titles gives a sense of this new minority opinion: ‘The Lesson of the French Revolution’ (1907); ‘The Social Disability of the Jew’ (1908), which largely blames Jews for the intolerance shown them; ‘Justice to the Corporations’ (1908); and ‘Coddling the Criminal’ (1911). The historian Brooks Adams approved Theodore Roosevelt’s emphasis on a new nationalism, considering his friend as the leader of a great power who would dominate not only Wall Street and Asian markets, railroad tycoons and labour, but the world. Those more cautious about the consequences of boosterism saw the perfect storm gathering. John J. Bigelow, Jr, the son of the US minister to France during the Civil War (and the first editor of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography), voiced what many wondered with his essay ‘If the United States Should Go to War’ ( June 1911). A major in the armed services, Bigelow saw his country unprepared for war. Judged by its fighting capacity, the United States was a nation able and determined to remain at peace. Havelock Ellis, pacifist psychologist and one of the founders of the Fabian Society, contributed ‘War against War’ (1911), which admits only one nation of peoples united through their common humanity. War, in Ellis’s estimation, comes to nothing more than wilful self-murder and he enumerates factors that would lead to a permanent international peace. His dismissal of the Church’s efforts towards peace – he calls their effect nil – excited protests in the religious press. The labour economist H. R. Mussey made his position clear with his provocative title ‘Democracy or Dynamite’ (1912). Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, received 6 per cent of the vote, or 900,000 votes, in the year of Mussey’s essay. Wharton, who lived in the Faubourg, the stronghold of the ancien régime, witnessed the rise of French and German nationalism as she read about a parallel movement in the United States. In France, organizations like Action Française wanted to restore the monarchy to power. In 1907, James Huneker surveyed the career of Maurice Barrès, whom Wharton knew through Fullerton and Walter Berry, in an article entitled ‘The Evolution of an Egoist’: Barrès, he wrote belongs to the group of militarists and nationalists who were so active in the Dreyfus affair … He upholds France for the French. It is doubtless a noble idea, but it leads to fanatical outbreaks and the Rousseau-like cry, ‘Back to the soil!’22

24

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

France would read German aggression as an attempt to impose its kultur and institutions on Europe, which German intellectuals rationalized as a service to peace, whose greatest threat lay in national differences. The Custom of the Country engages in the debate about nationalism through its intersection of cultures in the lobby of the Nouveau Luxe. Wharton looks with an anthropologist’s eye, dispassionate and inevitably biased by her own history, at small-town America, old and new New York and Paris. Her analysis both relies on and undermines certain assumptions and prejudices about these places and also the people who inhabit and cherish them. Like James, Wharton valued the slow accretion of habits, attitudes and traditions that defined in her mind the races. She read contemporary scientific books on evolution and race theory by Vernon Lyman Kellogg, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau and George Vacher Laponge, whose pronouncements found their way into the generalizations in The Decoration of Houses about ‘the Anglo-Saxon mind’ in which ‘beauty is not spontaneously born of material wants, as it is with the Latin races’.23 Wharton’s observations about race take for granted racial differences; at the same time and perhaps paradoxically, she believes in a shared and accumulating set of human feelings, values, aspirations and unwavering principles that work to erase difference. In The House of Mirth, she plays with the idea of inherited kinships adding ‘to the mighty sum of human striving’.24 In The Custom of the Country even someone as unperceptive as Undine intuits the similarities between the Marvells and the de Chelles, the last representatives of their passing cultures. The de Chelles assume that once at Saint Désert the place with its immemorial associations will begin the process of transforming Undine into a Frenchwoman whether she wants to adopt her husband’s nationality or not. Undine’s experience of time and place – her hereditary rootlessness – perhaps most distinguishes her as an American from her French in-laws. She belongs to a race of nomads against which the de Chelles have no defences; they simply cannot conceive of a person not eventually bowing to the family, the emblem of their race. ‘Race’ meant something else, as Quincy Ewing points out, to most Americans – Undine excluding. In his March 1909 Atlantic article, ‘The Heart of the Race Problem’, Ewing notes that if you ask the average man or woman what the race problem is in ‘this land with its millions of foreigners of all nationalities’, the answer will invariably boil down to ‘the Negro’. The real race problem, he writes, is the ‘white’ problem of not wanting to stand with blacks on ‘common human ground’.25 Kelly Miller, a sociologist who combined W. E. B. Du Bois’s belief in activism with Booker T. Washington’s advocacy of hard work, thrift, racial solidarity and institutional outreach, seconded Ewing’s analysis a month later in ‘The Ultimate Race Problem’. Miller predicted that:

Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

25

After the red and brown races shall have perished from the face of the earth … there will be left the white, the yellow and the black as the residuary races, each practically distinct in its ethnic identity and occupying its own habitat … Whether this will be but a stage in the ultimate blending of all races in a common world-type transcends all of our present calculable data and must be left to the play of the imagination.26

The Custom of the Country looks at the question of race from the vantages of class and custom and it comes to Miller’s conclusion about an ultimate blending, based however on a different kind of life-blood, money. Ralph Marvell sums it up: ‘The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange’ (p. 78). Wharton captures the dynamic more poignantly in Ralph’s analysis of what New York society means to a parvenu: it was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious … as that between the Blois gargoyles on Peter Van Degen’s roof and the skeleton walls supporting them. (p. 73)

Wharton’s metaphor captures the devil’s pact between the classes and the moneyed masses, which forms the backdrop of her novel and its larger statement about a changing America in an increasingly borderless world in which the era’s jet-setters race aimlessly from one amusement to another. Ralph had thought of his mother and grandfather as ‘Aborigines and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race’. He revolts ‘against the restrictions and exclusions of the old code’ by marrying Undine (p. 74), who might as well have wrapped him in a blanket infected with smallpox. Raymond de Chelles similarly rebels before reverting, to Undine’s dismay, to type. Despite Wharton’s nostalgia for the passing of the best of New York – represented by fiscal and moral responsibility – her focus concerns the process of cultural transmission when the notion of culture is itself changing. Wharton locates this process in hotels, whether the Nouveau Luxe in Paris or the less flashy Riviera retreat where Undine goes to recuperate her reputation following her divorce from Marvell and her affair with Peter Van Degen. ‘The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities’, Wharton’s narrator observes, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance … It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an

26

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country organized codified dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others. (pp. 362–3)

The erasure of difference works like a kind of branding by reinforcing the buyer’s, in this case the tourist’s, sense of class standing and taste. Despite her love of Lenox, Massachusetts, and her work with the local library, Wharton has seldom been touted as a fan of small-town America, but she comes close as its values are embodied in the sad, displaced figure of Undine’s mother, Leota Spragg, who tells her history to her future son-in-law in the unpretentious dialect of her people. ‘The Spraggs had been “plain people” and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The fact drew them much closer to the Dagonet ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense’ (pp. 81–2). Speech, customs, manners, a long rich history – these are the outside signs of systems of belief that make a people themselves and which Wharton sees lost in the manufactured elegance of the Hotel Luxe and its shabbier Riviera cousin. A ubiquitous world culture resulting from material prosperity and the mantra of materialism could be nothing more than a ‘mutilated fiction’ – the central metaphor she uses to communicate the ethos of Undine’s Riviera hideaway. Like the Tauchnitz editions in the hotel bookshelves, it has been passed on to indiscriminate readers who seem not to mind that scarcely any work was complete; they live only to gorge themselves on a minute’s entertainment, to ‘feed their leisure’ (as Wharton writes) ‘with mutilated fiction’ (p. 362). As readers, we might assume Charles Bowen’s role and ask: what are those fictions, chief among them the myths about marriage, woman’s nature and material prosperity? Perhaps the greatest myth of all – and one Wharton shared with the founders of the Atlantic, although her novel belies it – is the idea that the populace can be educated. Instead of culture trickling down to the waiting masses, as the Atlantic editors imagined, it emanates from the illustrated magazines and other mass media venues in every direction, including upwards. The levelling of standards, as Wharton’s description of the hotel suggests, results in a general lowering of aesthetic, if not moral, quality, and this realization lends her seriocomic novel its tragic reverberations. The Atlantic never seriously conceded this point, although authors like Loren H. B. Knox similarly blamed American materialism for ‘Our Lost Individuality’ (December 1909). Indeed it maintained its cultural authority on its denial, with Harriet Monroe predicting the coming of a poet-prophet like Walt Whitman to lead her century into a new millennium.27 As Wharton analysed the consequences of internationalism, what we might now call ‘globalization’, the Atlantic focused on two foreign fronts that would soon play important parts in world politics: Germany and Japan, which consolidated its position in Asia. According to the historian Arthur M. Knapp, the Japanese are ‘a people who, if not wholly of our blood, can trace back their ancestry to as

Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

27

lofty a plane of ancient civilization as that upon which we are so complacently priding ourselves’.28 Articles about Germany, meanwhile, prosaically dealt with topics such as production and trusts. More generally, examinations of culture – specifically Kuno Francke’s ‘The Study of National Consciousness’ – assumed inherent cultural differences and national types. Francke defined ‘culture’, ‘as the content of national consciousness’ and recommended the comparative study of literatures.29 In his earlier book, Glimpses of Modern German Culture (1898), Francke had presented Germany as the classic land of moral contrasts. Nowhere is the conflict between the powers temporal and spiritual, between traditional creeds and personal convictions, between autocracy and freedom being waged with greater intensity or deeper rooted bitterness. Nowhere is there such a variety of parties bent on mutual annihilation.30

If anticipation of the conflagration to come fed nationalism, then in the ironic logic that Joseph Heller captured with the phrase Catch 22, nationalism created a hunger for war. Although the Atlantic published more poetry than fiction under Bliss Perry, it continued to publish distinctly American pieces such as Mary Austin’s ‘The Walking Woman’ (1907) and Mary Antin’s studies of immigrant life, ‘The American Miracle’, ‘A Kingdom in the Slums’ and ‘The Immigrant’s Portion’ (1912). These pieces indicate the magazine’s continued support for regional writing as a counterweight to its support of English authors such as John Galsworthy, May Sinclair and Ford Maddox Hueffer before he became Ford Maddox Ford. With the notable exception of Sarah Orne Jewett’s contributions, the general quality of fiction declined from the heyday of Howells when it assumed the ‘Promethean’ task of defining American literature and culture. Professional magazine writers like Kathleen Norris and Katharine Fullerton Gerould – Morton’s cousin and Wharton’s rival for his affections – represented the new dispensation. Something changed in Wharton’s thinking between her idyll through the French countryside in A Motor-Flight through France and the publication of The Custom of the Country, which pessimistically assembles the factors and forces that wrought war. War brought her back to her pre-war vision of France as the mother of civilization, a sentiment Willa Cather, another Francophile, would echo in her feelings that all good things came from France, including salad. It changed for the moment the trajectory of Wharton’s thoughts about culture and civilization, which in books such as French Ways and Their Meaning and Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport (1915) reached their apogee in France. The cataclysmic view of a dystopian future in which beauty is equated with cost and honour with fashion seemed almost sacrilegious in the face of the immediate human horror of Belgian refugees flooding into Paris, and where one stumbled over their bruised and weary bodies in railway stations and streets. The war

28

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

resulted in Wharton’s idealistic re-imagining of culture which united ‘civilized’ nations despite their superficial differences of language and custom, when customs did concern themselves with right and wrong. For Wharton, it might have been Gatsby’s vision of the new world, ‘a transitory enchanted moment’ as man ‘held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder’.31 Wharton, who recorded the passing of that moment for her generation and called her war books propagandizing, may not have really believed in its reality. Whatever promise she envisioned during the war was not to survive its aftermath. In the 1920s, she published an increasingly bleak series of novels that would bring her closer to her view of civilization in The Custom of the Country. The Mother’s Recompense, Twilight Sleep and The Children form a trilogy of anti-modern novels, by Wharton’s own definition if ‘modern’ now means – to quote Raymond de Chelles in The Custom of the Country – coming from 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!’ (p. 545). By the time she wrote her story of a western writer like Sinclair Lewis in Hudson River Bracketed she had returned to depicting the frenetic country-hopping and indistinguishable cultures foreshadowed in The Custom of the Country, which read against the Atlantic Monthly becomes a Cassandra’s cry to a country she both loved and disdained.

2 WHEN THE READING HAD TO STOP: READERS, READING AND THE CIRCULATION OF TEXTS IN THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY Shafquat Towheed

In her first New York society dinner at the Fairfords’, the relentlessly upwardly mobile but intellectually ill-prepared anti-heroine Undine Spragg is ambushed by the highbrow conversation at the table, and is forced to concede the limitations of her own literary knowledge: ‘she had read no new book but “When the Kissing Had to Stop”, of which Mrs Fairford seemed not to have heard’ (p. 37). Surprisingly, Undine’s recollection is not of a cheap popular novel, as we might expect from her social and cultural background, but of the famous lines from Browning’s poem ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s’, a mid-nineteenth-century elegiac musing on eighteenth-century Venetian hedonism, first published in the critically acclaimed collection Men and Women (1855): As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?1

Elaine Showalter has interpreted this small social humiliation, exposing the limited frame of Undine’s cultural reference, as uncontested evidence of authorial criticism, and even disapproval; Wharton, Showalter unequivocally argues, ‘mocks Undine’s ignorance in reading “When the Kissing had to Stop”’.2 Showalter’s assessment of Undine’s reading is reductive and absolute, and, I would suggest, closed to the multiple interpretative possibilities suggested by almost any act of reading or allusion to a text. While Undine is ignorant of current trends in literary fashion, despite, or perhaps because, of her familiarity with Apex’s out-of-date circulating library (to which she unflatteringly compares the Fairfords’ dining room), her casual, metonymic act of remembering the line ‘when the kissing had to stop’ does indeed suggest the complexity of the novel’s (and Wharton’s own) ambivalence about mass reading and its consequences upon literary taste. Undine’s recollection suggests the paucity of her formative reading and, by extension, its decontextualization: her remoteness from a high – 29 –

30

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

literary culture is indicated as much by her categorization of Browning’s verse as recent as it is by her confusion of the line of the poem with the title of the book, much to Mrs Fairford’s bemusement. At the same time, however, Undine’s potent memory of Browning’s lines also demonstrates the tenacity of his half-century-old verse in the avalanche of modern reading material, for Undine remembers Browning’s words precisely, despite growing up in the Midwest and being surrounded by the crass and trivial journalism favoured by an entirely unliterary family circle. Wharton was herself a great admirer of Browning’s verse, naming him as one of her favourite poets, and often reading his poems aloud by the fireside; in her travel book Italian Backgrounds (1905), she specifically alludes to ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ for capturing the brilliant artistic creativity of eighteenth-century Venice in the era before ‘the kissing had to stop’.3 Whatever criticism Wharton may have been making of Undine’s lack of cultural development at the start of The Custom of the Country, surely her recollection of Browning, however garbled and uncertain, was not one of them. Indeed, one could argue that Mrs Fairford’s failure to recognize one of the most famous lines in Browning’s poetry is a much more acerbic critique of the ossified and narrow-minded literary culture of Old New York, one that Wharton herself had chafed against through much of her early life. The use of literary allusion as a marker of cultural taste is further complicated by Wharton’s choice of poem here, which deliberately urges us to question the reliability of the narrative voice. In an ironic amplification, Browning’s poem ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ both depicts and is the product of an act of misremembered reading and/or listening. The narrative voice in Browning’s poem hears Galuppi’s toccata played on the clavichord, claiming ‘I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind’, while Browning himself claimed to have owned and read ‘two huge manuscript volumes almost exclusively made up of his “Toccata-pieces”’ and to have been inspired to write ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ by one of them.4 However, Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85), the Venetian composer of some ninety keyboard sonatas, as well as many oratorios and operas, never composed a toccata, and Browning’s own description of the composed notes in the poem is in fact, entirely imaginary. Is this a reader trap set by Browning, designed to make us question the reliability of the poetic voice? Or is Browning’s own recollection of reading Galuppi’s scores as an inspiration for the poem at fault here? Examining an act of reading, or an allusion to it as represented in fiction, invariably opens up multiple interpretive possibilities. While the narrative voice in The Custom of the Country is often keenly ironic in its sustained moral criticism of Undine Spragg, in this particular instance, the failure of Mrs Fairford to recognize Browning’s words is as noteworthy as Undine’s inability to differentiate between a remembered line of a narrative poem and the title of a verse collection. Both these instances indicate partial reading and recognition, and

When the Reading had to Stop

31

both implicitly ask the reader of the text not to make the same mistake: how many of Wharton’s implied magazine readers in the serialization of the novel in the pages of Scribner’s Magazine would have recognized this particular allusion to Browning, and how many would have let it pass them by? As a staged act, the representation of reading in fiction is rather more complicated to analyse than Elaine Showalter’s overly simplistic, reductive and decontextualized interpretation of Undine’s recollection of reading Browning’s verse would suggest. Taking my cue from this complex node of what the reading act can tell us, as well as what it can imply, in this chapter I want to look again at some of the main representations of reading in this wonderfully textually and semiotically charged novel. As well as looking at the reading matter available, I want to assess the various reading preferences, cultures and practices suggested in Wharton’s novel. By drawing upon social, economic and historical studies of print culture and reading practice in the early twentieth-century transatlantic world, I intend to re-examine the implications of the fictional representations of reading matter and individual reading in The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s most textually sophisticated and reflexive work, and argue that the novel provides a complex locus for the discussion of reading and its implications in the period.

Reading, Space and the Non-Textual Uses of Print Reading is everywhere in The Custom of the Country, and almost all the interlocutors in the narrative are also explicitly or implicitly represented as readers. There are some seventy acts of reading either directly represented or alluded to in the course of the near six hundred pages of the novel, covering the entire range of reading practices in early twentieth-century America, from desultory magazine reading, to the purposive reading of temperance writing, from reading to gather social intelligence in the society columns of the popular press, to novel reading as a form of personal seclusion, and from borrowing novels through the public circulating library system, to the private circulation and reading of correspondence. As an act that has both public and private aspects, reading often defines the negotiation of space between the private and the public; indeed, in a novel first read through the pages of a widely circulating literary magazine, the issue of the social spaces defined and reshaped through the individual and collective participation in print culture is essential to the development of the plot. The very opening scene of the novel uses another novel, a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), to convey valuable information about the demarcation of social space. Undine and Mrs Spragg are seated in one of the ‘private drawing-rooms of the Hotel Stentorian’ (p. 4), in a Louis Quinze suite almost entirely untouched by its occupants’ taste or personal proclivities. The uncertainty of their social standing as aspiring members

32

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

of an upwardly mobile nouveau riche in predominantly (but increasingly beleaguered) old wealth New York is accentuated through the uncertainty of the physical space that they occupy. The ‘private drawing-rooms’ are of course in the very public sphere of a hotel, and one of the only markers that this public commercially available space is being used in a private context is the copy of Conan Doyle’s book; reading fiction as a personal and private act reinscribes the space as semi-private rather than wholly public. While The Hound of the Baskervilles domesticates the rented Louis Quinze suite, the intervention of the bell boy with a handwritten note from Laura Fairford inviting Undine Spragg to dinner provides an ample reminder of the public, commercially demarcated space occupied by the Spraggs; this is clearly an invitation that cannot be reciprocated. The social standing of the Fairfords’ dinner parties, its value as a clearly demarcated and socially exclusive space, is further confirmed by Mrs Heeny’s deployment of a newspaper clipping from that morning’s Town Talk, of the previous week’s Fairford dinner: ‘Mrs Henley Fairford gave another of her natty little dinners … as usual it was smart small and exclusive’ (pp. 8–9). Ironically, the social exclusivity of the Fairfords’ regular Wednesday evening dinner soiree is given shape, value and form through the public discourse of Town Talk and the collective act of newspaper reading. This uncertainty about the Spraggs’ social space is furthered glossed throughout the novel by Mrs Spragg’s confusion between the different English and French senses of the word ‘hotel’. Later in the novel, when Ralph Marvell visits the Spraggs’ drawing-room, he becomes absorbed in the ‘perusal of the “fiction number” of a magazine which had replaced “The Hound of the Baskervilles” on the onyx table’ (p. 116). Ralph Marvell’s desultory reading (itself linked to his own putative aspirations to become a novelist) suggests both the circulation of texts in the seemingly unchanging rented space, while also reinscribing its semiprivate, semi-public nature. The place where reading occurs invariably defines a social space, often through the interconnected relationship between reading matter, access rights and the demography of the user. Entering the book-lined interior of the Fairford study, Undine is immediately drawn to compare it to her own locus of reading, the reading room of her old circulating library: ‘its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded Undine of the old circulating library at Apex, before the new marble building was put up’ (p. 32). Undine’s conflation of Apex’s circulating library with the Fairfords’ study complicates the demarcation of public versus private space. The family study is implicitly structured as private space, designed for both reading and entertaining, while the circulating library at Apex, undoubtedly the town’s main (perhaps only) source of reading matter, is explicitly offered as an acceptable public space for young women to occupy. Wharton’s presentation of the stratified and disparate range of American consumers of printed

When the Reading had to Stop

33

matter at the turn of the twentieth century draws our attention as readers not only to what kind of literature is being read, but where and how. The forest of allusions that Undine fails to negotiate later that evening offers us a further reminder of the increasing diversity of readerships in a mass literature culture and the physical and intellectual space between New York’s Upper East Side and a small town in the Midwest. We are now beginning to know a great deal about readers such as Undine – young, provincial, newly educated, socially mobile – and their access to and use of printed matter in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent work by scholars in social and economic history, librarianship and the history of the book has carefully reconstructed the reading world of newly established Midwest communities such as those fictionalized by Wharton in the form of Apex City. Christine Pawley’s study Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa closely documents the access, borrowing records, and reading habits of the 605 users of the Sage Library in Osage, Iowa, from 1876 to 1895. The Sage Library’s reading room in Osage (for reading in situ) was only open for patrons one evening in the week; it was not centrally heated, nor did it benefit from electric lighting (the Fairfords’ study is similarly illuminated by a wood-fire rather than gas lighting). It was not designed as a space for prolonged reading, but rather for the extensive browsing of a wide range of newspapers and magazines. Operating primarily as a lending library, patrons borrowed books to read at home, often with a rapid turnover of titles. Pawley notes that nearly two-thirds of the recorded patrons were women or girls, and that 69 per cent of all titles were checked out by females; fiction was overwhelmingly the most popular choice of genre, with eighteen of the top twenty titles borrowed during the period 1890–5 being novels.5 In a similar vein, James Connolly and Frank Felsenstein’s project ‘What Middletown Read’ documents the borrowing records of some 6,300 patrons of another Midwest town library, the public library of Muncie, Indiana, from 1892 to 1902. Muncie’s Library was a more established facility than the Sage Library in Osage, Iowa, benefitting in 1901 from a $50,000 grant from the great benefactor of American library building, Andrew Carnegie; the impressive marble building, complete with a six Doric column facade, opened in 1904. The systematic study of Muncie’s Public Library currently being undertaken will offer us a detailed insight into the physical and imaginative world fictionally represented by Apex’s ‘new marble building’ (p. 32) and, with it, the formative cultural influences of Undine and her milieu. Provisional findings indicate once again that women were more likely borrowers than men, and that the dominant genre borrowed was contemporary fiction.6 Through her frame of cultural reference, Undine provides a representative sample of a wider trend in the changing reading habits of young women in provincial America at the turn of the twentieth century.

34

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Undine’s familiarity with the circulating library system, both as a place from which to access reading matter and a space in which to gauge social interaction, is repeatedly glossed throughout The Custom of the Country. She exults in the Ellings’ ball for being as ‘thrilling as a page from one of the “society novels” with which she had cheated the monotony of Apex days … she had no time for reading now’ (p. 228). Wintering in the French Riviera, Undine finds her rest cure hotel to be full of ‘odd volumes of Tauchnitz’; inspecting the hotel bookshelves, she ‘discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction’ (p. 362). Undine’s discomfort at not being able to read multi-volume fiction sequentially, a habit she clearly acquired through the circulating library in Apex City, is clearly not shared by her fellow inmates. Returning to New York in the middle of the season, and with her social position highly uncertain, Undine sits in the Malibran hotel, ‘reading novels and brooding over possibilities of escape’ (p. 371); her withdrawal is based on her ‘dread of seeing familiar faces’ (p. 371) and, once again, novel reading creates a private space within a public sphere. And, of course, Undine also benefits from the private circulation of books, by borrowing them from her friends, such as the ‘powerful novels which Popple was fond of lending her’ (p. 365). In all these instances of novel reading, the very act of reading privileges private space within a public domain, both as an instrument of self-assertion, and as a tactic for withdrawal from social engagement. As a novel reader, Undine is aware of the barrier that its self-absorbed consumption generates. Making way for Mabel Lipscomb’s suitor from Little Rock, Arkansas, Undine is forced to ‘sit upstairs with a novel while the drawing-room below was given up to the enacting of an actual love-story’ (p. 368). As part of the process of wheedling opera box tickets out of her father, Undine once again engages in strategic novel reading in order to exact a particular type of emotional and financial tribute: ‘she kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her … a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book’ (p. 58). The Louis Quinze drawing room is momentarily, at any rate, domesticated through Undine’s selective textual and emotional engagement. What is not mentioned by Wharton in her depiction of Undine Spragg’s reading is the extent to which female access to reading matter was policed, often through the intervention of the librarian, reading room attendant, or checkout clerk in public spaces, and male members of the family in private ones.7 All these potential sources of social, class, gender and linguistic anxiety shaped both access to books and the reading habits of a newly enfranchised generation of largely female readers. Undine’s reading is formed not only by personal preference, or her understanding of reading for social advancement, but also by access to printed matter, determined through multiple filters of income and location, and an early socialization into a particular form of extensive reading, structured through the

When the Reading had to Stop

35

circulating library model. Wharton’s depiction of Undine’s reading is not simply a critique of contemporary America and its increasingly fragmented culture, but also an accurate account of the rise of a newly enfranchised and socially mobile, though perhaps less literary female reading community. While the act of reading determines physical, temporal and social space, so does the act of not reading. Just as important are the numerous non-literary (and often, customary) uses of printed matter in The Custom of the Country: the material act of reading is frequently displaced by the material display of reading matter. Books, catalogues, opera programmes, newspapers, calling cards and magazines are all used to facilitate or refuse social interaction, without the explicit requirement to read their content (which is either elided, or implicitly assumed to have taken place). At the art gallery, Undine furiously scribbles notes in her unread catalogue, in ‘imitation of a tall girl in sables’ (p. 48), before ‘inadvertently bumping against’ Peter Van Degen, a man she recognizes from ‘innumerable newspaper portraits’ (p. 49): the non-textual use of the gallery programme initiates this flirtatious social encounter. At the opera, Mabel Lipscomb uses her opera programme as a kind of semaphore, making ‘large signs across the house with fan and play-bill’ (p. 63) in a bid to be seen, while Elmer Moffatt unfolds ‘his programme’ and ‘affected to study it’ (p. 102) in an attempt not to be seen to be communicating with Undine. Undine reads her programme not to follow the opera, but to ‘consult the list’ of the ‘numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners’ (p. 61) printed on the reverse, thereby allowing her to initiate eye contact with both Peter Van Degen and Ralph Marvell. In her drawing room in the Stentorian, Undine’s unnamed ‘unread novel’ (p. 51) rests invariably on her lap, on her knee or on the sofa, and is only seemingly looked into intently once (p. 58), when she wants to avoid a conversation with her father, before being flung to the floor (p. 58). At the Virginia resort of Potash Springs, Mabel Wincher looks down intently into her novel to avoid having to recognize Undine’s superior beauty; ‘the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels … Undine never succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled by’ (p. 55). Mabel Wincher’s strategic use of the novel as a means of securing her own private space and thereby preventing an unwarranted social interaction is a model learned and later replicated by Undine Spragg, but it is not the only means by which textual matter is utilized in the course of the novel.

Reading with Purpose, versus Reading for Distraction Two central modes of reading practice – reading for a specific purpose, and reading as a form of entertaining distraction – are repeatedly referenced in the course of the novel. Printed matter – whether novels, the Bible, newspapers, society magazines or correspondence – is read with intent and scoured for useful information by many of the characters in the novel. Undine Spragg, for example, takes

36

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

literally the advice of ‘Boudoir Chat’, a column in one of the Sunday newspapers, in trying to decide what kind of paper to use to send her acceptance of Mrs Fairford’s invitation to dinner: ‘she had read that … the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink’ (p. 18). Undine’s desperation to fit into the right social set is shaped by a reading practice with an explicitly utilitarian function. Later she scans ‘the columns of her morning journal’ (p. 349) for news of Peter Van Degen’s return to New York aboard the appropriately named Semantic. This is clearly a utilitarian reading practice that she shares with her father, for Abner Spragg’s highly successful patent for ‘Goliath Glue’ was the result of his sitting up ‘all night over the Bible to get the name’ (p. 80). The greatest exponent of the utility of reading (and reading for a direct purpose) in the novel is also its greatest social and financial success: Elmer Moffatt. Moffatt’s relentless scanning of the popular press, a kind of extensive reading in extremis, serves as a form of intelligence gathering, both commercial and social. It is Moffatt who informs Undine about Indiana Binch née Frusk’s divorce and remarriage as the new Mrs Rolliver, thereby planting the seed of her own future marital trajectory: ‘didn’t you see in the papers that Indiana’d fixed it up with James J. Rolliver to marry her?’ (p. 270). Moffatt sees ‘by the papers’ (p. 413) Undine’s residence in Paris, and it is his reading of the Radiator before anyone else that allows him to inform Ralph Marvell of the failure of the Apex charter, and with it his hopes of buying back his son Paul; ‘seen this morning’s Radiator?’ (p. 461), he asks Undine’s invariably ill-informed ex-husband, a man who prefers to read the ‘evening paper’ with his pipe (p. 218). Moffatt’s Paris hotel room gives us the clearest evidence of his monomaniacal reading and understanding of current affairs: ‘there were no books in the room, but the florid console under the mirror was stacked with old numbers of Town Talk and the New York Radiator’ (p. 567). Wharton’s narrative makes it clear that Moffatt’s practice of extensive reading with an overtly utilitarian purpose was instilled early in his career, in his youth in Apex. Invited to give the Fourth of July oration by the local temperance society, Moffatt’s dazzling speech is the product of ‘half the night’ spent poring ‘over Bartlett’ (p. 550), America’s best-known volume of quotations.8 For Moffatt, reading always has a direct outcome, even if ‘assiduously studying’ temperance literature and thereafter denouncing the hypocrisy of the local temperance society leads to his temporary disgrace and banishment. Moffatt’s relentless reading of the periodical press is inseparable from his personal ambition, and his reading practice gives shape to his own personal trajectory. While Moffatt presents the tightest connection between reading and action, several of the female characters conspicuously engage in novel reading as a form of escapism. Clare Van Degen presents the spectacle of a placid, though habitual novel reader. When interrupted by Ralph Marvell while reading ‘sat near the window’, she ‘merely’ places ‘a finger between the pages’ to keep her place (p. 319);

When the Reading had to Stop

37

this is clearly an activity that will be resumed after her conversation has finished. She knows enough of contemporary fiction to ‘slip in the right word here and there’, but Clare’s mind, the narrator reminds us, ‘was neither keen nor deep’ (p. 323), and is clearly formed by a particular type of novel reading that conspicuously fills her leisure time, while failing to develop her mind. For Laura Fairford, reading is a welcome solace and diversion; when visiting the deliriously ill Ralph, she keeps ‘a book on her knee’ (p. 329), a necessary distraction from the Marvells’ impending divorce. Clare Van Degen, Laura Fairford and Undine Spragg all read novels to pass the time, as well as to escape from their own unhappy marriages. Reading for distraction is not an innocuous activity, and Wharton’s narration makes her disapproval of the warped values of the popular novel clear: Undine’s ‘novel-reading had filled her mind with the vocabulary of outraged virtue, and with pathetic allusions to woman’s frailty’ (p. 376). Wharton’s implicit critique of reading merely for entertainment, simply as a means of distraction, is both entirely conventional, and implicitly conflicted, pace Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The moral critique of women novel readers was centuries old by this point, a wellestablished and entirely conventional viewpoint. As Kate Flint has demonstrated, women’s reading was a ‘form of consumption associated with the possession of leisure time, and thus contributed to the ideology, if not always the practices, which supported the ideal of the middle-class home’, but at the same time, it ‘could also be regarded as dangerously useless, a thief of time which might be spent on wifely duties’.9 Wharton’s implicit warning against the distracting allure of novel reading is explicitly undermined by the serialization of The Custom of the Country itself in the pages of Scribner’s Magazine, a journal dedicated to a particular form of conspicuous and leisurely consumption, and little in the way of moral edification. However, perhaps the greatest warning against the potential pitfalls of reading as an interpretative strategy to approach life is found not in the female characters of the novel, but in its leading male character: Ralph Marvell.

The Dangers of Allusion and the Temptation of Trope Easily identified as the representative of high literary culture in the novel, and as a dilettante with literary aspirations of his own, Ralph Marvell’s gentlemanly reading is largely represented through a plethora of allusions. But The Custom of the Country is not a Künstlerroman, and Ralph Marvell is not Edith Wharton’s fictional alter ego; we should be wary of accepting Marvell’s frame of cultural reference as appropriate, or even authorially endorsed. Marvell’s concerted engagement of literary allusion, and his insistence on viewing the world through a series of literary tropes, is not only shown through the course of the novel to be misguided, but to be positively dangerous. For Ralph Marvell, his emotional engagements are shaped by his reading; ‘love had … appeared clad in

38

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

the attributes of romance’ (p. 83), and it is in this mode that he insists on viewing Undine Spragg during his midnight vigil: he seemed to see her like a lovely rock-bound Andromeda, with the devouring monster Society careering up to make a mouthful of her; and himself whirling down on his winged horse – just Pegasus turned Rosinante for the nonce – to cut her bonds, snatch her up (p. 84)

Marvell’s pastiche mixes Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the account of Perseus slaying the sea monster and rescuing Andromeda) with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, without taking on board any of the moral implications of his source texts; Perseus in Ovid’s account, for example, foregoes his dowry to marry Andromeda, an issue Ralph Marvell completely fails to anticipate throughout his courtship and marriage. Marvell continues to read Undine through the spectre of literary trope. From Andromeda, the most beautiful of the nereids, he casts her as her namesake, the soullessly beautiful water sprite Undine in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s popular German romantic novella Undine (1811). ‘You never looked your name more than you do now’, he declares during their Italian honeymoon, a reference that is lost on Undine: ‘she smiled back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion’ (p. 144). Once again, Marvell’s interpretation of Undine through Fouqué’s novella fails to gloss the moral implications of his source text (Huldebrand, Undine’s mortal husband, must die in order for the water sprite to have an eternal soul). Desperately trying to fashion Undine as his literary muse, Marvell masochistically casts himself as Prometheus (p. 152), before finally attempting to ‘read’ Undine as a text with a hidden meaning: ‘its surface-language had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen the warning letters’ (p. 221). In Marvell’s insistently inappropriate frame of literary allusion, Wharton is here perhaps consciously reprising (and un-writing) Christopher Newman’s similarly over-signified view of Noémie Nioche in Henry James’s The American (1875), but while James’s criticism is directed at Newman’s naivety, Wharton’s flags up Marvell’s propensity for literary delusion. Marvell’s life of reading has not trained him for married life, nor has his preference for the great writers and poets given him any greater insight into human nature. To make matters worse, his resistance to non-literary reading of any kind, seen for example in his inability to accept newspaper coverage of his divorce, and his incompetence in dealing correctly with the legal correspondence resulting from that divorce, render him singularly ill-equipped to survive in twentieth-century America. The represented and implied acts of reading of Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country, I would argue, are not as Claire Preston has suggested, evidence of an ‘engagement with literature’ that is as ‘purely recreational and inessential as their professional activities, and somewhat more so than their sporting and

When the Reading had to Stop

39

social ones’, but rather a far more incisive authorial critique of his inappropriate aspirations to high culture, and perhaps even more disturbingly, an exercise in demonstrating the futility of his attempt to interpret life through art.10 Part Quixote and part Werther, Ralph Marvell’s insistence on seeing women through the gauzy filter of an inappropriate literary frame of reference proves to be disastrous for his personal life, and crippling for his literary ambitions. If novel reading was often seen as a dangerous diet for women, Ralph Marvell provides ample evidence of the dangers of the classical literary curriculum for men in an era typified by increasing female emancipation, the proliferation of print and the telescopic effect of the public sphere on private life.

The Circulation of Newsprint: Mrs Heeny versus Mrs Wharton The Custom of the Country is a novel that narrates the trajectory of information through the pages of the popular press, while itself being distributed to its readers through a journal that combined the literary with the commercial. Serialized in the colourfully illustrated pages of Scribner’s Magazine from January to November 1913, Wharton’s novel is relentlessly self-referential in its consciousness of the power of mass journalism to shape its readers. In recreating the American world of print in the first decade of the twentieth century, The Custom of the Country glosses a range of fictional newspapers and magazines: Town Talk, the Radiator, Boudoir Chat, Family Weekly, the Little Rock Magazine, nameless morning and evening newspapers, society and fashion magazines, and even a literary magazine with a ‘fiction number’ (p. 116) curiously like Scribner’s Magazine itself. This is a serialized novel whose plot depends upon the reading of periodicals and newspapers, in a country where the most important customs are played out on the pages of the popular press. Of all the consumers of newsprint in the novel – and there are many – Mrs Heeny presents both the most formidable spectacle of the disseminating power of the popular press, literally massaging the opinions of her interlocutors through the power of her clippings, and the most arresting example of popular participation in newspaper reading. In her hands, the newspaper clippings become both an inquisitorial resource, offering up the required information about a person or event, and a corroborative (even a revisionist) textual record, completely substituting and displacing actual events: what is written about a person is invariably more valuable and accurate than what may actually have taken place. The mutilated remnants of Undine Spragg’s marital career as delineated in the popular press become, in Mrs Heeny’s explanation of Undine’s life to her beleaguered son Paul, both the definitive account and justification of a life, and the literal, textual substitute for an unerringly absent mother. ‘You’d oughter start a scrapbook yourself ’ (p. 582), Mrs Heeny advises the nearly nine-year-old Paul, a boy

40

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

with a ‘passion for the printed page’ (p. 580), in order to understand his mother; ‘you could make a beauty, just about your Ma, with her picture pasted in the front’ (p. 582). Paul is seductively and insidiously drawn into the mesmerizing world of newsprint, and the reading of inquisitorial accounts as a source of social intelligence and social capital: ‘he had the feeling that Mrs. Heeny’s clippings, aside from their great intrinsic interest, might furnish him the clues to many things he didn’t understand, and that nobody had ever had time to explain to him’ (p. 582). At the end of the novel, Paul too is drawn into the reading world of the twentieth-century mass market newspaper, complete with society columns, photographs and sexual scandals. Indeed, newspaper reading is the one reading practice that almost all the main characters in The Custom of the Country are inevitably forced to share, either as participants, subjects or both: arguably, the circulation of newsprint is as central an expression of social interconnectedness (and interdependency) in Wharton’s novel as the web of connectedness in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or the miasma of disease in Dickens’s Bleak House. Ironically, the photograph shy Wharton, a woman who Hermione Lee cogently notes had ‘mixed feelings about her own exposure’, was relentless in pressing her publishers to advertise The Custom of the Country as widely as possible in the popular press.11 Writing to her British publisher, Frederick Macmillan, she urged him to ‘advertise the book a little more than you have been doing’; in his reply, Macmillan noted that the firm had already spent some £133 (c. $646) in the first six months after publication on promoting the novel, with over 280 separate advertisements in the British press, and even placards in the London underground.12 Wharton herself understood only too well the efficacy of Mrs Heeny’s fictional practice of the surveillance and dissemination of the popular press; during the First World War, she kept newspaper clippings about herself, especially about her charitable work and award of the Légion d’honneur in 1916, while in the period after, her newspaper cuttings were increasingly (and sometimes bizarrely) miscellaneous, including accounts of scandals, articles about writing and advertisements for beauty products.13 The circulation of information in the form of newsprint, whether whole or in pieces, is central to the development of the plot of this, Wharton’s most news-dependent novel.

Conclusion Replete with reading matter, both conspicuously read and unread, The Custom of the Country relentlessly refers to that most ubiquitous and usually least analysed custom of a mass literate country: reading. Wharton’s most self-conscious exercise in engaging with the marketplace is also her most explicit musing on the proliferation of print (and its consequences) in the first decade of the twentieth century. Far from being simply a polemic against cheap print, or a jeremiad against the trivializing depravities of popular culture, The Custom of the Country

When the Reading had to Stop

41

is a work of rare, sociological, even anthropological insight into the complex and multifaceted reading universe of early twentieth-century America. As both a participant in and a witness to the fiction boom of the early twentieth century, Wharton’s novel articulates the diversity of reading practices that took place in, and beyond, the imaginative world of the novel. For while the novel in its pages forecloses the act of reading through the generic convention of a formal ending to the plot (articulated through Undine’s gradual realization of her next, still to be realized ambition to be an Ambassador’s wife), it actively constructs the negotiation of value through the act of reading as an ongoing, perhaps even an open-ended, process. The novel’s final scene is precipitated by yet another act of reading. Elmer Moffatt’s habitual practice of extensively scanning newspapers for valuable financial and social news and discarding them as and when necessary, the ‘habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing room’ (p. 593), clutters Undine’s ostentatious Paris residence, and leaves her visibly annoyed. It is not, however, a reading practice and a form of social intelligence gathering from which either of them can ever hope to escape. Informed by Elmer, courtesy of the newspaper, of Jim Driscoll’s appointment as Ambassador to England, Undine ‘caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to’ (p. 593), suddenly realizing both the casual thwarting of her ambitions, and the relentless tyranny of an aspirational print media perpetually arousing desires that it has no intention of fulfilling. Undine’s last, and perhaps most bitter frustration is realized through the printed word. Reading for a purpose, to be informed of society, as an escapist distraction, as an aid to flirtation, as a social obligation and as a way of demarcating space – all these modes and practices are represented in Wharton’s most anthropological text. After all, reading for Wharton’s fictional characters in The Custom of the Country, as indeed for us, does not have to stop within the artificial confines of the world of the novel.

3 ‘DON’T CRY – IT AIN’T THAT KIND OF A STORY’: WHARTON’S BUSINESS OF FICTION, 1908–12 Bonnie Shannon McMullen

In 1903, Edith Wharton wrote to Sara Norton, ‘I wept mentally (for I never do physically!) over your poor dear letter’.1 The next decade brought causes for real tears, including a turbulent affair with the faithless Morton Fullerton and the physical and mental collapse of her husband, leading to the breakdown of her marriage. By 1910, she was writing to Fullerton, ‘I am in such a state of exasperated sensitiveness just now that I lie awake and cry all night, with the despair of the future before me’.2 In this emotional turmoil, it is not surprising that the habitually disciplined Wharton made slow progress with the ‘great American novel’ which she intended would follow soon after The Fruit of the Tree of 1907. In 1908 she described it as ‘sadly neglected’.3 The Custom of the Country was not ready for serial publication until 1913, the longest gestation of a novel in Wharton’s career. Astonishingly, however, while never losing sight of her ambitious project, Wharton managed to write another novel, a novella, poetry and eighteen short stories, in addition to the travel book A Motor-Flight through France, in this period. Shari Benstock traces how Wharton’s broadening critical perspective on society required large canvasses, and how She used the smaller canvasses of short stories and novellas to probe the psychological and parapsychological worlds … These two forms of her writing required quite separate skills, and it was for this reason that there came a moment in every long project when she turned back to short story writing or a novella.

This ‘exercise’ ‘served as a resting place and … a spur to her creativity’.4 The stories written between 1908 and 1912 map the evolution of Wharton’s creative progress towards The Custom of the Country. They fall into roughly chronological categories that demonstrate: 1) the choices facing the woman and the artist; 2) the artist’s possession of her subject; 3) the complex relationship between truth and an oblique, or fictional, use of language, dramatized through letters; 4) a dimension of human experience beyond reason and control, exemplified by the ghost story; – 43 –

44

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

and, finally, 5) her triumphant merging of the realistic and psychological strengths of her short fiction with the spatial and temporal breadth of the novel form.

Choices: The Woman and the Artist The two earliest stories, written in 1908, are both deeply personal and a commitment to continuing professional integrity. In ‘The Pretext’, Margaret Ransom, a middle-aged woman married to the stolid lawyer for a New England university, finds her equilibrium upset by the attention, which she takes for love, of a young Englishman, Guy Dawnish, who is temporarily living in the conservative town of Wentworth. She insists that the supposed understanding between them should not be named, but is later humiliated to learn that the flirtation was, on his part, just a pretext to escape an ‘engagement’ to an English girl. Stripped of romantic illusion, which, even at its height, offered no possibility of an alternative future for this married woman, she turns to research on English Gothic architecture. The subject was suggested to Wharton by Henry James, and the name Ransom, with its Christian resonances, is likely to be an allusion to the lawyer Basil Ransom in The Bostonians. The conclusion recalls the end of James’s Washington Square, where the heroine, whose hopes have been blighted by a failed attachment, has made her final farewell to her former suitor. ‘Catherine … picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were’.5 Margaret, likewise, ‘took … up’ her book on the English Gothic, ‘and slowly, and painfully, like a child labouriously spelling out the syllables, she went on with the rest of the sentence’.6 This authorial dialogue between Wharton and James hints at a dimension in ‘The Pretext’ that James’s novel lacks. Although both works suggest a life/work, life/art dichotomy, Wharton’s could be read as offering solace, possibly even fulfilment, to the lonely and disappointed heroine. Margaret’s supposed lover has betrayed her, and was never the man she took him for. The work before her, however, is real, and although at first she is ‘like a child’ approaching it, like all children she has the potential to develop. Even the idea of Gothic architecture, with its transformation of heavy material into transcendent lightness, suggests a way for Margaret to transcend the weight of her despair. (A story of 1909, ‘The Debt’, might also refer to Wharton’s misprision, or revision, of James. A scientist enrages his distinguished teacher’s family by refuting the master’s theory, but justifies himself as continuing the work that his predecessor would have done, had he lived. ‘He didn’t pick me out and train me for any object but to carry on the light’, he explains to his mentor’s son.)7 Barbara A. White argues that Margaret gives in too easily to Lady Caroline, Dawnish’s insensitive aunt, and that she ‘lets … [the town of ] Wentworth win and opts for disillusion’.8 However, the encounter frees her from the self-deception that has caused her humiliation, and returns her to her ‘candid’ self.9 Margaret

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

45

chooses honesty and realism, just as Wharton did in her writing. True, a man can love an older woman, but careful reading uncovers no evidence that Dawnish feels anything beyond friendship for Margaret. He attempts a confused confession, with the ominous words ‘there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you’. He believes she ‘would understand everything – make allowances for everything – see just how a man may have held out, and fought against a thing – as long as he had the strength’.10 Given this story’s associations in its genesis and resolution with James, and considering the homosocial circle that surrounded James, it seems more than possible that the ‘thing’ which Guy wishes to confess to a sympathetic matron is not love for her, but homosexuality, the practice of which was illegal in England at that time. It could as easily be Margaret’s husband that he loves. Hence his desperation to find an excuse not to marry, and his infrequent and impersonal correspondence after his purpose has been accomplished. Evelyn E. Fracasso writes of the ‘scathing satire’ of Wharton’s treatment of the Wentworth ‘tone’, calling it ‘one of her strongest indictments of upper-class society’.11 While limiting, however, Wentworth is also supporting. Wharton would note with dismay in The Custom of the Country what America was turning into, and Wentworth represents what is being lost: ‘In a world without traditions, without reverence, without stability, such little expiring centres of prejudice and precedent make an irresistible appeal to those instincts for which a democracy has neglected to provide’. Such instincts commanded sympathy. Wentworth is an island of stability ‘preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment’, rigid, possibly doomed, but a refuge for threatened values. In addition to her childless marriage and hinted-at sexual inhibitions, compounded by a consciousness that she is ageing, Margaret’s problem may be that she and her husband are only ‘almost’ part of the Wentworth community.12 In spite of the gentle satire in the idea of the Higher Thought Society, before which Margaret will present her research, the story holds out the possibility that the work may become the life, rather than a substitute for life. It will integrate her into a community where she has been marginal. The limitations on Margaret may provide the structure that enables fulfilment, just as the limitations of the short story form allow this genre a particular insight and intensity. Margaret has been made a pretext, but the story also suggests a ‘pre’ text, an introduction to a more extended treatment of the issues it raises. It is true that Margaret turns to the task at hand out of necessity, rather than choice. Indeed, Wharton’s female protagonists seldom have the ability to make significant choices, at best steering a path through circumstances not of their own making. Wharton explores this idea in her dark story ‘The Choice’, in which all the morally confused action takes place at night. Isabel Stilling confides to her lover, Wrayford, how she yearns for her husband to die. Taking his cue, he opens the sliding floor of the boathouse, their place of nocturnal assignation, just as

46

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

the husband enters. Wrayford then plunges into the water himself, whether by accident or in an attempt to save his intended victim, is not clear.13 Isabel, seeing them in the water below, calls for and saves her husband, while Wrayford drowns. The scene is a setting for the damned, a night ‘hot as a kitchen-range’, a lake presided over by ‘an infernal skipper’. ‘What in hell’, cries the rescued husband upon learning the identity of the other man, but then reveals not just his odd mixture of obtuseness, egoism and good nature in lamenting the death of Wrayford, but also his faith in the latter’s good will: ‘I wish old Austin could have known that I was saved!’14 Although the husband’s exasperating failings are vividly dramatized, the denouement suggests that Isabel may have made the right choice. In a Darwinist reading, which demonstrates the connections between Isabel Stilling and James’s Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Bert Bender argues that, whatever Isabel’s intellectual preferences, her choice of the strong and healthy Stilling over the weaker, less dominant Wrayford, who literally loses his grip during the attempted rescue, was predetermined.15 Wharton, in the summer of 1908 when this story was written, was confronting choices beyond those of sexual selection, not just in her personal life but, more important for posterity, in the direction of her writing, choices which, like Isabel’s, were not wholly determined by intellectual or aesthetic considerations. Her novel, as it loomed in the distance, could be compared to Stilling, who, in the ‘congenial medium’ of his own house, ‘dilated and grew vast’; there he enjoys a ‘dominant position’, his ‘voice … important’. Wrayford, by contrast, represents the ‘ironic world of New York’.16 Although her big novel was planned, Wharton seemed to be avoiding a full engagement with it, preferring, for the time being, the ‘ironic world’ of the short story. Isabel, like James’s Catherine, gives her attention to embroidery, while pondering her position vis à vis her husband and lover, just as Wharton produced finely wrought short pieces while considering her choices. Les Metteurs en Scène (1908), written in French, suggests, as does ‘The Choice’, the severe limitations of all freedom of action, even for those who believe they are managing events.

Possession: The Artist and Her Material Eight of the stories Wharton wrote during this period concern artists, art collectors or writers. In ‘The Verdict’ (1908), an acclaimed society portrait painter, Gisburn, suddenly abandons his easel, marries a rich widow and becomes an art collector. The narrator, who has considered him a ‘cheap genius’, identifies his flaws in these terms: his ‘false virtuosity’ lies in ‘tricks of prestidigitation by which … he managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail’. The man, like his pictures, has ‘the quality of looking cleverer than he was’.17 Gisburn then confesses that, called upon by the

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

47

artist Stroud’s widow to paint her husband, he has lost confidence under the imagined gaze of the dead master: ‘I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits … he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between’. Gisburn admits that he has dealt in ‘lying paint’, while Stroud ‘possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it’, as evidenced by the Stroud sketch of an old donkey achieved ‘with a dozen lines – but on everlasting foundations’. The belated self-knowledge Gisburn reveals amounts to an artistic manifesto and a case for parity of value between large and small canvasses. It suggests that Wharton’s possession of The Custom of the Country was not yet established to the point where she could proceed with confidence. She could not yet answer Stroud’s hypothetical question, ‘Are you sure you know where you’re coming out?’18 ‘A dozen lines … on everlasting foundations’, the short story, would constitute her achievement for the nonce. In ‘The Bolted Door’ (1909), a failed playwright, a parodic prototype for Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country, who is himself a refraction of his creator, has ‘no knack for business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of commerce’.19 Unlike Ralph, he lacks the courage for suicide, and attempts to force the state to effect his exit by confessing to the murder of an elderly cousin. Although his writing is rejected, the alibi he invented for the murder was so persuasive that no one believes his belated confession. Whether he is writing fiction or telling the truth, he is not taken seriously, although his account of the murder is so vivid that his incredulous hearers agree it could have made his name as a writer. He is not the ‘guilt-ridden’ ‘repentant sinner’ of Evelyn E. Fracasso’s reading,20 but is self-obsessed and amoral, even considering committing a second murder just to be arrested. Ironically, he fails to appreciate that the selfish obsessiveness of his cousin, which justifies the murder in his eyes, is his own predominant trait. His desperate attempts to confess land him in a madhouse, the ‘bolted door’ he has feared above all else, although by this time he has indeed driven himself half mad. The implication is that, had he imbued his writing with the imaginative passion that informed the undetected murder and successful alibi, he might have succeeded beyond all bounds. Tragically, he has failed to identify the nature of his own talent, to possess it, and has perversely attempted to follow an unsuitable model. The rich victim’s passion is growing melons, and he has grown ‘just like one of his own melons’, which he enjoys ‘prodding and leering at’, but never eats, because of a delicate digestion. The ‘large, undifferentiated’21 Lenman recalls Stilling, the expansive husband in ‘The Choice’, and suggests that Wharton, at this juncture, was repelled by things bloated, including prose narrative. It is a beautiful irony that the bloated connoisseur of bloated fruit dies from a poisoned melon just when his physician has declared it safe for him to eat a small piece. One imagines Wharton turning to her novel, only to flee back to the safer, concentrated, defined space of the short story. Did she fear her novel-in-progress

48

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

might become as amorphous as one of Lenman’s melons, or that the artist might die from her own poisoned fruit? Another parable of obsession, ‘The Daunt Diana’ (1901), concerns Neave, a collector who has honed his sensibilities to a point ‘as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses’. He has undergone ‘a long process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no pact with its self of yesterday’. Not content with appreciation, however, he yearns for ‘the last deep identification which only possession can give’. Unlike Gisburn in ‘The Verdict’, who was financed by his wife, Neave ruins himself in his quest, but in the end gets ‘hold of the secret we’re all after’.22 The process of scrutiny, discrimination, evaluation and possession is equivalent to the author’s relationship to her subject, and parallels the process of the novelist’s art. However, as a comparison between the melon-grower and art collector makes clear, the object of possession is all-important. ‘The Daunt Diana’ is framed by a narrator who hears Neave’s story from another collector, Finney. Finney’s collection is negligible, but, in pursuit of snuff boxes, he has come back with ‘fragments of human nature’. ‘A psychologist astray among bibelots’, Finney has honed his taste and discrimination as thoroughly as Neave, resulting in ‘an unusually sensitive touch for the human texture’. He presides over a ‘museum of memories’, and his ‘specimens’ ‘have almost always some mark of the rare and chosen’.23 Wharton, who filled her own ‘collections’ with specimens of human nature from her ‘museum of memories’, could hardly have described herself more accurately. A related theme was examined in ‘The Legend’ (1910), which questions the extent to which a writer’s work belongs to him. Pellerin, who has disappeared in the face of public indifference, returns after he achieves a following, only to find that he is not recognized and that his mature work is rejected. The story commends an idea of evolutionary form as the only true creativity, but recognizes that readers who have taken possession of earlier work may be unable to grow with the writer. The writer loses possession of both ideas and reputation to an enthusiastic, but obtuse, readership.

Letters: ‘Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant’24 Others, especially Candace Waid,25 have emphasized the importance of letters in Wharton’s fiction. In these stories, letters, rather than aiding understanding, serve as instruments of deception and/or as an exposure of the writer’s vulnerability. In ‘His Father’s Son’ (1909), a young lawyer believes, after reading the correspondence between his mother and a concert pianist, that he is illegitimate. His ‘feelings about life … and art’, he reasons, were inherited from Dolbrowski, and not from

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

49

the dull owner of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle Company. Grew Senior’s appearance belies a vibrant imagination, however, and he confesses to writing the letters to Dolbrowski, copied and signed by his wife, who never met the pianist. Through the correspondence, Mr Grew’s horizons broadened, enabling him to give his son ‘the big view from the start’.26 Although this endorsement of ‘the big view’ seems at odds with the parable of the melons, it demonstrates the aesthetic dialectic that Wharton was struggling with in this period. It is the over-cultivation of melons, the inability to justify their size, that Wharton deplores. Grew’s correspondence with Dolbrowski effects an evolutionary expansion of horizons, an emergence from limitation to a broad perspective, a process not dissimilar to that wrought by Gothic architecture in ‘The Pretext’. No matter that the correspondence, like all fiction, is premised on a lie. In ‘Full Circle’ (1909), the theme of masquerade is given a double twist. Betton, a novelist of fading popularity, writes his own fan letters to avoid losing face with his secretary, Vyse, and to keep him, a talented but unsuccessful writer himself, employed. When the ruse arouses Vyse’s suspicions, Betton desists, but eventually ‘a succession of really remarkable letters’ resumes. Betton takes to answering them himself, but discovers, during Vyse’s temporary absence, that his own trick has been reversed. Imagining that Vyse’s deceit was motivated by a desire to ‘soothe and smooth’ his employer’s ‘writhing ego’, he learns that it was merely the ploy of a ‘stone broke’ man to keep his job. While the story examines the author’s position in relation to his audience, it also illuminates one of the main motives for writing at all. Wharton was never ‘stone broke’, but writing was her profession, her business, her living. Thus, although the coming novel was stalled, her ‘letters’ to her reading public kept coming from a variety of angles. Like Vyse, she might have said she ‘wanted to keep my job’.27 ‘The Letters’ of 1910, like ‘The Verdict’, concerns a painter, Deering, who marries a girl who supports him. Circumstances separate them for two years after their initial courtship, and Lizzie, a struggling teacher, assuages her loneliness by writing passionate letters, none of which is answered. However, when Lizzie comes into an inheritance, Deering reappears, claiming he could not answer the letters because of his own poverty. ‘After three years of wedded bliss’, Lizzie has lost the illusion that her indolent husband’s work is ‘some sacred rite’. As he lies smoking on a divan in his studio ‘while he skimmed the morning papers’, the ‘great work’ on the easel gathers dust. When Lizzie unpacks and sorts a trunk full of Deering’s belongings, their child plays with a beaded bag which disgorges her letters, all unopened. The bag itself may have been made for Deering by another woman during their separation. Realizing her husband has lied, and aware that her inheritance played a part in his return, she nevertheless dismisses an initial impulse to leave him, realizing, in a ‘wide flash of pity and initiation’, that ‘richer realities’ have replaced her ‘illusions’, and that ‘her husband as he was, as he would

50

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

always be’ was still material from which was ‘fashioned a love that will bear the stress of life’.28 Lizzie starts as a love-struck girl, writing to a man who never answers, perhaps because the real object of her outpourings is not a man, but a construct of her romantic imagination. She ends disillusioned but, paradoxically, happy with her hard-won realism. It is a misreading, I believe, to state, as Evelyn E. Fracasso does, that Lizzie chooses ‘to remain imprisoned’29 in her marriage. Her life before marriage was ‘like the blind life of the plant before it reaches the surface of the soil’. There is no going back, for her marriage to Deering is her life, and it is a life in the light of fulfilment. Lizzie, with her vision of her marriage as a thing of value and beauty made up ‘of mean mixed substances’, ‘worthless scraps of mortar, glass, and pebbles’,30 seems to anticipate W.B. Yeats’s late evocation of the origins of his ‘masterful images’ in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’: A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till.31

Wharton, too, from this time on, never lost her sense of ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ from which language arises and art is fashioned, of the need for the writer, as Pellerin puts it in ‘The Legend’, to ‘touch earth between times’.32

‘In the Mood for Ghosts’ ‘I should be very glad to die, but it’s no fun struggling with you don’t know what in the dark –’, wrote Wharton to Morton Fullerton in May 1914, showing that, unlike the circle of men in ‘The Eyes’, she was not often ‘in the mood for ghosts’.33 The nocturnal intruder in what she called her ‘Timgad adventure’ was not an apparition, yet the ‘people with candles but without trousers’ who responded to her cries saw no one.34 This traumatic incident must have seemed, to the highly strung Wharton, the actualization of a lifetime of apprehension. In ‘Life and I’, she tells how, after a serious childhood illness, she lived in a state of ‘chronic fear’, dread of ‘some dark, undefinable menace’. Ghost stories, in particular, upset her equilibrium, and, even at twenty-eight, five years after her marriage, she burned books of ghost stories, unable to sleep knowing they were in the library downstairs. Nevertheless, Wharton wrote ghost stories throughout her career, perhaps for the specific purpose of giving a definite shape to the ‘formless horrors’ that ‘haunted’ her.35 While the ghost story, in its emotional energy, is, in some respects, the epitome of what can be achieved in the compressed form of the short story, paradoxically, it also offers a wider spatial and temporal perspective than is usually possible in a story, one that is closer to the scope of the novel. The three ghost stories written between 1909 and 1910 mark an escalation in

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

51

Wharton’s struggle to give aesthetic expression to her ‘big subject’ without losing the psychological intensity she had perfected in short fiction. They occupy a pivotal position between the earlier and later stories of this period. In the first of these, ‘Afterward’, written in late 1909, a newly rich couple escaping ‘the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town’ take a Tudor house in Dorset to ‘taste … every delicious mouthful’ of a place that has ‘all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past’. Their consumerist approach to an acquired setting with no connection to their own lives leads to demands that the house be haunted, although they are warned they will not recognize the ghost until afterwards. Ironically, the isolation and solitude that put them ‘in possession of life’ precipitates a confrontation with their past which destroys their autonomy. When her husband disappears, Mary is convinced that ‘the house knew’ his fate. The ghost is not of the house, however, but a product of ‘business’ and its disturbing contingencies’ which has made their life in the house possible.36 Like The Custom of the Country, ‘Afterward’ is saturated with money, accounts and business. ‘In search of economic drawbacks’, the Boynes’s whole world view is economically determined. When, at first, no ghost appears, they ‘set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account’. Ned is writing a book called ‘The Economic Basis of Culture’, and, when the ghost approaches Mary, she takes him for ‘a person arriving “on business”’. Later, Mary loses ‘herself in … calculations of the outlay’ for property improvements, ‘luxuriating in a lavish play of figures’. Even their relation to each other follows a business paradigm, and a confrontation between husband and wife ‘liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral obligation’. Throughout, the term ‘security’ is repeated – ‘the tried security of their personal relations’, ‘the recovery of [Mary’s] sense of security’, ‘her recovered security’ – emphasizing the way that Mary’s comfort is founded on securities of a different order. When Parvis, the lawyer, finally reveals the events that led to Ned’s wealth and Elwell’s suicide, he remarks, ‘I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.’37 As in The Custom of the Country, a wife’s ignorance of her husband’s work is emphasized: Theoretically, [Mary] deprecated the American wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne’s report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him … it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was built.38

This theme gives the novel-in-progress its title when Charles Bowen declares that ‘the whole problem of American marriages’ is that a man excludes his wife ‘from the real business of life’ because to include her is ‘against the custom of the coun-

52

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

try’ (p. 206). The consequences of this custom, Mary’s silent acquiescence in Ned’s opportunism, fill her with ‘terror’ and ‘horror’, isolated and ‘numb’ amidst the ‘ruins’ of her former security.39 Like other Wharton protagonists, Mary fails to read the warning signs. Although she believes she is ‘well versed in the code of the spectral world’, ‘her short-sighted eyes’, ‘her short-sighted gaze’, afford only ‘a blurred impression’ of the visitor from the other side. As her Edenic idyll turns into hell, she misses the symbolic irony of the arrival of ‘the boiler maker’, the ‘encounter’ with whom ‘led to such far-reaching results’, at the exact moment of Ned’s abduction by the ghost. Mary has unwittingly implicated herself in Ned’s doom by calling in the greatest hothouse ‘authority’ of all. Their ‘colloquy’, their ‘absorbed confabulation among the flower pots’, recalls another garden colloquy between a woman and a hothouse expert, with ‘far-reaching results’ for mankind. On an intertextual level, it is tempting to link ‘the great man’, ‘an authority from Dorchester’, to Thomas Hardy, chronicler of the tragic, mythic, dimensions of secluded existences.40 Cynthia Griffin Wolff has described The Custom of the Country as ‘a novel of energy’.41 In ‘Edith Wharton’s Poetics of Telecommunication’, Aaron Worth identifies Undine as an ‘analog’ force, ‘a figure … associated with the wavelike flow of energies’.42 Although hardly ghostly, Undine’s conception draws on mythical forces. Space and time are no more obstacles to her purposes than sentimental scruples. In this respect, the ghost of Elwell, who continues his thwarted struggle for justice by extra-legal means from beyond the grave, could be compared to Undine. When Ned Boyne demands a house ‘without the least hint of “convenience”’, he is not thinking of the root of the word, which suggests ‘convene’. However, the wavelike intensity of his guilt and anxiety results in a fatal convening, a most inconvenient outcome. Mary, who has ill-advisedly relied on her supposed knowledge of the ‘code’ of ghosts, is destroyed by a different medium of communication, a wave which carries Ned away and, as she internalizes the message, becomes the ‘surgings of her brain’.43 Margaret, in ‘The Pretext’, is overcome by ‘the rush of a great wave of life’, which prevents her from recalling the coded message of Dawnish’s words.44 In Worth’s analysis, the same contrast of energies constitutes the chief dialectic between the old and new forces struggling for dominance in The Custom of the Country. Wharton needed, as she wrote, to acknowledge the wave, whose power she recognized in her 1913 novel, while avoiding inundation. This process involved the difficult translation of wave energy into code. In ‘The Triumph of Night’, also written in late 1909 but not published until 1914, it is uncertain whether George Faxon is haunted or haunting. His ‘rootless life’ has left him without ‘a personal stake in things’. Stranded in a blizzard at the station of the aptly named Northridge, New Hampshire, where he expects to take up a secretarial post, he accepts the hospitality of the amiable young Frank Rainer, nephew of the famously rich businessman Lavington. He is asked to witness the

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

53

will of Rainer, who is suffering from tuberculosis. As Lavington smiles benevolently at Frank applying the seal, Faxon notices an identical man behind him, glaring at Frank with ‘pale hostility’. At dinner afterwards, two lawyers urge Frank to follow the medical advice of the ‘highest authorities’ and go south, rather than the contrary advice of the ‘awfully clever chap’ found by his uncle. Again Faxon is disconcerted by the same ‘watcher’ or ‘presence’ behind Lavington, looking at Rainer with ‘deadly menace’, expressing ‘all the fierce weariness of old unsatisfied hates’. This ‘monstrous vision’ drives him from the house, and Frank, following him through the snow on his uncle’s orders, collapses and dies.45 Although, like Mary Boyne, he is uneasy from the first, Faxon too fails to read his surroundings correctly. His impression of ‘warmth and light’ at the house is ‘violent’. He misses the significance of the ‘hothouse plants’, and the profusion of flowers in his room – mostly arums and carnations, which are associated with funerals. Invited to make himself ‘at home’, he finds it ‘oddly cold and unwelcoming’, even though ‘balmy’. The conventional, but ‘intensely negative’ personality of Lavington has, he supposes, ‘in some occult way … penetrated every corner of his dwelling’. Like the boiler man in ‘Afterward’, and his prototype, Lavington is a hothouse expert, and, in time-honoured tradition, has more than one face to show the world. His ‘brilliant ubiquity’ is ‘difficult to escape’, for the ‘complicated conveniences’ of the house signal an evil and fatal convening.46 Faxon’s stark options bring to mind Robert Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice’. His motivations are opaque, however. He feels resentment that ‘he alone had been singled out as the victim of this dreadful initiation!’ The ‘fire’ lies in the immediate rapport that develops between Faxon and Frank, within seconds moving from ‘reciprocal understanding’ to a deep ‘sense of solidarity’. Soon the warmth becomes physical, as he slips his arm through Frank’s, who meets ‘the movement with a responsive pressure’. During the short time that Faxon is at Lavington’s house, Frank visits his room twice, and at Frank’s second approach Faxon takes flight. Is it the ghost that Faxon flees, or his attraction to Frank? If the latter, it would explain why ‘he had no personal life’.47 Later, his hands red from Frank’s fatal haemorrhage, Faxon’s guilt is compounded by the knowledge that Lavington has saved his failing company with an inheritance from Frank. Faxon is overcome by the belief that, though singled out to rescue Frank, he had, like Pontius Pilate, ‘washed his hands of it’.48 Like ‘Afterward’ and The Custom of the Country, the story is concerned with business morality and the social Darwinism that the lawyer in ‘Afterward’ takes for granted. Even though Faxon is outside the business world, his life and outlook are determined by this ethos. It is not his ‘business’ to rescue Frank, he tells himself, and so abandons him. (‘The Blond Beast’ (1910) deals with a similar cast. The protagonist, a secretary like Faxon, flees an uncomfortable situation, leaving a vulnerable youth to the mercy of his rich, cynical father).

54

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

The conventional reading of ‘The Triumph of Night’ sees the moral that Barbara A. White draws: namely, that ‘Faxon delays too long in exposing Mr. Lavington’s plan to kill his nephew’.49 However, the story is written in counterpoint, and this interpretation accounts for only one strand. Why is Faxon ‘a stranger everywhere’, ‘unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of … perpetually treading other people’s stairs’?50 Henry James, not wholly in jest, called Wharton the ‘Angel of Devastation’.51 Faxon, it could be argued, is an angel of death, part of the machinery to destroy Frank (just as Pontius Pilate was part of a larger divine plan), who innocently welcomes the agent of his doom. When no seal can be found for the will, Frank declares, ‘It’s the hand of God’, but Faxon counters this divine agency and supplies one. When Faxon asks, of Frank’s dilemma, ‘What business was it of his, in God’s name?’ he may, unwittingly, be answering his own question.52 (In ‘Afterward’, Mary, who has similarly distanced herself from her husband’s business, is the agent who directs the ghost to Ned.) Mr Lavington has created a millionaire’s inferno, and Faxon’s function is to deliver the souls of the damned. The stranger who comes in the night, he is a ghost without knowing it. Undine, also, largely unconsciously, brings death and destruction to those who embrace her. Later, Faxon is in Malaya, while his companion, on business, has ‘gone into the jungle on a long excursion’. Among the papers he finds in the hotel is Zion’s Herald, again suggesting his function as a supernatural agent. It is hard to avoid the impression that Wharton is referencing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when she writes of how Faxon, like Marlowe, ‘had looked too deep down into the abyss’.53 If so, one fears the outcome of his friend’s errand in the jungle. Wharton may have delayed publication of this story fearing it was too dark for periodical publication. To do so, she perhaps imagined, would have made her truly deserving of James’s sobriquet. However, the story also demonstrates her vulnerability as a writer, an unwilling prophetess of doom, whose personal defence against a freezing world, ‘the bitter black-and-white landscape’ of the written page, was, like Faxon’s overcoat, ‘no thicker than a sheet of paper’.54 ‘The Eyes’, also from the spring of 1910, is saturated with business-speak, as the friends ‘take stock’ of their group and ‘tax each member’ in the course of their ‘exchange of ideas’. Their host speaks of ‘arrears to make up in money and emotion’. Like the other ghost stories, it concerns a younger and an older man. Culwin, a self-indulgent man of ‘fine intelligence’, presides over a circle of younger men at select dinners and intellectual discussions. On this occasion, they take turns telling ghost stories, based on personal experience. Although ‘essentially a spectator’, and, in the narrator’s opinion, ‘not the kind of man likely to be favored with such contacts’, when most of the guests have left, Culwin begins the story of his own hauntings. The first occurred when he proposed marriage to a plain, love-struck cousin; the second, when he praised the writing of an untal-

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

55

ented, but beautiful, young man. The ‘ghost’ takes the form of two eyes, old and hideous, with an ‘expression of vicious security’ and ‘a look of base astuteness’.55 The irony lies in the discrepancy between the narrator’s qualified admiration for his host and Culwin’s unwitting revelation of himself as thoroughly degenerate. If ‘The Triumph of Night’ hints at homoeroticism, not just in Faxon but also in Lavington with his ‘whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief ’,56 his cultivation of hothouse flowers, his collecting, in ‘The Eyes’ it is explicit. Culwin’s misogyny is blatant, but he is scarcely more respectful of his male acolytes. He says of Gilbert Noyes, ‘I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain’, but laughs with pleasure when Gilbert hugs him and retires to bed ‘smiling at the memory of his eyes – his blissful eyes’. Culwin’s twelve disciples are young (the narrator’s mother knew him in his youth), replenished by new recruits. Under the guise of forcing ‘the young idea to robuster bloom’, Culwin is, in reality, a cannibal ‘with a taste for young flesh’, an ogre who ‘liked ’em juicy’. He is, indeed, the ‘phosphorescent log’, rotten right through. The terror the story arouses in its hearers and teller comes from the final recognition that the eyes are Culwin’s. Like Faxon, he is both haunted and haunter. In soliciting the tale, the young men, who have absorbed the business morality and hypocrisy at the heart of this corruption, have made themselves victims of the ‘infernal’ power of ‘the eyes’.57 The implication is that those who have beheld ‘the eyes’ will in turn become ‘the eyes’, suggesting a continuum between teller, tale and listener. In all three stories, the significant action takes place in libraries. In ‘Afterward’, we are informed that the library at Lyng ‘was the central, the pivotal “feature”’.58 In ‘The Triumph of Night’, Faxon first sees the ghost in Lavington’s shadowy study. In ‘The Eyes’, the framing tale takes place in Culwin’s library, ‘with its oak walls and dark old bindings’, and the incident that leads to Culwin’s first haunting occurs in his aunt’s ‘Gothic library, filled with classics bound in black cloth’.59 This self-referential emphasis on books, and the space they occupy, is suggestive of worlds of story beyond the story we are reading, a reminder that each work takes its place in a long tradition of story-telling. When a book-derived reality collapses from collision with a different system, the self implodes, as with Mary, who, prefiguring Ralph Marvell’s collapse, ‘felt the walls of books rush toward her’.60 Her life, like Gisburn’s art in ‘The Verdict’, has not been built on ‘everlasting foundations’. In ‘Visibility in Fiction’, Wharton asks, ‘what is the particular faculty of genius that produces … the … effect of visibility? Sometimes one inclines to ascribe it to a quality of quietness.’ She describes a successful writer’s ‘patient intensity of attention’ and ‘some secret intuition that the barrier between themselves and their creatures was somehow thinner than the pages of a book’.61 This foregrounding of ‘quietness’ and ‘attention’ brings to mind Ned Boyne’s ‘Benedictine regular-

56

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

ity of life’, which, like the writer’s ‘patient intensity’ results in the evocation of a ghost with all the ‘visibility’ of ‘a person arriving “on business”’.62 Perhaps all of Wharton’s ghost seers should be regarded as figures for the author. To the reader of the ghost story, the protagonist is as much a ghost as the ghost is to the protagonist. To the writer, both are ‘ghosts’, creatures of concentrated meditation, but what about the relation between writer and reader? For Wharton, this particular genre created a special sympathy, and she wrote of being ‘conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers, of their meeting me halfway’.63 These qualities of ‘quietness’ and ‘intensity of attention’ are notable by their absence in the business, or busyness, saturated Custom of the Country. Ralph Marvell, who has the capacity, is destroyed by his attempt to bridge the gap between his world and the new society around him. His son, Paul, ‘whose habit of solitude had given him a passion for the printed page’ (p. 580), is last seen in his stepfather’s library gazing at ‘rows and rows of books’ (p. 578). They ‘all looked as if they might have had stories in them as splendid as their bindings’ (p. 578), but sit in locked cases, to be admired only as artefacts. Although he has taken ‘a prize in composition’ (p. 588), his likely future is forecast by Moffatt, who says, ‘when you’re big enough I mean to put you in my business’ (p. 589).

The Long and Short of it ‘Autres Temps’ (1911) continues the exploration of the effects of past actions on present circumstances, presenting a temporal perspective closer to a novel’s than a story’s. Here, the action in question is divorce, which is also central to The Custom of the Country. Mrs Lidcote returns to America from Florence, where she has lived since leaving her husband for another man. Now, her daughter too has left a husband, but, instead of encountering censure and exclusion, has been embraced by society. Imagining her own status has also changed with changing times, Mrs Lidcote is dismayed to find herself secluded from her daughter’s guests for an entire weekend. She realizes that her position was determined years earlier, and ‘that society is much too busy to revise its own judgments’. Her ‘case has been passed on and classified’; she is ‘the woman who has been cut for nearly twenty years’. She accepts, sadly, that her outcast state has ‘become a tradition … and traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy’.64 Mrs Lidcote’s challenge, to interpret New York, ‘the sphinx whose riddle she must read or perish’, was the same as Wharton’s, as she described a society that had emerged in her absence. With a new society came new modes of expression, and Wharton demonstrates the concessions she is not prepared to make to stylistic modernity as she describes two young women whose ‘talk leaped elliptically from allusion to allusion, their unfinished sentences dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture’.65 But was there a danger, as she approached her sphinx-like

‘Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story’

57

subject matter, that Wharton’s own ‘case’, like Mrs Lidcote’s and Pellerin’s in ‘The Legend’, had ‘been passed on and classified’? ‘Xingu’ of 1911 comically revisits some of the material of ‘The Pretext’ and ‘The Legend’. The Lunch Club, presided over by that huntress of culture, Mrs Ballinger, is a descendant of the Higher Thought Club and the Uplift Club of the earlier stories. Mrs Roby is censured for her frivolity, but rescues the club from the disdain of the celebrated novelist Osric Dane. Turning the discussion to Xingu, Mrs Roby exposes everyone’s pretensions as they feign to know what it is. After her departure with the author, the group attempts to settle the definition of Xingu, finding, embarrassingly, that it is a river in Brazil. While light, the story makes a serious point. In ‘The Pretext’, Margaret engineers her own humiliation by enjoining her ‘lover’ to silence: ‘Don’t let us try to find a name that … that we should both agree upon’.66 Hence it is forever unclear what Guy might have said. ‘Xingu’ presents the opposite situation, a name, the meaning of which is known to only one person. As a writer seeking ever-greater clarity and precision, Wharton saw her work as naming, finding the right word. In The Writing of Fiction, she asserted that ‘words are the exterior symbols of thought, and it is only by their exact use that the writer can keep on his subject … Every word, every stroke, tells.’67 The Custom of the Country could be seen as an extended definition of something that determines the lives of all the characters, but that only one character, Bowen, standing apart as commentator, has the insight to identify. ‘Xingu’ displays a renewed confidence, extending to self-parody in the figure of Osric Dane, who ‘looked as though she were about to be photographed for a new edition of her books’ and ‘had a way of looking at you that made you feel as if there was something wrong with your hat’.68 Her novel’s title, The Wings of Death, might even be a playful allusion to James’s ‘angel of devastation’. Wharton’s mood had changed, and by 1912 she was deeply engrossed in her novel and wrote only one story, ‘The Long Run’, the title of which almost suggests her own long run towards the completion of Custom. Halston Merrick has turned away the married woman he loved for reasons he defends as chivalrous, but which in hindsight look pusillanimous. A friend, meeting the formerly ‘vivid and promising’ Merrick after twelve years, sees in him ‘something dreadful, unforeseen, unaccountable: Merrick had grown conventional and dull’. What Merrick has feared is the ‘terrible indissoluble completeness’ the union would have entailed, but later realizes that, in rejecting Paulina, he has also lost his muse.69 One could connect this story to Wharton’s personal life, but it is more interesting to see it in relation to her big novel. The safer-seeming course for Wharton might have been to abandon the subject that presented itself to her. Indeed, she had confessed in 1907 to Robert Grant that she ‘always obscurely felt that I didn’t know how to write a novel’, and in approaching a novel she lacked ‘the sense of authority with

58

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

which I take hold of a short story’. Nevertheless, she continued, ‘I see things more & more from the novel-angle’ and suspected ‘silence to be the only escape’. Not wishing to sacrifice the ‘smaller realism’ she had perfected in her stories, for four years she strove to marry this art to ‘a larger whole, in all its remotest connotations’.70 She was vindicated in the long run. ‘Struggling with you don’t know what in the dark’ could be a description of the human condition. It is also probably a good summary of the creative process. Referring to her ‘Timgad adventure’, Wharton recalled, ‘It was the inability to get a light … that was so horrible’.71 Getting a light is a good metaphor for what Wharton did through her writing, and the short story, at its best, in her assessment, is ‘a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience’.72 As a boy, Ralph Marvell had found a cave ‘with … a single shaft of communication with the sky’ (p. 76), an image that resembles a Wharton story. The attraction of England for the Boynes in ‘Afterward’ is that it is ‘incredibly compressed’ and, ‘for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so far’,73 a description of the genre within the story. With its containment and concentration, the story form provided the shaft, or column of light, to ease the struggle ‘in the dark’ for Wharton, illuminating the twisting path to the realization of her 1913 novel. When Elmer tells Undine, ‘don’t cry – it ain’t that kind of a story’ (p. 576), it could also be Wharton, who never diverted her attention from what the narrator of ‘The Verdict’ calls ‘the real business’ of art, ‘the hard passages’, speaking to herself and her readers.74 The genesis of The Custom of the Country was not ‘that kind of a story’ either.

4 WORST PARENTS EVER: CULTURES OF CHILDHOOD IN THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY Carol J. Singley

Edith Wharton’s twenty-eight-year marriage produced no biological children, but she had a lifelong interest in the welfare of the young and created many fictional juvenile portraits. Children are the explicit focus of her short story ‘The Mission of Jane’ (1902), and her novels Summer (1917) and The Children (1928), but Wharton’s explorations of child-rearing also appear in novels about women climbing the social ladder. Nowhere are the effects of parenting on childhood more evident than in The Custom of the Country. The Custom of the Country is set in the early 1900s and published in 1913, and is in some ways a companion novel to The House of Mirth, set in the same period and published in 1905. Both novels of manners tell the story of poorly parented, beautiful and vain women in search of husbands. Both protagonists are essentially, even tragically, ignorant about the true source of happiness. However, Undine Spragg seizes every opportunity for success and is driven by a rapacious appetite for new experiences, money and social standing, in contrast to the more passive Lily Bart, who sows the seeds of success but fails to reap the harvest from her efforts. Beginning with the early reviews,1 readers have noted the novels’ parallel depictions of American womanhood, but they have neglected a key aspect in Lily’s and Undine’s situations: their families. Orphaned, Lily has no one to depend upon, whereas Undine is indulged by self-sacrificing parents who exert every effort to foster her social rise in New York society. At the core of both characters’ problems is an ethically suspect value system transmitted from the older generation to the younger. For different reasons, both the Barts and the Spraggs encourage their daughters’ narcissistic materialism and fail to instil moral values. However, if The House of Mirth shows the detrimental results of absent or neglectful parents, The Custom of the Country demonstrates the consequences of excessive, permissive ones. Lily’s conspicuous failure and Undine’s putative success direct readers’ attention to the place of the child in early twentieth-century American society and – 59 –

60

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

family life. Deficient parenting in both The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country produces ethically challenged offspring who fail to function properly on behalf of themselves or others. In Lily’s case, the child who is inadequately parented becomes ill adapted to a competitive environment and fades or wastes away. In Undine’s case, the child who is overindulged develops an appetite for consumption and immediate gratification, literalizing the Victorian fantasy expressed by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland of the child grown large and the parent grown small. The source of Lily’s problem is exploitation by a selfserving mother who objectifies and dismisses her and who echoes Wharton’s own self-centred mother, Lucretia Jones. Undine’s childhood challenges are more complex. Whereas Lily languishes without parental guidance, Undine depends on and exploits parental support in order to increase aggressive acquisitiveness, destroying everything and everyone in her path. Lily dies imagining that she embraces a child, but Undine lives on to become a monstrous mother to a real-life child she emotionally abuses and abandons. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton explores social and moral disintegration in the modern American family and voices concern that the direction parenting was taking boded ill for the nation as a whole. Undine can be no more and no less than the culture that produced her. The most conspicuously parented of all Wharton’s characters, she is yet a spectacular failure. Her consuming energy, self-serving habits, and initials, ‘U. S.’, provide a portrait of what Wharton found disturbing not only in American youth but also in the parents who raise them. The Custom of the Country opens with an alarming reversal of parent-child roles. ‘Undine Spragg – how can you?’ wails Mrs Spragg (p. 3, italics in original), simultaneously voicing maternal distress and helplessness. The well meaning mother is overwhelmed by the business of parenting, and her daughter’s aggressive manoeuvres declare not only the child’s importance but also her superiority. Undine takes advantage of, and sometimes revenge on, her mother’s ineffectuality. Mrs Spragg parents Undine ‘with an air of detachment as if she had been a wax figure in a show-window’; ‘she seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child’ (pp. 4, 11). Her ‘protest’ acknowledges her daughter’s power; her ‘prematurely-wrinkled hand’ advertises her datedness; and her fingers, ‘heavy with rings’ (p. 4), suggest the limits of affluence to direct the child to good behaviour or moral values. The daughter rather than the mother assumes authority in this first scene. Mrs Spragg is demoted from manager to observer. A few pages later she will play the role of servant who catches her daughter’s carelessly flung garment of clothing and smoothes it on the bed (pp. 45–6). Undine is a thoroughly modern child who does not acknowledge and will not accept parental authority. The Custom of the Country presents a social world in which children, not their parents, decide social engagements, and parental permission is a courtesy, not a requirement. When a dinner invitation arrives from the venerable

Worst Parents Ever

61

Mrs Fairford addressed to Mrs Spragg, it strikes Undine as ‘funny’ that she is not the addressee. She cannot fathom why her mother should be included in a transaction that does not involve her. The notion that Mrs Spragg will ‘allow’ or not allow her daughter to do something seems equally antiquated (p. 9, italics in original). In this first scene, Mrs Spragg abdicates maternal authority and displaces it onto the hired help, the masseuse Mrs Heeny. Mrs Heeny, ‘in comparison’ with Mrs Spragg, ‘had a reassuring look of solidity and reality’ (p. 4). She provides solace and advice to both mother and daughter – indeed, she does more for Mrs Spragg’s ‘spirit’ than for her ‘body’ (p. 10). The problem with this casual intimacy, however, is that Mrs Heeny’s treatments are part of a business transaction, not an expression of familial love; her current piece of advice, which accompanies a manicure, costs Mrs Spragg three dollars. Family dynamics have disintegrated to the point that Mrs Heeny knows more about Undine than her own mother does. In response to an invitation from the Fairfords, Mrs Heeny explains that the social rules of bygone days persist in the ‘best’ families, and in so doing affirms the importance of maternal presence while also declaring its impotence. Dinner invitations and romantic proposals of all kinds must be filtered through the mothers, she explains. Although these families understand the modern girl’s need for independence, the best families ‘pretend that girls can’t do anything without their mothers’ (p. 9). When Undine asks how her mother shall know what to reply to the invitation, Mrs Heeny affirms the topsy-turvy world of the novel. She confirms that the daughter, not the mother, is in charge. Your mother will ‘say what you tell her to, of course’, she declares ‘humorously’ (p. 10). The deficiencies in the mother-daughter bond should come as no surprise in a novel notable for its depiction of shallow relationships. Undine’s first epistolary act is to impersonate her mother, a gesture Undine considers ‘amusing’ and not the least bit disrespectful (p. 19). Giggling, she composes a response to Laura Fairford’s invitation, affecting her mother’s voice and signing her name. With this appropriation of her mother’s role, she signals her autonomy and intention to manage her own destiny. Undine then invites Mrs Heeny, not her mother, to see her array of dresses and to tell her more about the Marvells, hugging her as one would a mother. Later Mabel Lipscombe, not Mrs Spragg, will open social doors for Undine in New York society, and when Undine finds herself on inconsequential New York streets rather than Fifth Avenue, she presses onward with indomitable force, relegating Mrs Spragg to the background. She is a child with parents in name only, a child who receives everything but owes nothing. Undine’s drive for social prominence puts her father as well as her mother in a subordinate position. Like Mrs Spragg, he becomes an accessory or servant to her wishes. Her parents are easily intimidated in part because Undine is all they have. Two of their children died of typhoid fever caused by impurities in the

62

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

drinking water in Apex, and although Mr Spragg channelled his grief into a sense of resolve that led to his water-works fortune, Mrs Spragg has only her repeated stories ‘to give her a sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life’ (p. 79). Having weathered ‘the protracted struggle, darkened by domestic affliction’ of ‘early married life’ (p. 79), the Spraggs are eager to meet Undine’s every need, but Wharton documents the nightmare that ensues when parents are entirely at their children’s disposal. At the Fairford dinner, Undine’s aspirations are revealed to be superficial and materialistic. She craves gilt, luxury and newness, and has only disdain for the authenticity of the Fairford books, wood fireplace and ordinary menu. The dinner guests range in age from the youthful Undine to the elderly, but the woman with ‘white hair’ fails to ‘arrest Undine’s attention’ because of her age (p. 33). Conversation on topics of general interest rather than people hold no interest for her; she is insensitive to the ‘world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations’ and instead has a ‘violent longing’ to brush away the cobwebs of subtle social discourse and ‘assert herself as the dominant figure’ (p. 37). Impressed at the dinner with the importance of the opera, the spoiled Undine browbeats her father into buying her not just a seat but an entire box, which she intends to use only once. When he demurs at her request, she threatens to return to the Midwestern town of Apex, whereupon Mrs Spragg ‘cast a frightened glance at her husband’. Both parents are afraid of their child. Undine exhibits an ‘assertiveness’ that ‘had long since cowed Mrs Spragg’ and which ‘was beginning to frighten her husband’. Mr Spragg alternates between dread of Undine’s ‘ways of getting things out of him’ and pride over her mastery of two manipulative techniques: ‘the tender, wheedling way, and the harsh-lipped and cold’ (p. 43). Inverting the normal parent-child relationship, she lords over her parents. After she overwhelms them with her campaign for an opera box and then declares she will go horseback riding, Mr Spragg retreats to his office, and Mrs Spragg ‘tottered meekly after her’ (p. 44). Wharton’s depiction of Undine reflects a larger literary and cultural trend. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature was concerned with ‘the emancipation of childhood and adolescence from the family and religion’, as Peter Coveney writes in The Image of Childhood.2 He cites as an example Edmund Gosse’s 1907 Father and Son, a memoir with which Wharton was surely familiar, as she and Gosse were friends and literary correspondents.3 In this memoir and in other fiction of the period, children were finally released from the authoritarian parental control that had endured from Puritan times. Wharton also may have been responding to more austere representations of family and childhood, such as that found in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1884). Wharton was familiar with Butler’s work, which Hermione Lee describes as a ‘strong influence’; Wharton quoted him in the commonplace book that she kept between 1901

Worst Parents Ever

63

and 1933.4 Butler’s novel exposes the harsh paternal practices of two generations of the Pontifex family. If Wharton follows the lead of writers like Gosse and Butler who demonstrate the need to lift the weight of discipline from children, she also joins the camp of those who protested against overly romantic portrayals of childhood. John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had ushered in a new era of thinking about original innocence, which Wordsworth develops in his lines from ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: ‘But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’5 A realist, Wharton rejects these optimistic views of childhood. ‘If ever I have children’, she once wrote, ‘I shall deprive them of every pleasure in order to prepare them for the inevitable unhappiness of life!’6 Throughout the nineteenth century, Coveney notes, literature about the child ‘expressed this conflict between restraint and romantic freedom’.7 Wharton joins this dialogue in The Custom of the Country, showing how freedom without training or responsibility creates a moral void that leads to excessive self-absorption and disregard of others. Undine is expressive and articulate, but not well educated. Wharton mentions no schooling whatsoever. Undine loathes reading, and she is at a loss when, at the Fairford dinner party, conversation turns to topics of culture rather than gossip about people. The closest figure to a mentor or tutor is Mrs Heeny, who draws from her satchel a curriculum composed of newspaper clippings about the comings and goings of fashionable society. Mrs Heeny instructs Undine in the proper way to read a social invitation, but her knowledge is derived not from authentic experience as a member of elite society but from her subordinate position as its masseuse. Nevertheless, Mrs Heeny is ‘the only bright spot on Mrs. Spragg’s horizon’ (p. 10) and she remains an essential aid in Undine’s climb to social prominence. Undine is unfamiliar with the elite circles she wishes to join; in this sense, she is not only insensible to the nuances of social convention, but she is also innocent of them. She is, to evoke Rousseau’s phrase, a tabula rasa (blank slate) on whom nothing is lost. However, even though Undine absorbs information with lightning speed, she is incapable of extracting any lasting value from the lessons she learns. She refuses to honour her parents, husband or child by using her learning for the betterment of them or herself. Undine’s aggressive manoeuvring constitutes not only an act of independence but also an act of revenge against her parents. It suggests, moreover, the autobiographical element in the novel, in which Undine’s determination to be autonomous parallels Edith Wharton’s assault on her own mother’s controlling behaviour. Wharton’s innocence had been damaged by her mother, who abused her power and set incompatibly high social standards for a daughter who was sensitive, intellectual and artistically gifted. Lucretia Jones in turn was in conflict with the generation before her: when she married well, she ‘avenged’ the poverty of her youth.8 Once at the centre of her elite circle, Lucretia proceeded to

64

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

dictate the terms of her daughter’s social life. Wharton suffered under her yoke and eventually broke free of maternal proscriptions, establishing permanent residence in Europe around the time she wrote The Custom of the Country. The novel is in some ways a fantasy of childhood that runs counter to Wharton’s own experience. She creates a daughter whose parents respond to her every whim. In The Custom of the Country, the daughter, not the mother, is in control, unlike in Wharton’s own life. However, this state of affairs results in disaster rather than benefit for the child. A determined artist as well as committed friend and philanthropist, Wharton left old New York and constructed a positive, productive life herself. However, Undine breaks free of parental guidance only to wreak havoc on everyone around her. At the centre of Undine’s enterprise is a moral void or gap. The Custom of the Country thus becomes Wharton’s commentary on the deficiencies of modern parenting among the elite and a plea for social and moral values that must originate within the family. Advice on parenting became widely available in the early decades of the twentieth century, but little of it has penetrated the Spraggs’ consciousness. The child-study movement fostered a scientific approach to parenting, giving families hope that they might more efficiently guide their offspring through the hazards of childhood. The renewed interest in child-rearing and education was influenced by Darwinian theories of evolution and inspired by a number of social reform movements that were aimed at not only creating better conditions for children but also fostering the moral progress of society. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) was a leading figure in the American child-study movement. His 1904 book Adolescence explained the special challenges facing children passing into adulthood. Experts from religious walks of life also continued to provide advice in popular media such as magazines as well as in church forums. That childhood was a principal area of concern for middle-class readers is evidenced by the attention given to the topic in a review of The Custom of the Country published in the Nation. The reviewer observes that previous generations of pioneering Americans were forced to toil hard merely to survive, but now increasing numbers of parents enjoy the relief that comes from relaxed economic pressures. An unfortunate result of the transition from ‘hardship into prosperity’ is that parents are prone to spoil their offspring. The father determines that his child ‘shall miss nothing of the good things of life which their parents had to go without’ and goes ‘too far’.9 Other writers noted the special challenge facing upper-class Americans, especially given the fact that the United States was a new nation without traditions handed down from generation to generation in Europe. Wharton’s contemporary, Charles Augustus Stoddard, Presbyterian minister, journalist and, from 1885 to 1902, the editor of the New York Observer, wrote a 1904 column, signed ‘Augustus’, in which he gives advice on the subject of the ‘Children

Worst Parents Ever

65

of the Rich’. His commentary anticipates the issues Wharton raises in her novel. He makes many references to Old World customs and conventions, which would have made little sense to the Spraggs, as well to the unique challenges facing the nouveau riche, which would have resonated with Undine’s parents. He begins by observing the rapid changes in American society: ‘There is an aristocracy of wealth, which is growing larger and more influential every year in these United States … though the same families do not always remain rich aristocrats’, he observes. He further notes that these children of newly moneyed classes, even if wealth persists only for a few generations, ‘are a source of anxiety to their parents’. If not adequately trained, children of affluent parents ‘may and sometimes do become an element of … danger in the community, threatening its order, morality and healthful development’.10 Augustus makes several recommendations in order to avoid an outcome such as the one Wharton documents in her portrayal of Undine. He advises parents to provide ‘a liberal education and personal instruction’ that teaches a young person ‘to use rather than abuse riches’. Drawing on a long, Puritan tradition of austere parenting – ludicrous in light of Undine’s spoiled, materialistic and self-serving habits – he argues that ‘those who expect to be rich … have to learn restraint, and endure subjection, and practice self-denial’. On the subject of social interaction, Augustus favours the customs of families such as the Marvells and Dagonets rather than the Spraggs. He urges parents to acquaint their children ‘with families where wealth is the handmaid of art and natural science and intelligent travel’ and to seek friends ‘among those whose life has high and honourable aims’. He takes Great Britain as a model for the United States and urges parents to ‘promote the well-being of the nation’ through their ‘devotion, self-denial and wisdom’.11 He calls to mind Wharton’s description of the ‘irresponsible pleasure-seekers’ who populate her novel The House of Mirth,12 when he argues that a ‘rich class need not be a reckless and pleasure-loving class, who encourage dissipation and waste’.13 Undine is closely aligned with the consumer culture to which she is attracted, so much so that she becomes not a person, but a force. In turn, she commodifies, uses and then abandons everyone who crosses her path, including her son, Paul. The hapless Mr Spragg characterizes Undine perfectly when, in response to her demand for an opera box that will be used once, he says, ‘You only want most things once, Undine’ (p. 43). Undine is the antithesis of the wife and mother valued in the cult of womanhood that predominated in the nineteenth century, and as such she represents Wharton’s worst fears about the so-called advances of women. Wharton depicts Paul’s father, Ralph Marvell, as a sensitive, traditional and moral individual unprepared for his wife’s selfish and rapacious materialism. Before Undine marries Ralph, she comes to ‘resent’ (p. 101) rather than revere or respect him, and on their European honeymoon she is bored and restless. Petu-

66

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

lant about not having new clothes, she places Ralph in the position of needing to be an indulgent parent ‘humouring an irresistible child’ (p. 145). Unlike Mr Spragg, however, Ralph has small chance of satiating Undine’s material appetite ‘on the earnings of his Muse’ (p. 146). A romantic, Ralph contemplates the ‘hallowing effects of motherhood’ when he guesses that Undine is pregnant, but Undine greets the prospect of motherhood with a tone of ‘chill’ and ‘cold competence’, concerned only that she must withdraw from society until the child is born (pp. 184–5). Their marriage is from the beginning a ‘mistake’ (p. 193), and its issue, Paul, is a mere inconvenience Undine dismisses. His insignificance is symbolized by the fact that, out on a jaunt with Peter Van Degen, she completely forgets Paul’s birthday. She apologizes for this transgression as if she has missed an appointment or misplaced an object: ‘I knew there was something I’d forgotten!’ (p. 203, italics in original). As a child who grows up with no moral compass, Undine becomes a mother who has nothing to offer her own child. She remains self-centred and ‘unconscious of the wound’ her actions inflict on others (p. 214). In a continued reversal of parent-child roles, Paul must make accommodations and sacrifices for Undine. When Undine suffers a largely self-manufactured ‘nervous breakdown’ over the family’s financial straits and Ralph procures a house in Tuxedo to trim expenses, Undine visits her son there only on Sundays. He is further deprived of her care when Undine’s nervous condition worsens and Paul’s room must be relocated because ‘his scamperings overhead disturbed her sleep’ (p. 257). Undine schemes to procure a trip to Europe, ostensibly to promote her recovery, and further excludes her son, who is sent to his grandmother in the Adirondacks. Only as the day of her departure approaches does she become ‘tenderly preoccupied with Paul’s welfare’ (p. 265) because she knows she will soon be released from maternal duties. Undine’s infamous past is suggested and her eventual reunion with Elmer Moffatt foreshadowed when, before leaving for Europe, she encounters Moffatt on the street. She is carrying her son, and the irony of this monstrous mother alluding to the Madonna and Christ child is not lost on Moffatt. ‘Not insensible to the picture she and her son composed’ (p. 267), he offers to carry Paul and plants a kiss on his lips. His proprietary manner foretells his eventual role as Paul’s stepfather and also underlines Paul’s status as mere commodity. Abandoned by his mother, Paul is a nonentity. He is indulged and petted by the Spraggs and in particular by Mrs Heeny, his surrogate mother, who nourishes him as she does Undine, with items from her bag. The sweets he seeks at its bottom are intermixed with bunches of society news clippings. Undine’s ruthlessness reaches its apex when, after she manages to offend even the liberal moral standards of Van Degen because she refuses to visit Ralph during his life-threatening illness, she sets her sights on Raymond de Chelles. Needing to obtain a papal annulment because de Chelles’s strict Roman Catholicism for-

Worst Parents Ever

67

bids divorce, she extorts Ralph and threatens to take custody of their son if he does not provide her with the money needed for the annulment. Penniless and in despair, Ralph commits suicide, leaving Paul semi-orphaned. When Undine marries de Chelles and introduces Paul to his new family, she is pleased by de Chelles’s affection for the boy, not for Paul’s sake but for her own: she realizes ‘what an acquisition he would be’ in her continuing quest for favour from the de Chelles clan (p. 478). Foiled when their marriage fails to produce a son, the only means by which Undine can gain acceptance into the de Chelles family and French elite society, Undine divorces him and continues in her relentless pursuit of social prominence. She ends where she began, with Elmer Moffatt, now fabulously wealthy through business dealings as ruthless as her own. By the end of the novel, Paul is a compliant but listless child, suffering the reader must assume from depression that is neither noticed nor attended to. Home from boarding school for the holidays, he finds himself alone in the new hôtel that Moffatt has purchased for the family. During the two years that they have been married, Undine and Moffatt are ‘always coming and going’ with little regard to their son: ‘Paul never knew where they were except when a telegram announced that were going somewhere else’ (pp. 576–7). Learning by message (his mother ‘hadn’t had time to telegraph’) that his mother and stepfather will be home for dinner, not in order to be with him, but to entertain a party of guests, Paul good naturedly reflects that ‘generally he didn’t much mind’ (p. 577). His depression is palpable, however, as he wearily retreats to his bedroom. It is devoid of toys and books, including the familiar items of childhood because ‘none of the new servants … could find his things, or think where they had been put’ (p. 577). The nine-year-old Paul is a ghostly presence, a mere shadow of the boy he might be were he loved. Desperately lonely, he wanders through the house, passing first through his mother’s room and then through his stepfather’s. He is attracted in Moffatt’s room to a ‘portrait of a boy in grey velvet’. The image is a reflection of Paul and his depressed state of mind: The boy’s hand rested on the head of big dog, and he looked infinitely noble and charming, and yet (in spite of the dog) so sad and lonely that he too might have come home that very day to a strange house in which none of his old things could be found. (p. 578)

The colour of the boy’s eyes is grey, the same colour as his mother’s and his father’s eyes, making Paul’s perception of the figure one that aligns him with his absent and missed parents. The grey eyes as well as the time of day, twilight, signify Paul’s colourless existence; the dog offers companionship as well as a reminder of the subordination and powerlessness of creatures at the mercy of others. Restless, Paul continues through the house, stopping at the library, where books he might have read are under lock and key because they ‘were too valuable to be taken

68

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

down’ (p. 579). He then remembers Mrs Heeny and commences a visit with her, enjoying ‘a sense of reassurance that nothing else in the house conveyed’ (p. 581). Once again, Mrs Heeny plays a maternal role. She offers newspaper clippings from her bag that tell the story of his mother, of her marriages, and of de Chelles, whom he has mistakenly assumed is his father. Among the press items is a story hailing Elmer Moffatt as ‘the greatest collector in America’, with the notation that the price he has paid for ‘the celebrated Grey Boy is the largest sum ever given for a Vandyck’ (p. 583). Paul and the painting have become Moffatt’s possessions; by associating himself with the figure in the portrait, Paul is reduced to a highly valued commodity. Paul faces further betrayal. He has little interest in the publicity given to Moffatt’s art collection or to the story about the reset pearls in the necklace Undine wears in her portrait, but he pays rapt attention when the topic turns to his mother’s divorce and remarriage to Moffatt. With characteristically childlike curiosity, he wants to know why his mother married Mr Moffatt. He feels deflated when he learns that Undine has maligned de Chelles – just as his father, Ralph, felt betrayed when he realized Undine’s manipulations and lies. Paul’s discovery of Undine’s untruths ‘took his little heart in an iron grasp … That was what he had always feared to find out’ (p. 586). While he is absorbing this information, Undine and Moffatt return home. Paul hugs her, but she turns him away carelessly, eliciting rare criticism from the good-humoured Moffatt, who asks, ‘Can’t you ever give him a minute’s time, Undine?’ The final blow comes when Paul realizes that the Boucher tapestries hanging in the ballroom represent not an impending reunion with the de Chelles family but a final break from them. Moffatt attempts to comfort Paul by informing him that if he is willing to follow Moffatt in business, he will ‘be the richest boy in America’ (p. 589). Paul’s response is undocumented, but the reader surmises his continuing alienation and loneliness. The Grey Boy is a construction of Wharton’s imagination. However, it alludes to Thomas Gainsborough’s most famous painting, Blue Boy (c. 1770).14 The subject of Blue Boy is thought to be Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy merchant. If by hanging this portrait in Elmer Moffatt’s bedroom, Wharton is suggesting that Moffatt has joined the ranks of the notably affluent, it is also significant that Buttall eventually experienced bankruptcy and had to part with the painting in 1796; Wharton perhaps foreshadows Moffatt’s end. The portrait shows the confident, full figure of a boy posed in blue satin and ushered in a nostalgic, romantic period of art in which the child was associated with nobility, glory and youthful optimism. Gainsborough, in turn, was influenced by the painter Anthony Van Dyck, whom Wharton credits in the novel with painting Grey Boy. The painting also evokes Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles II (1639), which features a well-dressed boy posed with his hand on a dog. The seventeenth-century royal portraits by Van Dyck and the eighteenth-century depiction of Blue

Worst Parents Ever

69

Boy by Gainsborough represent different periods of art and different attitudes towards children, making Wharton’s novel a study not only in changing social manners but in changing views of childhood. The multiple canvases and periods suggested by Grey Boy turn our attention to the fact that Wharton depicts three generations of families in The Custom of the Country. Each generation succeeds and fails in different ways. The Spraggs achieve financial success, but despite their doting they fail to parent their child adequately. Not only empowered but also spoiled by her parents, Undine becomes a social sensation, but she is a reckless, careless parent who puts her needs ahead of her child’s. Her son, Paul, is sensitive, artistic and closer in temperament to his father than to his mother, but he feels alienated and displaced in a materialistic family and society that little understands his needs. The ‘custom of the country’ mentioned in the novel’s title refers not only to social conventions but to changing customs in parenting. Readers in Wharton’s time and throughout the twentieth century became accustomed to placing high value on the child, investing it with romantic dignity, originality and even divinity. The historical reality, however, is that childhood was not always so highly valued by adults, and the behaviours of parents are by no means instinctive or inevitable; they are learned. Childhood emerged as a distinct concept and stage of life in early modern history, as Phillipe Ariès has demonstrated.15 Through the nineteenth century, children were valued as much for their labour as for their unique romantic qualities of innocence. Only in the twentieth century, after the First World War, did parenting become a enterprise requiring selfless devotion and commitment, and only then were children ascribed the ‘pricelessness’ that we associate with them today.16 Neither is there consensus in the twentieth century on the effect of divorce on children. When Wharton was a child, divorce was unthinkable, but by the time she published The Custom of the Country in 1913, the practice had become more widespread and socially acceptable.17 Wharton had at her disposal no clinical data to prove whether Undine’s serial marriages were detrimental to Paul, in part because it was considered self-evident that divorce was harmful to children.18 She does suggest their disorienting effect: Paul is unsure about his father’s identity and is under the delusion that he is Raymond de Chelles’s son because of the time they spend together during Paul’s formative years. Studies of children and divorce after the mid-twentieth century supported two beliefs: that if parents are happier after divorce, children will be happier as well, and divorce is a temporary crisis with short-term effects on children. However, subsequent studies challenge these assumptions, terming them myths that conveniently meet the needs of divorced parents and calling for more careful studies of the lasting effects of divorce on children.19 In the twenty-first century, the jury is still out on

70

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

the effect of divorce on children. Wharton was ahead of her time when she gave the subject such serious treatment. Undine is an unruly child and a monstrous mother by nineteenth-, twentieth- and twentieth-first-century domestic standards. Without doubt, The Custom of the Country expresses authorial concern for the direction that American families and parenthood seemed to be taking. However, Wharton, ‘always addicted to anthropology’,20 presents her material with a keen power of observation that permits more than one interpretation. She shows that the Spraggs’ indulgence of Undine and Undine’s mistreatment of Paul are the result of cultural adaptations to changing standards of child-rearing. The reader’s immediate and normal response is to malign Undine, blame her parents and pity her son. Wharton invites such an interpretation. At the same time, a wider view of Wharton’s narrative acknowledges that child-rearing, like all social practices, follows ‘the custom of the country’ and is not fixed but changeable.

5 CRUDE ASCENDING THE STAIRCASE: UNDINE SPRAGG AND THE ARMORY SHOW Emily J. Orlando

He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. The Custom of the Country (p. 83) [I]n the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits of ‘Signers’ and their females, she felt a conscious joy in her ascendency. The Custom of the Country (p. 90)

In the early months of 1913, the American public was fairly unanimous in its response to the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at New York’s Armory of the 69th Regiment. Better known as the Armory Show, the exhibition was organized by a newly formed avant-garde group called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS). The show attracted some 100,000 visitors and featured approximately 1,600 works, introducing the unsuspecting United States to modern American and European visual art.1 The event was exhaustively covered in the press, which made Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) at once a scandal and the butt of many jokes. The gallery displaying Cubism was labelled ‘The Chamber of Horrors’ while Duchamp’s painting, which captures multiple angles of a mechanized figure in motion, was ridiculed by viewers as ‘a lot of disused golf clubs and bags’, ‘an explosion in a shingle factory’ and an ‘academic painting of an artichoke’.2 (The ‘academic’ label probably stung the most, given the anti-establishment spirit of the show.) Former President Teddy Roosevelt unfavourably compared Duchamp’s Nude Descending to ‘the Navajo rug in [his] bathroom’.3 ‘Monstrous’, ‘childlike’, ‘immoral’, ‘unconventional’ and ‘depraved’ were some of the adjectives used to describe the Armory Show, not to mention that the artists were called ‘fakers’ and ‘degenerates’.4 Rather coincidentally, these words also have been hurled at the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, unveiled (or unleashed) the same year: the social-climbing, gold-digging, reliably vulgar Undine Spragg – a sort of ‘crude ascending’, or rather clawing her way up, the hallowed staircases of old New York. – 71 –

72

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

While much has been made of Wharton’s interest in and impressively vast knowledge of the visual arts, this essay seeks to cover unexplored ground. Art was immensely important to Edith Wharton. As Hermione Lee notes, ‘Three of her pall-bearers, Metman, Gillet and [Kenneth] Clark, would be museum directors’.5 She had close personal ties to the art critics Bernard Berenson and Royal Cortissoz. Scholars such as Helen Killoran, Adeline Tintner, Eleanor Dwight and more recently myself have examined Wharton’s intertextual dialogue with Italian Renaissance, neoclassical and nineteenth-century painting. However, the connection between Undine Spragg and modern visual art, specifically the contemporaneous Armory Show and the movement it heralded, has yet to be addressed.6 Wharton, an expatriate whose divorce was finalized in April 1913, travelled to the United States in December of that year to attend her niece’s wedding, and spent two weeks catching up with friends. Wharton’s timing would not have allowed her to experience the Armory Show first-hand, as it had left New York after a month for Chicago (24 March–16 April), then Boston (28 April–19 May), before closing.7 Given Wharton’s distaste for modern art, and for American art in general, it is unlikely she would have wished to view it.8 Wharton did come to own two paintings by the French artist Odilon Redon, a still life by Renoir and a landscape by Cézanne – three artists whose work was featured at the Armory – but Wharton’s pieces were not what would be called ‘modern’, her Redon ‘flower pictures’, for instance, being products of the late nineteenth century rather than the dreamy, mystical paintings of smiling spiders and happy flowers for which the artist was also known.9 Wharton surely would have been aware of the controversy encircling the Armory Show and modern art in general, and moving between Paris and New York as she did, its influence would have been hard to ignore.10 As she was finishing The Custom of the Country, Wharton was living in Paris – the very epicentre of modern art, especially in the years between 1907 and 1914, given the ascendancy of Fauvism (Matisse) and Cubism (Picasso, Braque et al.).11 Wharton’s impressions in 1913 of New York, which she had not seen in two years and would not again for another ten, were as follows: she found it ‘a great show’, but ‘ugly, patchy, scrappy’ and ‘souldestroying’ – an interesting choice of words, given the lexicon used to describe the Armory Show.12 While Wharton’s aversion to modernist writers such as James Joyce has been well noted, it strikes some readers as disappointing that her best fiction produced during the early hours of modernism (for example, The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence) seems to avoid engaging at length with modern visual art in favour of looking back to an older artistic tradition.13 This essay illuminates the compelling correspondences between Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and modernism in the visual arts, particularly the works of the Armory Show. Positioning her narrative in the context of the history and reception of the show allows us to recognize the various (surprisingly

Crude Ascending the Staircase

73

conventional) female types replicated across modern art: woman as fallen, oversexed, despondent, broken, repentant, kneeling, reposing, dreaming, vampiric, monstrous or (figuratively if not literally) descending.14 All of these tropes are represented in works by artists associated with the show. Wharton’s Undine, it is crucial to note, assumes – or is otherwise positioned in – each of these ‘attitudes’ throughout the course of the novel, some of which I will discuss here. While Undine’s New York husband, the well-heeled Ralph Marvell, signifies the romantic, Hudson River school painter sensibility – a sensibility that ultimately is crushed by modernity – Undine, along with her first and fourth husband, the equally vulgar Elmer Moffatt, announces the death knell of tradition in the arts and the ascendency of a new, crude, monstrous millionaire class whose members, as Candace Bushnell would later show, collect paintings so they might ‘polish off their rough edges with art and culture’.15 The Armory Show, an event made possible by at least two important developments,16 was conceived in 1911 by four young male artists – Jerome Myers, Elmer MacRae, Walt Kuhn and Henry Fitch Taylor – who wanted to breathe new life into American art and were anti-establishment in outlook.17 The artistic establishment, against which these moderns were reacting, was represented by the conservative National Academy of Design.18 The four artists established the AAPS (which seems to have been birthed to organize the show, disbanding shortly thereafter), recruiting sixteen other artists to join the society.19 Arthur B. Davies, a painter known for his dancing female nudes in dream-like landscapes, served at the time of the show’s inception as the AAPS president and exhibition overseer. At the opening reception, John Quinn spoke to the collective hope that ‘the American people [might have] an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art’.20 The organizers also wanted to ‘put American artists on at least equal footing with their European contemporaries’.21 Although it is not clear that this was, to date, the largest art exhibition of its kind, it is arguably the most important ever held in the United States.22 The show included works by such nineteenth-century artists as Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin), and the more ‘modern’ Fauves (Matisse, Dufy et al.), Cubists (Picasso, Picabia et al.) and Expressionists (Munch et al.). Although the immediate response was not hostile, many members of the press recognized in the exhibits something to laugh at and ‘the public came to gape, snicker, and jeer’.23 The exhibition, and especially Nude Descending, inspired many humorous poetic responses, printed in such venues as the Chicago Tribune and the Sun, while the American Art News offered a prize to the reader who could locate the nude in Duchamp’s painting.24 For some viewers, however, the show was no laughing matter: ‘there were a great many people who were seriously disturbed by

74

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

the new art. A sense of outrage underlay the hysterical vituperation of many spectators and critics.’25 The critical attacks bordered on the vicious. The show was regarded as a kind of circus whose freakish exhibits had nothing to do with the realities of their [the general public’s] lives … Those already distrustful of artists and convinced of the traditional values (as they understood them) found all their prejudices confirmed or even intensified by what they saw there.26

As it happens, the European art inspired the most shock and awe.27 In fact, ‘[n]ot only did they [the European artists] attract most of the publicity, but they outsold the Americans more than two-to-one’. As Frank Anderson Trapp notes, ‘In [such] international company, most of the … American works were simply too familiar and therefore easy to ignore’.28 By the time the show moved from Chicago to Boston, the American artworks were altogether eliminated, due to space limitations, making the New England experience of the show that much more European and far less comprehensive.29 Wharton’s novel of 1913 – set in the first decade of the twentieth century30 – is, like the Armory Show, international in scope, and it poignantly documents America’s jarring and at times painful passage into the new century. That transition is felt perhaps most acutely by Undine’s first publicly acknowledged husband, the blue-blooded Ralph Marvell. (She has married and divorced Elmer Moffatt before the novel begins.) Ralph represents the old guard of New York, descended from Declaration ‘Signers’ (p. 90), and he also suggests an earlier, Emersonian, romantic impulse in American art and letters whose day has come and gone. Although he once wished to be aligned with the ‘moderns’, Ralph grows to recognize the ‘chaos of indiscriminate appetites’ associated with modernity and eventually concedes, as would Newland Archer, that there was, after all, good in the old ways: Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies. He too had wanted to be ‘modern’, had revolted, half-humorously, against the restrictions and exclusions of the old code; and it must have been by one of the ironic reversions of heredity that, at this precise point, he began to see what there was to be said on the other side – his side, as he now felt it to be. (p. 74, italics in original)

Ralph’s perspective mirrors that of Thomas Cole, the celebrated nineteenth-century American landscape painter who similarly drew inspiration from the hills of Italy but eventually returned to the States, where he found the climate most pure. Like Emerson and Whitman, both of whom were profoundly important to Wharton, Cole found truth and purity in nature. Here is Ralph, taking in the lush scenery on his honeymoon with Undine:

Crude Ascending the Staircase

75

To Ralph the Sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating. The sun, treading the earth like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances, crushed out of it new colours. All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were white, but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars. Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield. (p. 140, my italics)

Ralph sees in the landscape something like the majesty and mystery Cole records on his canvases. He in fact feminizes the land (and by extension Undine) – it lies ‘prostrate’, bearing ‘secret treasures’ – and this reading will be projected back onto Ralph by way of Undine’s emasculation of him. It is a cruel irony that Undine, at first as ‘intoxicating’ as the Sienese air, is ultimately more like the ‘treading’ and ‘crushing’ sun in this picturesque scene; she too is a radiant ball of fire that will illuminate and obliterate Ralph’s universe. What’s more, the ‘reversal’ of ‘all the values of the … landscape’ anticipates Undine’s inversion of the values for which Ralph stands. Wharton’s allusion to the cypress – traditionally symbolic of death because, once cut, it does not regenerate – further foretells doom for Ralph and Undine. Granted Ralph, we are told, is ‘not blind to [Undine’s] crudity and … limitations,’ but he finds them, initially at least, ‘a part of her grace and her persuasion’ (p. 83). The problem for Ralph and Undine’s other admirers is that beauty, like art and nature, was not supposed to be vulgar.31 Ralph gets swept away in the splendour of the Italian landscape and erroneously conflates its poetic inspiration with Undine. He fancies that Undine’s dimpled, drooping, delicate hand holds ‘the magic wand of expression’ that might enable him to complete his literary projects (p. 142). Marvell insists on positioning Undine as ‘Ariel-like’ (p. 152) and ‘nereid-like’ (p. 144), despite his own recognition that she is ‘too practical’ (p. 143). Although Mrs Spragg tells Ralph that Undine was named for a crimping iron, and not the water sprite with which he associates her, he insists on placing her in a romantic narrative in which he might rescue her: he seemed to see her like a lovely rock-bound Andromeda, with the devouring monster Society careering up to make a mouthful of her; and himself whirling down on his winged horse … to cut her bonds, snatch her up, and whirl her back into the blue (p. 84)

This impulse to imagine one’s lover as a distressed damsel begging rescue also informs such Wharton heroes as Lawrence Selden and Newland Archer. These male protagonists thus invoke the popular trope of Perseus rescuing the enchained Andromeda, illustrated in a series of pictures by the Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones (Figure 1). For Ralph, ‘Society’ is envisioned as the ‘devouring monster’.

Figure 1. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Rock of Doom (c. 1876). Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library.

Crude Ascending the Staircase

77

Undine, of course, is the narrative’s true devouring monster, and her union with Ralph is ill-fated for a number of reasons. His Transcendentalist appreciation of non-conformity cannot compete with Undine’s ‘instinct of adapting herself to whatever company she was in, of copying “the others” in speech and gesture as closely as she reflected them in dress’ (p. 160). Although Ralph steps into the novel as a romantic, he unceremoniously departs as something of a would-be naturalist, his original optimism corrected by a kind of Darwinian/ proto-Kafkaesque perspective which informs his writing: ‘He no longer saw life on the heroic scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than the insects they were’ (p. 427). Eventually, after a concerted effort, Ralph ‘felt an eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task was a necessary part of the world’s machinery’ (p. 427). Sadly, even his suicide makes use of the modern ‘world’s machinery’: it is not Lily Bart’s chloral, nor rope, but a pistol that hastens his unhappy end. Like Ralph, the other men in Undine’s sphere are given to underestimating or containing her, and they repeatedly seek to frame her in the context of nineteenth-century representations of women. The Sargent-esque Popple wants to ‘do’ and ‘have’ Undine – the implications of which are patently sexual – positioning her in a recognizably conventional pose: ‘I think I’ll ask to paint her; might be a good thing for the spring show. She’d show up splendidly as a pendant to my Mrs. Van Degen – Blonde and Brunette … Night and Morning’ (p. 72). Popple, then, would have Undine pose for the kind of turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau panel in which ‘Woman’ is aligned with the seasons of the year or phases of the day. Alphonse Mucha’s Evening Contemplation panel from his ‘Times of the Day’ series provides an illustrative example (Figure 2). Here we find surprising connections to Arthur B. Davies’s paintings associating female nudes with the four seasons. Davies, after all, was President of AAPS, the group of artists who, in organizing the Armory Show, sought to rescue American art from convention. Yet when we examine the trope of the beautiful dreamer (the sleeping woman subject to our gaze) – so popular in fin-de-siècle canvases (e.g. Albert Moore’s The Dreamers, Frederick Leighton’s Flaming June) – alongside Davies’s use of the theme a decade later in Sleep Lies Perfect in Them, we see that some Victorian conventions evidently had not lost their appeal (Figure 3). Sleep surely does not lie perfect in Undine Spragg, but men continue to miscalculate her. Popple fails in his efforts to capture her in an Art Nouveau-esque panel. Although Popple’s art makes women look prettier than in real life, his inability to paint Undine according to his original plan – the crouching, demure, nameless woman featured in a Mucha panel – suggests that the techniques of nineteenth-century painting are incapable of representing various experiences of modernity.32 Undine gets a full-length portrait out of him, for which she gives herself press in ways that look forward to a twenty-first-century celebrity auc-

Figure 2. Alphonse Marie Mucha, The Times of the Day: Evening Contemplation (1899). © Mucha Trust/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Figure 3. Arthur B. Davies, Sleep Lies Perfect in Them (1908). Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Gift of Cornelius N. Bliss.

80

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

tioning off her newborn’s pictures to People Magazine. As I have noted elsewhere, the unseemly Peter Van Degen’s ‘bulging eyes’ (mis)read Undine as a kind of PreRaphaelite stunner – pale, passive and poised for death (p. 49). Van Degen’s gaze records ‘the long curves of [Undine’s] neck’ which to him ‘[look] dead white in the cold light of the studio; and her hair, all a shadowless rosy gold … starred with a hard glitter of diamonds’ (p. 189). Van Degen associates Undine with the kind of beauty immortalized in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel – the otherworldly beloved mournfully looking down from heaven – but she has designs that are not dreamt of in his philosophy. As Undine arises from her opera box in an earlier scene, Ralph reads her as though she might be a Whistler painting: Undine stood with one arm listlessly raised to detach her cloak from the wall. Her attitude showed the long slimness of her figure and the fresh curve of the throat below her bent-back head. Her face was paler and softer than usual (p. 68, my italics)

Although Undine seems to Ralph, at this early moment in their courtship, to be as demure, feminine and romantic as the unnamed ‘little white girl’ in Whistler’s paintings, she becomes more like a Duchamp canvas – complicated, unpredictable, hard to pin down. Three years into their marriage, Ralph comes to see that Undine is more ‘eluding and doubling’ than he could have imagined (p. 222). Here he is scanning Undine as though she is a work of modern art that he cannot understand: He stopped, and she pulled him about so that their faces were close, and he saw her lips curving for a kiss. Every line of her face sought him, from the sweep of the narrowed eyelids to the dimples that played away from her smile. His eye received the picture with distinctness; but for the first time it did not pass into his veins. It was as if he had been struck with a subtle blindness that permitted images to give their colour to the eye but communicated nothing to the brain. (p. 223, my italics)

Ralph’s failed attempts to grasp and absorb Undine in this scene compellingly look forward to the ways that ‘Woman’ was represented in the work of modern visual artists, particularly those associated with Dada. Ralph detects in Undine a sexuality he cannot comprehend and an ambivalence he would be at odds to represent. At the same time, Wharton’s description of this romantic encounter – Ralph receives a blinding picture which his veins and brain are ill-equipped to process – perhaps unintentionally suggests the criticisms levelled at experimental, modernist visual art. His perception of Undine has shifted from a nineteenthcentury vocabulary of pallor, secret treasures and Ariel-like grace to a modernist vocabulary of colour, shape and line. Undine demonstrates her physical aggressiveness in that scene and ultimately she becomes to Ralph something of a vampire – a trope increasingly aligned at the turn of the century with the New Woman, though perhaps best illus-

Crude Ascending the Staircase

81

trated in Lucy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In fact, as Patrick Bade has noted, ‘[i]n Byron’s time vampires had usually been of the male sex but from the middle of the [nineteenth] century onwards they were almost invariably female, draining the life force from their chosen mate’.33 The blood-sucking, avaricious temptress seducing her male prey was represented in the Armory Show by Edvard Munch’s Vampire, a version of which appears as Figure 4. It is worth noting that the picture was actually named by the writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, whose unconventional wife enchanted Munch: ‘It was not meant as a literal representation of a vampire but rather as an image of the supposedly vampire-like qualities of women’.34 Munch was drawn to the theme of the femme fatale – the destructive, malevolent, heartless siren.35 As Bernard Denvir notes, Time and time again he reverts to the theme of woman as vampire, as the fatal temptress, and even in his Madonnas he seems intent on destroying utterly the icon which in the past had done so much to idealize femininity.36

Munch’s unsettling Madonna – a curiously sexualized representation of the Virgin Mary – was also exhibited at the Armory Show. Much like her enervating counterparts from visual culture, Undine is exhausting, literally and metaphorically, to Ralph, once they are married. Wharton notes that ‘His life had come to be … the incessant struggle to make enough money to satisfy her increasing exactions’ (p. 218). She drains him of his resources and when their relationship comes to an unhallowed end, his numerous pictures of her haunt him: ‘The walls and tables were covered with photographs of Undine; effigies of all shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the photographic tradition’ (p. 339). The proliferation of Undine’s likeness is made possible by the medium of photography – further aligning her with modernity – and Ralph cannot breathe comfortably until each picture is removed.37 Undine’s vampiric impulses look forward to the ‘vegetarian vampire’ to which the flighty (yet determined) flapper of Wharton’s 1920s story ‘The Temperate Zone’ is compared. It is no accident that as American women were seeking political, social and sexual power (enfranchisement, access to higher education, reproductive rights) at the turn of the twentieth century they were aligned with such (threatening) figures as the vampire, which arguably sets the stage for de Kooning’s Woman 1 (1950–2), in which ‘Woman’ is represented as demonic, devouring, destructive – altogether monstrous. As women were complicating traditional roles, increasingly they found themselves represented as threatening, unholy and perverse. Modern visual art, then, was paradoxical in so far as it was at once revolutionary and conservative. As Naomi Sawelson-Gorse notes of Dadaism, which followed on the heels of Cubism, This movement of absolute rebellion was also one of repression. While no one person represented Dada, while no one meaning defined it, misogyny prevailed in a con-

Figure 4. Edvard Munch, Vampyr II (1895–1902). © Munch Museum/Munch – Ellingsen Group, BONO, Oslo/DACS, London. Photo credit: Lithograph and woodcut; composition: 15 1/8 x 21 3/4”; sheet (irreg.): 22 3/8 x 27 5/8”. Publisher: the artist, Berlin. Printer: M. W. Lassally, Berlin. Edition: 150–200 in several colour variations. The William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. J. Hall Collection, 1968 (1167.1968). © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Crude Ascending the Staircase

83

sistent way. For all their avant-gardism in shedding aesthetic precepts and bourgeois tenets, male Dadaists maintained the status quo of the patriarchal socio-cultural judgments and codifications regarding gender of the late nineteenth-century bourgeois society in which they were born … Viewed from this perspective, their female colleagues were to be seen not heard, were to be nurturers not usurpers, were to be pleasant not rancorous.38

When we consider Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), which is arguably a rape scene, we are reminded of visual culture’s (not always subtle) gestures to contain, commodify and/or (in this case) violently constrain women. Undine becomes, as one character puts it, the ‘monstrously perfect result of the system’ (p. 208). She is aligned in the novel with monstrosity, crudity and ambition, and she fully understands that ‘the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous’ (p. 193). These adjectives resonate powerfully with the kind of modern art that Wharton, and so many Americans, distrusted in 1913. While Picasso claimed modern art was ‘the sum of destructions’, the same might be said of Undine Spragg.39 Undine is the culture-less, vulgar, invasive new American and her modernity is pictured, in a poignant synchronicity, in an image by the French painter Francis Picabia. Udnie (Young American Girl) is one of a series of images inspired by an enchantress the artist met on the ocean liner that took him to the Armory Show (Figure 5).40 As with his Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie (I See Again in my Memory my Dear Udnie), which constructs the female body with electrical sockets and plugs, and the work of many of his modernist confreres, Picabia has equated with fragmentation the sexually alluring, inviting, disturbing American female – or la jeune fille Americaine41 as the type came to be known abroad. Undine Spragg, Wharton’s version of the jeune fille, is similarly associated with the trappings of modernity – blazing electric light and the modern technologies of the telephone, photograph and motor car, not to mention that when she abandons Ralph she fittingly rides a train called ‘The Twentieth Century’ (p. 332). Reading Wharton’s Undine in tandem with Picabia’s Udnie, one has to ask whether ‘Woman’ in the modernist aesthetic is threatening or threatened, empowered or disempowered, ensnaring or ensnared.42 Although Wharton apparently was not consciously engaging modernism in the visual arts, she evidently had an answer: ‘Woman’, in the ‘new’ aesthetic, is all of these things. Examining modern art against the backdrop of 1890s decadence, we see that the tropes and forms of early twentieth-century visual art were not altogether new. When we compare Duchamp’s Nude Descending and Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (1876–80), the similarities are surprising. While the late Victorian painting draws on classical themes and presents the female form fully clothed, Duchamp’s canvas was seen to have violated the rules of form and perspective, overturning our expectations. And yet both paintings succeed in representing the

Figure 5. Francis Picabia, Udnie (Young American Girl, or the Dance) (1913). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009. Photo credit: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Crude Ascending the Staircase

85

same female figure descending a staircase, visually accessible from several perspectives at once. It is not so much that Wharton’s Undine represents the modern art of the Armory Show – the most shocking of which was European – but she mirrors, in rather compelling and perhaps unintentional ways, the crude, invasive, vulgar, unwelcome, unsettling, monstrous flavour of modern art. And she is, in spite of her modernity – or let us say because of her modernity – consistently read in ways that are old-fashioned, conservative, Victorian: charming water sprite, rock-bound Andromeda, Art Nouveau poster girl, Pre-Raphaelite damozel, Whistler symphony of colour and light, vampiric New Woman. Undine Spragg, whose initials declare her status as decidedly American, reflects our own discomfort with change, with modernity, with a challenge to accepted modes of representation. In the partnership she brokers with the crass, vulgar Elmer Moffatt, Undine will likely collect high-priced works of art, like the Ingres painting with which she tantalizes him, notwithstanding that ‘a year ago she had never heard of the painter, and did not, even now, remember whether he was an Old Master or one of the very new ones whose names one hadn’t had time to learn’ (p. 561).43 She has been known to perform the ‘perfunctory dash through a picture show’ (p. 282). Undine consciously, joyfully, crudely ascends New York’s gilded staircases. Wharton’s heroine sets the stage for the modern women of the ‘lipstick jungle’ that is Candace Bushnell’s New York, which is ‘still the best place in the world … and certainly one of the few places in the world where women … could not only survive but rule’.44

6 ‘IT’S BETTER TO WATCH’: COMPULSIVE VOYEURISM IN THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY AND THE HOUSE OF MIRTH Jessica Schubert McCarthy

No Edith Wharton heroine has captured readers’ sympathy quite like the very tragic Lily Bart of The House of Mirth (1905). Though remarkably beautiful, she is ultimately unable to secure a marriage that will grant her financial stability and security. Wharton’s novel traces the young woman’s descent from a privileged pedestal in society’s upper echelon to her lonely death by overdose in a boarding house. Critics and Wharton scholars, both when the novel was published and today, are often inclined to discuss the novel’s staggering popularity and posit arguments as to why readers were so taken with what is arguably one of the most tragic tales Wharton ever told.1 Conversely, no Edith Wharton heroine has elicited readers’ antipathy quite like the very selfish Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country (1913). While she too is remarkably beautiful, Undine Spragg is ultimately unable to secure a marriage that will completely fulfil her seemingly endless desire for increased wealth and upward social mobility. Never satisfied with her current position, Undine’s climb through society’s ranks is both swift and ruthless. While readers may follow Lily’s decline with trepidation, they observe Undine’s ascent with dismay and repulsion. In both cases, however, we are constantly compelled to keep watching. Lily Bart and Undine Spragg are, in many ways, opposite sides of the same lovely coin. While the former ‘might be incapable of marrying for money’, the latter has no qualms about trading marital vows for fortunes or family titles.2 Just as their values regarding marriage and love are markedly different, so are the trajectories each woman’s life follows. Even more quickly than Lily plummets from her high place in society, Undine rises from the ranks of the nouveau riche to the aristocracy. Though these characters seemingly have little in common besides being physically attractive and part of an elite social circle, both Lily and Undine rely upon the visual perception of others for approval and, in many cases, appraisal. – 87 –

88

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

So much of Lily Bart’s and Undine Spragg’s success depends upon appearances and being seen – in the right places, in the right way and by the right people. In addition to understanding how visuality plays an important role in each character’s development, each protagonist suggests a different manner of understanding the importance of appearances. By employing multiple references to sight and seeing, Wharton implicates the reader as participating in the culture that destroys Lily but nurtures Undine. The final outcome of having spent so much time taking in conspicuous displays of wealth and luxury is that readers become compulsively voyeuristic and complicitly participate in the consumption of this status-based pornography. With Lily Bart they cannot stop watching to see if she will be saved and with Undine Spragg they keep watching to see who she will destroy. In either case, no one – not the reader and certainly not the other characters that populate these novels – can look away, even for a moment. In Women, Compulsion, Modernity, Jennifer Fleissner defines compulsive activities not merely as repetitive and irresistible actions but as acts that create ‘a seemingly endless spiral’. Fleissner goes on to point out that turn of the century psychological writings viewed compulsivity as a ‘dialectical process’ where any attempt at perfecting order ultimately disrupts and undermines the individual’s endeavours, resulting in a breakdown of structures. According to French psychologist Pierre Janet, as cited by Fleissner, compulsion’s primary symptom is a ‘feeling of incompleteness’.3 Thus the compulsive act is compelled by a lack that the individual struggles to fill. However, rather than meeting the individual’s needs, the struggle for fulfilment only impairs one’s ability to create the order necessary for contentment. Compulsion then is never satisfied and only leaves one wanting more, thus perpetuating itself indefinitely. Certainly, both Lily and Undine display compulsive tendencies. In Lily’s case, compulsion is demonstrated by self-destructive behaviour such as gambling and speculating in the stock market. Her addictions increase in seriousness, culminating with drug use at the novel’s end, but these patterns of dependence reveal themselves very early when Lily’s visit to Bellomont renders her unable to resist ‘the gambling passion’ sparked by her wins and losses at the bridge table. Lily makes excuses for her behaviour, arguing that a member of her social set ‘must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy’, an observation that only reinforces the emphasis placed on maintaining her appearance.4 Despite the degree to which Lily’s gambling funds the purchase of dresses and jewellery – all essential elements of a young society woman’s costume – her investment in superficiality does not begin and end with adorning her own admirable form. Shortly after Lily’s losses, her habit escalates from gambling at the bridge table to speculating in the stock market with help from Judy Trenor’s husband, Gus, who agrees to help Lily on the belief that financial exchanges will lead to physical ones. Lily believes she will certainly profit from another ‘big rise’ in the market.

‘It’s Better to Watch’

89

Despite the overt sexual innuendo contained in that phrase, Lily refuses to recognize the degree to which she is accumulating debts she cannot pay. Lily does ‘vaguely suppose’ the circumstances of her exchanges with Gus, but she turns a blind eye and opts not to think too hard or examine her situation too closely.5 It is no accident that she desires only to take situations at face value; after all, she herself would like to be appraised primarily on the beauty of her visage. This literal interpretation of ‘face value’ is reinforced by Mrs Bart’s insistence that her daughter will restore the family’s former wealth because she can ‘get it all back, with [her] face’.6 Unfortunately, as Lily’s excessive spending clearly foreshadows her ruin it is difficult for readers wholly to enjoy her consumption of frivolous goods such as dresses and jewellery, and their vicarious pleasure is undermined by the nagging awareness of a steep price to be paid for these luxuries. In The Custom of the Country, however, Undine Spragg appreciates all of the luxuries money can afford and has absolutely no intention of doing without them. Where Lily was constantly counting the contents of her purse, Undine’s husband, Ralph Marvell, observes that ‘Undine, like the lilies of the field … assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral insouciance with Sheban elegance’ (p. 149). Undine’s ability to take wealth for granted is rooted, of course, in the fact that, unlike Lily Bart, her financial security has never been threatened. Yet, similar to Lily, Undine opts not to comprehend matters of finance, a decision that allows her also to avoid responsibility and thus refrain from curbing her own appetite for consumption. The luxury of disinterest is underscored by Undine’s belief that practical matters are the domain of men who ‘go “down town” … to bring back the spoils to their women’ (p. 44). However, Undine’s excessive spending is less troubling and therefore more compelling to the reader because she is clearly never in danger of financial ruin. We can vicariously enjoy Undine’s acquisitions quite fully because there is no sense of the bill ever coming due. As a result, while Lily’s compulsive behaviour revolves largely around attaining financial security, something she has felt herself to be lacking for a good deal of her life, Undine has no such problems with money. That is not to say, however, that Undine is without compulsions and addictions of her own. Jennifer Fleissner describes Undine Spragg as ‘compulsively divorcing’, but her decisions to marry or remarry have less to do with an interest in marriage itself, or even in financial gain, and are instead much more driven by the desire to increase her social status.7 Though Undine’s appreciation of wealth has been established and money is always a factor in her choice of suitors, material gain is secondary to increasing her place in the social hierarchy. Undine’s interest in social climbing is well established prior to her marrying Ralph. In addition to the requirements for a lavish wedding, Undine confronts her father to express her expectation that he will provide a monthly income for

90

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

the couple after they have been wed. Abner Spragg, caught by surprise, suggests that Undine break off the engagement and instead consider marrying a man who can afford her expensive tastes. However, Undine’s counter-argument makes it clear that while she expects financial security, money is not her primary motivation. In fact, the worst consequence Undine can imagine for breaking an engagement to Ralph is that ‘all kinds of spiteful things would be said about her, and she would never be able to go with the right people again’ (pp. 123–4). While never under the delusion that love plays even the smallest part, the reader is made fully to see that Undine’s desire to become Mrs Ralph Marvell has everything to do with wanting to join New York’s aristocracy by marrying into a well-established family of ‘the right people’. Unfortunately for Ralph, and despite her initial insistence on money’s unimportance, Undine grows tired of being married to a man who lacks financial resources and whose poetic disposition she does not understand. Instead she sets her sights on Peter Van Degen, a member of the nouveau riche who she thinks will leave his wife, Ralph’s cousin, and marry her. When it becomes clear that Van Degen’s interest extends no further than an extramarital affair, Undine’s continued desire for upward mobility leads her in pursuit of Raymond de Chelles, a titled member of the French aristocracy. Smarting from Van Degen’s rejection and wanting very much to belong to a social group she deems superior to that of New York, Undine goes so far as to use her son Paul to extort money for an annulment from Ralph. Upon realizing that marriage to de Chelles is not nearly as lavish or glamorous as she had hoped, Undine leaves him in order to remarry her first husband, Elmer Moffatt, who has by now become exceedingly rich and influential. Even the most cursory glance at Undine’s marriage history suggests an inability to choose between title and money: she marries first in an attempt to escape the confines of Apex, in New York to acquire social prestige, pursues a wealthy married man, remarries in France for an aristocratic title and, finally, after boredom gets the better of her, returns to her first husband who has made a fortune and can furnish her with all the pleasures to be purchased. However, as the novel ends, Undine is taken with the idea of marrying an ambassador, largely because her current husband, Moffatt, has mentioned in passing that a man in that position could never marry a divorced woman. Undine’s compulsivity then might be read as stemming not just from a sense of lacking money or status, but of lacking things which others possess or deny her. Undine wants what she cannot have and when she does have it, she simply does not want it anymore. As a result, Undine seems more compulsive than Lily, whose addictions are driven largely by necessity rather than a taste for excess. Highly impressionable, Undine is evidence of an evolution in Whartonian naturalism. Not only do her desires extend beyond the basic needs which motivate Lily Bart, but Undine is absolutely capable of finding

‘It’s Better to Watch’

91

a way to possess anything she craves. Thus, her motivations might stem from her environment but she has evolved with a capacity for mastering that environment. The treatment of compulsion in these novels certainly establishes Lily and Undine as characters that might plot the progression of Edith Wharton’s engagement with naturalism; however, the novels’ treatment of visual culture provides even more marked examples of the ways Lily suffers at the mercy of her environment while Undine flourishes as master of her own. Throughout the course of each novel both women demonstrate constant awareness of themselves as visual objects by repeatedly posing and performing. Because they understand the importance of appearances, Lily and Undine strive to manage and manipulate the way they are seen by others. However, Lily is ultimately unable to maintain appearances – in part because she lacks money and must rely heavily upon the perceptions of others, but also because she refuses wholly to participate in the social charade. From The House of Mirth’s opening paragraphs readers are made to understand that Lily Bart’s entire existence is dependent upon her ability to create and maintain appearances and, given that she does not survive the story to its conclusion, it seems that Lily fails to manage the way she is viewed. Lawrence Selden first glimpses Lily in Grand Central Station and observes that her every movement ‘seemed the result of far-reaching intentions’, but it is clear that, despite his affection for Lily, Selden never truly sees her. Though she constantly poses to display her beauty to its best advantage, Lily’s inability to manage her image is evident in Selden’s recognition that ‘his own view of her was to be coloured by any mind in which he saw her reflected’.8 Selden’s observation also serves as an indictment of the way that members of society view each other. Rather than taking in a first-hand view of Lily, Selden looks through the undeniably dirty lens of gossip and others’ impressions. Thus, even when Lily does her best to be original the reader can see that nothing really is. Lily’s desire to be seen, coupled with the unfortunate circumstance of her inability to control the way she is viewed by others comes to light when she attends the opera for the sake of having an opportunity to display herself. Initially reluctant to accept an invitation from Simon Rosedale, Lily agrees in order to keep him from repeating rumours of her financial entanglements with Gus Trenor. Because Lily is ‘always inspirited by the prospect of showing her beauty in public’ she does not realize that the admiring glances she receives include the impatient ones of Trenor, who desires sexual favours as repayment for his financial guidance. Though beautiful and enjoying the attention of others, Lily is described as one of the ‘brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence’, an observation that certainly paints her naive vanity as disabling any ability to clearly see beyond herself.9

92

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

It would be remiss to discuss appearances in The House of Mirth without delving into the performance of tableaux vivants at the home of the Wellington Brys. In their efforts to establish themselves as a part of fashionable society, the Brys host an evening in which their friends participate in tableaux by dressing and completing scenes depicting famous works of art ranging from Botticelli to Goya. Many of the tableaux are admired, largely because great efforts have been made to match the models with subjects well suited to their appearance and personality. When Lily appears, as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Mrs Lloyd carving her husband’s name into a tree, ‘the unanimous ‘Oh!’ of the spectators was a tribute … to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart’. Though she contemplated presenting a more elaborate image, Lily ‘had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her unassisted beauty’. Her decision is rewarded and for a brief moment Lawrence Selden sees Lily clearly, the tableau capturing her natural beauty, unadorned and without interruption from social influence. As if immediately to break the spell and ensure that the reader understands Lily’s incapacity to control her image, Ned Van Alstyne disrupts Selden’s musings over the poetic quality of her beauty with the crass observation that Lily is a ‘deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up’.10 Not only is Selden’s view recoloured by the comment, further evidence of his inability to maintain an unobstructed view of Lily, Van Alstyne speaks for the group by identifying Lily as just another ‘thing’ to be appraised. While Lily clearly understands that beauty can function as social currency, the real pleasure she derives from her appearance and that of the luxury surrounding her is primarily artistic. Beauty may be a commodity in Lily’s social circle but for her it is much more – in many instances she seems to derive more pleasure from observing beautiful objects than she derives from being beautiful or from being seen as beautiful. Unfortunately, the role of ‘artistic eye’ in a culture of voyeurs is neither profitable nor safe for a woman. Selden or Percy Gryce might collect whatever amuses them but, despite her heightened aesthetic sensibility, Lily can only be collected. Ironically, it seems that when The House of Mirth was published, not even Edith Wharton could control the way Lily Bart was viewed, particularly as the object of someone else’s artistic vision. As the author wrote in a 1905 letter to William Brownell, ‘I sank to the depth of letting the illustrations be put in the book – &, oh, I wish I hadn’t now!’11 Thus Wharton was reluctant to have Lily’s image rendered on the page, perhaps preferring that she only find form in the readers’ and the author’s imaginations. In contrast to Lily Bart, Undine Spragg behaves abominably. Unfailingly narcissistic, she acts only to produce more pleasure for herself, often at the expense of those around her, as she perpetually searches for a better, more profitable marriage. However, Undine’s selfishness is not nearly as intriguing as why the reader feels compelled to watch her bad behaviour. On the first page of Wharton’s

‘It’s Better to Watch’

93

novel Mrs Heeny, aesthetician to New York’s high society and an avid reader of the social gossip columns, admires Undine’s appearance, claiming to have ‘never met with a lovelier form’ (p. 3). Likened to a ‘fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light’, there is no denying that Undine appears lovely at first glance (p. 21). However, unlike the men who adore her, few readers are drawn solely to the image of beauty. Nor are they dazzled by her sparkling wit, superior intellect or admirable morality. In fact, Undine possesses none of those attributes. Yet, like Ralph Marvell’s very surname, that is what readers do: they marvel. Unable to turn away, they become mesmerized as any of Undine’s suitors, failing to recognize that the foundations of what initially appeared to be a Bildungsroman have fallen away. Rather than serving as witnesses to a journey of identity-forming self-discovery, we closely follow the tabloid-worthy progress of Undine’s calculated social manoeuvrings, watching in awe as she eschews tradition or sentiment in favour of status and power. We are, in a sense, riveted by our own repulsion. In Undine Spragg, Edith Wharton created a ruthless anti-heroine more suited to bear the title ‘celebutante’ than any twenty-first-century ‘it girl’. The result, however, is that as they are engaged in watching Undine’s manipulations, readers are forced to confront a reflection of their own complicity in her creation. Cynthia Griffin Wolff builds upon A Backward Glance’s condemnation of the society capable of destroying Lily Bart by suggesting that Wharton might have made a similarly scathing statement about the society which serves as the setting for The Custom of the Country. Wolff supposes that Wharton could also have potentially declared to her readership, ‘Do you want an image of your corruption? Look at what you have produced! Look at Undine Spragg!’12 Though Wolff ’s Wharton quotation is speculative, her word choice is telling. It is not an example of social ills that Wharton presents to her readership; it is an image, a mirroring back of all that has gone and is going wrong. While the novel’s title might suggest a need to reconsider, or at least question, national priorities, the compulsive voyeurism which takes place both inside and outside of the novel begs readers to question exactly why they want to watch. Is it purely morbid curiosity, an element of Schadenfreude, or the aftertaste of naturalism motivating them to wait on edge for Undine’s inevitable demise? Given that Undine not only survives, but thrives, if readers are motivated by a desire to watch her fall, their attentions go unrewarded. Furthermore, Wharton creates multiple ways of seeing and a multiplicity of visions, which complicate a single conclusion. For example, by juxtaposing Undine’s compulsive desire to be seen with Ralph’s obsessive desire to see, and placing the reader’s inability to turn away from Undine’s story at the centre of these poles, Wharton brings into sharp focus the tension between the superficial and the ‘real’, as well as our unfortunate preference for one over the other. Ralph may be a sympathetic character but he is not the novel’s most compelling figure. Readers may feel badly for the

94

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

predicament in which he finds himself – married to a wife who cannot and will not attempt to understand his point of view – but they are far more interested in waiting to see what Undine will do next. Thus Wharton encourages readers to confront the discrepancy between character traits they might claim to value and those that capture their imagination and hold their interest. As Undine admires herself in mirror after mirror, and is appraised or imagined by a multiplicity of gazes, the most unsettling aspect of The Custom of the Country reveals itself. Refracted and reflected back to us, the compulsive desire to watch, to see and to be seen becomes exaggerated as Ralph and Undine personify changes in visual perception at the turn of the century.13 The varied devices Wharton employs to present and create compulsive voyeurism, both inside and outside of the novel, make it necessary to pull apart the different layers of perception and examine how Undine and Ralph are seen and see, as well as the manner in which the author manipulates point of view and readerly perspective. By rejecting a first-person narrator, Wharton avoids limiting the novel to a single point of view and can demonstrate all social factions’ vulnerability to vision and voyeurism. For example, Ralph views his parents and grandparents as ‘Aborigines’, native inhabitants of New York who are ‘doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race’ and he ironically suggests that they will end up in an anthropological display (pp. 73–4). Even as the Dagonets judge those outside their circle, they are also measured from within. Here readers are given to understand that society is a house of mirrors where everyone watches each other and no one is above scrutiny. For even as the old regime views the new with scepticism, so is it fated to be studied as well. Optical illusions are made even clearer when Ralph comes to realize that ‘the other side’, the side he thought himself to be observing, is his side after all (p. 74). Though readers were riveted by Lily Bart’s tragic decline, even more compelling are Undine Spragg’s selfish exploits. The desire to watch Lily fall, perhaps in the hope that she will redeem herself, is certainly strong. However, there is a degree of humanity in Lily’s character that pulls upon readers’ sympathies and reminds them that, no matter what society might think, she is not merely an object. Undine, on the other hand, has no claims on our consciences. The more we watch Undine’s exploits, the more we are appalled, and yet the more mesmerized we become. It is this sense of the sordid, sensational or secret, not merely the sexual, which creates a voyeur of Wharton’s reader. Certainly the exchanges between Undine and Peter Van Degen are charged with a degree of sexual tension, such as when he inquires as to whether the cost of Undine’s portrait comes ‘higher than the dress’ she is wearing (p. 189). However, the voyeurism inspired by The Custom of the Country draws on the allure of social status even more than that of the physical body.

‘It’s Better to Watch’

95

In her study of pornographic literature, Allison Pease explains that voyeuristic consumption of texts relies heavily on reinforcing a set of expectations which allow the reader’s response to mirror the text’s content.14 That is, in the consumption of pornographic images, pleasure is derived by vicariously experiencing the pleasure occurring on the page. Similarly, Wharton’s readers are able vicariously to experience the spectacle of old New York society through her novels. As completely removed observers, we are granted not only access to Wharton’s world, but also a degree of omniscience that results from her use of a third-person narrator. Amy Blair observes that readers of The House of Mirth ‘just as surely imbibed the novel’s lush descriptions of Lily’s surroundings, the details of the lives of her wealthy friends, and the particulars of the elaborate social rituals by which members of the haute bourgeoisie could recognize each other’.15 Given the allure these trappings of wealth would have had, especially for those excluded from such opulence, Blair suggests that readers might have located the novel’s tragedy not in Lily’s death but in her exclusion from this highly desirable world of luxury. As stated earlier, however, readers would have vicariously enjoyed the opulence of Lily’s surroundings but any pleasure derived would be shadowed by the lurking awareness of its price. The glitter of wealth in Lily’s world is just as sparkling in the world of Undine Spragg; it is after all largely the same setting but populated with fresher faces. As Maureen Montgomery reminds us, Undine’s New York is ‘socially promiscuous, with ample opportunities for the display of wealth’ and, by virtue of constant exposure, harbours potential for sexual deviation, which only heightens its attraction.16 Graphic in their description of material goods such as jewellery and clothing, both The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country serve as examples of status-pornography, texts where vicarious consumption, display and leisure provide as much or more allure than sexual content. By observing the interactions of the social elite in Wharton’s novel, the reader participates in an exchange not unlike the transferral of pleasure via pornography. Interestingly, Lily’s vantage point is very similar to that of the reader. Though she is included in society events, Lily’s relative lack of money continually places her in the position of outsider, or voyeur, despite her seeming possession of insider status. Upon her initial arrival at Bellomont, Lily takes in the household’s appearance, not as an owner or even a guest, but as an observer who clearly recognizes her exclusion from the luxury of the place. As she observes the ornate architecture of her friends’ home, the front hall ‘arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of pale yellow marble’ and the glitter as ‘the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved’ the reader is made to understand that ‘there were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her

96

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities’.17 The reader’s desire for opulent descriptions is mirrored by Lily’s own craving to possess the setting in which she finds herself. The detachment Lily feels from her surroundings should come as no surprise given that she is, for all intents and purposes, homeless. After her parents are deceased Lily rootlessly drifts between the home of her aunt and the homes of her friends. Chafing at the obligations created by existing in the luxury of others and ‘conscious of having to pay her way’, Lily does not mindlessly inhabit the environment of wealth so much as she is draped in borrowed finery.18 Not at ease in the extravagant homes of her wealthy friends as her own fortunes unravel, later in the novel Lily is equally uncomfortable in the more modest dwelling of Gerty Farish, a place that no longer seems charming but which, like Bellomont, reminds Lily of her own limitations. The sense that small spaces are closing in upon her as finances decrease is especially apparent when Lily, moving too quickly, almost knocks over the tea table at Gerty’s apartment and exclaims, ‘– how beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat!’19 In addition to suggesting that Lily literally does not fit anywhere, this scene also emphasizes that she does not possess a space so much as she decorates it. The moment she attempts to move with any purpose, Lily is reminded to be beautiful and remain in her place. One way to understand Lily’s perspective is to see her as demonstrating Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s claim that ‘bourgeois pathos’ is created ‘through the sad realization of not belonging’. If the bourgeois sensibility is defined by the moment in which ‘the subject is made the outsider to the crowd, an onlooker, compensating for exclusion through the deployment of the discriminating gaze’, the distanced reader’s heightened feeling of detached observation enables an artificial sense of belonging to the upper class.20 Rather than feeling a part of things through personal involvement, the reader must feel apart from things and be in a position to observe. The displacement of intimacy in favour of material goods or social spectacle is not limited to Wharton’s reader. For Undine herself ‘enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity – the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses’ rather than ‘personal entanglement [which] might mean “bother”’ (pp. 223–4). Ralph views Undine’s utter disinterest in potentially complicated relationships as validation of her fidelity, but his wife’s obsession with public spectacle is just as destructive to their marriage as an affair. In many ways, Undine’s most amorous relationship is not with any individual but with the society that takes her in with its eyes. Undine does marry and divorce with astounding frequency, the breaking of marital vows may actually be seen as secondary to her compulsive desire to be visually engaged. In the opening chapter of Wharton’s novel Undine receives a dinner invitation from Ralph’s sister. Rather than being surprised by the unex-

‘It’s Better to Watch’

97

pected gesture of hospitality, she asks Mrs Heeny, ‘Why does she want me? She’s never seen me!’ (p. 7, italics in original). This exclamation makes clear the young woman’s absolute confidence that those who see her will admire her. That appearances are crucial is a point made again and again, but never as potently as in Chapter V when Undine prominently displays herself in the theatre box.21 Lily had also made a display of her beauty in an opera box, as mentioned earlier, but her performance was not wholly successful. In The Custom of the Country, however, Undine’s public appearance in the box marks a critical point in her ability to manipulate her image. Though she too is beautiful to observers, especially men, in this setting Undine is more acutely aware than Lily of the importance of managing her own sight so that she might more adeptly manipulate that of others. Fearing that she ‘revealed herself as unknown and unknowing’, she is struck with a realization which becomes ‘one of the guiding principles of her career: “It’s better to watch than to ask questions”’ (p. 65, italics in original). The importance of observation serves as a message both to the character and the reader. Does Wharton mean to excuse voyeurism by allowing for it to be rationalized as a necessary aspect of participating in the myriad gestures associated with socializing? By watching and learning proper codes of conduct, both Undine and the reader are able to avoid being seen in the wrong way by others who, no doubt, are also watching. In fact, when surveying the auditorium to find ‘herself [at] the core’, she is not merely a spectacle but also spectator (p. 60).22 This repeated emphasis on both being seen and seeing reinforces the primacy of visual experience. As Wharton writes of Undine, ‘Over a nature so insensible to the spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail’ (p. 235). The author’s observation clearly indicates that whatever artistic sense might have compelled Lily to crave beauty, Undine is ruled solely by a cold empiricism. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary traces vision and its historical construction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pointing to a passage in an 1850s essay where John Ruskin argues that in order to realize the full power and potential of artistic endeavours, one must reclaim and draw upon the ‘innocence of the eye’. For Ruskin and Crary, the innocent eye possesses a normally elusive ‘childish perception’ and, as a result, can observe without the interpretive burden of a prior consciousness of signification. Colours are seen as pure colours, not as references to other ideas or objects. As an example of such untainted vision Ruskin employs the image of a blind man who has instantaneously been given sight and therefore has no preconceptions about those items upon which his gaze falls.23 Characters who employ this type of vision might easily be thought to represent the old way of seeing things. In The House of Mirth, both Lily and Selden are hampered by their desire to see things as they believe or desire them to be, rather than as they really are. The idealism that clouds Lily’s and Selden’s vision marks them as characters that are potentially unfit to sur-

98

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

vive in the reality of New York society. Of course, Selden has the advantage of being a man who can afford to humour his dream visions while Lily cannot. In sharp contrast to Lily and Selden, Undine cannot lay claim to such unadulterated vision. Ralph Marvell, however, while not seeing with the spectacular perspective of recently restored sight, also fails to see things as they would appear to a more cynical viewer. The influence of imagination, particularly as it pertains to clouded vision, is nowhere as evident as when Ralph is falling in love with Undine. Ironically, Ralph imagines Undine as the innocent to be saved from ‘Van Degenism’ (p. 82). Ralph believes his judgements possess clarity because he is ‘not blind to her crudity and her limitations’ but finds them to be ‘part of her grace and her persuasion’ (p. 83). However, his inability to read Undine shows that he has not learned her lesson of observation. While the easy forgiveness of flaws might be quickly dismissed within the early throes of romance, Ralph’s innocent idealism also dates him, just as it dates Lily and Selden. Rather than seeming a cynic of the sort that may have cost Wharton the Nobel Prize, Ralph is a throwback to the Victorian way of seeing.24 Ralph epitomizes Ruskin’s ideal, which ultimately leads to his demise. In Undine’s New York there is no place for the old way of anything. Ralph’s desire to see and his inability to see Undine as she really is certainly speak to the impossibility of maintaining innocence and avoiding corruption in a social structure where present spectacles are more compelling than memory, imagination or tradition. Ralph could not see his love for Clare, he could not see Undine’s flaws and he could not see the mistake of his marriage. That Ralph is doomed seems certain from the outset of the novel. Yet, despite Ralph’s inability to thrive in this environment of voyeurism and consumption, readers experience their most intimate moment with him. Ralph’s suicide is physical and violent, embodied in a way that no sexual allusions are. The closest the reader comes to feeling rather than seeing is when Ralph himself becomes ‘conscious of seeing [the room] in every detail with a distinctness he had never before known’ (p. 474). Then, under the impression that his death will simplify Undine’s life, an observation he clearly recognizes as ironic, Ralph ‘felt again, more deliberately, for the spot he wanted, and put the muzzle of the revolver against it’ (p. 474). When Ralph gains his vision, not unlike Ruskin’s blind man, what he sees is that he does not belong. The belief that his death will ‘make it all right’ for Undine demonstrates Ralph’s awareness of just how unfit he is to survive the increasingly cynical twentieth century (p. 474). In the moment that he is suddenly able to see and comprehend his situation, with clarity and without romantic illusion, Ralph knows that he and his ideals will be sacrificed for the pragmatic and materialistic modernity personified by Undine. Tensions between the individual’s subjectivity and the influence of capitalism resonate in Crary’s Suspensions of Perception. Crary points to Henri Bergson’s 1896 book Matter and Memory as an example of attempts made within the

‘It’s Better to Watch’

99

study of perception to ‘salvage a subjective mode of apprehending novelty’ despite modernization. Bergson proposed that the human was constantly in a state of transformation, a compulsive changing and renewing. However, what Bergson did not account for was that capitalism ‘produced an endless chance of dislocations and destabilizations’.25 Where Bergson fails to take materialistic culture and greed into account, Wharton does not.26 Undine is constantly looking for new experiences and new identities into which she can insert herself. Many readers have noted the possibility that Undine Spragg’s initials are meant intentionally to correlate her values with those of the United States, but she is not the only representative of New York society’s new population and its emphasis on conspicuous consumption. Elmer Moffatt, like Undine, is also constantly trying to secure a social identity of his own – though Elmer’s motivation differs from Undine’s in that it is largely driven by the desire for financial success – through the acquisition of material goods. When Ralph approaches Moffatt in an effort to raise money to pay off Undine, the latter holds up a pink crystal to the light and informs his guest that ‘now and then [he] like[d] to pick up a pretty thing. Ralph noticed that his eyes caressed it’ (p. 451). Moffatt’s quest for novelty through material possessions reaches a climax with his acquisition of the de Chelles family’s heirloom tapestries and, of course, his marriage to Undine. An essential difference in the degree to which Lily and Undine manage the gazes that fall upon them is highlighted by a very telling passage from The House of Mirth. In this moment, Wharton describes the ‘great gilt cage in which they [the upper class] were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her!’27 Lily’s realization that she is trapped inside society’s cage, gilded though it may be, and on display not merely for the observation of those in her circle but for everyone, is horrifying. Undine, however, never allows the cage door to shut upon her because she refuses to accept others’ views as beyond her control. Even when she feels ‘entrapped into a bondage hardly conceivable’, due to the de Chelles sisters’ constant surveillance, and Undine exclaims to Moffatt, ‘Now you see how they all watch me!’, she is plotting her escape (pp. 559–60). Because Undine, unlike Lily, does not tolerate any situation that hampers her freedom and is ever resourceful when it comes to surviving or eluding unpleasant situations, as proven by her quick adaptability, Wharton builds upon her example of what society could destroy by demonstrating exactly it could produce. Also, by placing Undine’s compulsive desire to be seen alongside the reader’s inability to stop watching, Wharton raises the issues William James wrestled with in his 1912 writings. James saw experience as requiring attention to modern spectacles in order to serve as ‘both a simulation of and compensation for a chimerical ‘real’ experience’.28 The reader’s compulsive desire to observe Undine, voyeuristically taking in the trappings of wealth, is evidence not merely of morbid curiosity

100

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

but of a sense of lacking or incompleteness described earlier through Fleissner’s definition of compulsive behaviour. We watch the spectacle that is Undine to compensate for our own lack of experience and because we want to see what will happen to her; and vicariously to us. Though the reader and Lily Bart are similarly exiled to the outskirts of the upper class, given a window in which to peek but provided no claim to belonging, the reader is alone in the role of voyeur to The Custom of the Country. Rather than longing for luxury alongside Lily, we are held at a distance by Undine Spragg. We may find ourselves transfixed by her behaviour, but to sympathize with Undine is to condone her ruthless treatment of anyone who might be of use to her project of social climbing and material acquisition. While isolated in the position of removed third party, we are granted a simultaneous experience of both the past, via Ralph, who cannot escape tradition, and the present, via Undine, who cannot imagine a future beyond her immediate desires. It is the future, which Wharton does not predict, that holds our fascination. To suggest that readers are compelled by how these novels reflect upon themselves might, at least initially, suggest a degree of narcissism. However, examining what these characters, specifically Lily and Undine, reveal about Wharton’s readership enables us to understand why these novels elicited such a strong response. It is true that each novel’s luxurious setting compelled a degree of voyeurism, with differing results based on each woman’s ability to afford her surrounding splendour. However, more importantly, readers are compelled to watch in the hope of glimpsing a way to interpret the world seen outside the texts. By comparatively examining The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country we are able to follow Wharton’s perception of visual culture’s evolution in the early twentieth century. The inability to control one’s own image placed an individual at the mercy of an unscrupulous but scrutinizing society, as evidenced by Lily Bart’s tragic demise. Though she recognized the importance of appearances, Lily’s emphasis on art rather than artifice proved to be of little value to a society bent on material acquisition and social advancement. The recognition that beauty was not an end in itself but a means to acquiring all she desired enabled Undine Spragg to thrive in the same society that disowned and abandoned her predecessor. Ultimately, Lily shows society what it destroys and Undine represents what it can create, but both are cautionary tales reflecting society’s most dangerous illusions.

7 A ‘MIST OF OPOPANAX’: MAPPING THE SCENTSCAPE OF THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY Pamela Knights

Smells are surer than sounds or sights To make your heart strings crack – Rudyard Kipling.1

Following a vaporous trail of smells, aromas, perfumes, pongs and odours, this essay will attempt to map the osmographical terrain, the scentscape, of The Custom of the Country. Bringing various features into focus through the lens of Edith Wharton’s practices elsewhere, it will suggest some ways that Wharton’s work engages with the languages of olfaction at the turn of the twentieth century; and will indicate how, in her rendering of this most nebulous and neglected of senses, she anticipates some of the features only now being systematized in modern cultural studies. Often seeming ‘involuntary’ or not amenable to individuals’ control, the operations of smell can heighten for the reader the significant histories of Wharton’s major characters, and help to calibrate her representation of larger sociocultural territory, and the dynamics of change. Opening his study Osmics: The Science of Smell with Rudyard Kipling’s resonant lines above, John H. Kenneth adds a qualifying note: ‘owing to a lack of training, one is not always aware of the fact that one lives in a world of smell as well as in a world of form, colour, and sound’.2 This comment, in 1922, seems surprising, given the widespread interest in smells – osmics, olfaction, aromatics, perfume, scents, the aesthetics, ontology, physiology and hygiene of odours – manifested in a plethora of inquiries from the mid-nineteenth century on.3 Many of these earlier works had themselves made similar claims – that they were about to reveal a world hitherto ignored – and such remarks continue to feature in fresh studies, even today.4 However, as literary and cultural criticism has been catching up with the Marxian view that the bodily senses have a history, numerous studies have been bringing the landscapes of sensation more systematically into view. Such works set out to raise awareness of sensory worlds, and of how – 101 –

102

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

they have been configured within various periods, literary movements and genres.5 As witnessed in the selections in Jim Drobnick’s The Smell Culture Reader (2006), this new ‘auratic’ sensibility (as Hans J. Rindisbacher terms it)6 has parallels across the disciplines, from sociology and fashion to theology and cognitive science. In the commercial sphere, while scents have always enjoyed a high profile, reviewing products is difficult. As the novelist Hilary Mantel recently wrote, in taking up the challenge: ‘Scents are not so much objects as performances, processes, but we lack a process for appraising them’.7 Even the legal system is attending to osmology: the use of trained sniffer dogs, or in some cases sniffer bees, was the subject of a polemical book, Headspace, by British lawyer Amber Marks, published in 2007. With their attempts to develop specific vocabularies and taxonomies for sensory description across their various spheres, all such works have begun to make available a more precise terminology for discussion. Wharton herself was thoroughly acquainted with many of the literary phenomena that are now again interesting critics; though she was far from an admirer. In her late essay ‘Tendencies in Modern Fiction’ (1934), she deplores an entire tradition of attempts at detailed sensory depiction. En route to her target – modernist, stream-of-consciousness novels – she also berates mid-nineteenthcentury ‘realists’, a term she glosses with ironic quotation marks, for replacing imagination with observation, or exchanging, as she puts it, the ‘creative faculty for a kodak’. Quoting Henry James, Wharton laments a novelistic mode that gives precedence to what ‘could be smelt, seen, tasted, or touched’ instead of revealing a character’s ‘mental and moral characteristics’, or instead of, as she expresses it, trying ‘to build up, stroke by stroke, the shape and growth of his soul’. Such a device, she emphasizes: led back, by another road, to the old stock types of the earlier fiction – save that the character who used to be merely the Miser was now the man whose left eyelid twitched, or the siren the young woman who was always preceded by a whiff of ‘White Rose’.8

For Wharton, ‘born novelists’ discovered other pathways, while ‘the feebler beat their brains out against the blank wall of “Naturalism”’. Novelists, past and present, so she concludes, ignore to their peril the supreme importance of selection and of form, ‘not only in the structure of their tales but in the drawing of character’.9 Such a sniff of disdain might seem an unpromising start for arguing for Wharton’s own interest in olfactory narrative signals. Nevertheless, throughout her career, smells and scents – deployed selectively, according to her own prescription – would be crucial to structure and to character. Wharton was highly aware that human beings live in ‘a world of smell’, and could represent its phenomenology, the contours of its landscapes; and those of The Custom of

A ‘Mist of Opopanax’

103

the Country would be no exception. At first encounter, however, this text might seem to endorse all Wharton’s reservations, and, indeed, to appear especially resistant to olfactory readings. In Edith Wharton studies, the impact of the eye/ sight has been of intense interest, a preoccupation obviously key to The Custom of the Country. This is a sharply visualized novel, which has drawn considerable attention for its detail and descriptive acuteness. To use Hermione Lee’s summary, it ‘looks expansive’, it is remarkable for its ‘lavish amounts of decoration and social texture’, its representations of ‘shimmer and glitter’, its individualized perspectives on ‘painted’ landscapes. This attention to surface seems appropriate in a narrative, which is ‘the story of a material girl’ and which presents the rise of ‘image’, media culture, and economic and business shifts to a society of spectacle.10 All this is foregrounded in the allusions to mirrors, paintings, photographs and other sites of visual control and consumption in the text (the gaze, the stare, the commanding eye) that have stimulated keen analysis.11 Of the other senses, touch, in particular, has drawn comment within wider studies of the motifs of collection, connoisseurship and aesthetic ‘value’ in the text – an arena, where, again, a premium is placed on surface.12 Smell, in contrast, is without surface; it is anti-spectacle; odours invade and transport the body, destabilizing the observer’s sense of separation and command. As Dan McKenzie emphasizes, in the resonantly titled Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells (1923), such stimuli may revoke time through memory: the ‘olfactory miracle’ rouses the self, to ‘live the moment over again with the full chord of its emotions vibrating our soul and startling our consciousness’.13 Aromatics, particularly if tuned to such a pitch, might, indeed, then seem an unprofitable instrument for Wharton in developing her narrative. Here, at the centre of the show, she creates a heroine whose mode is – infamously – to keep herself distant, cool, controlled and soulless as the legendary water-nymph who shared her name. Throughout every phase of her history, Undine actively suppresses memory, desire, conscience, to present the inodorate surface of a transparent crystal vase. But Undine’s glitter, the textures and patinas of surface and settings, need not entirely distract the reader from other textual currents. Also integral to Wharton’s broad narrative design is the pervasive taint of the insanitary, emanating from the nineteenth-century obsession with all-too actual waters, the stinking sources of disease and miasma.14 As Charles Henry Piesse, an eminent British physician, reminds readers in a polemical treatise of 1887, cultivating a ‘nose’ from childhood was a matter of public urgency: How many among the living millions have ‘no nose’! They have no nose for smell in a refined sense. They smell, but their consciousness is but slightly affected, scarcely stimulated – in a word, they smell, but do not appreciate. ‘Noses have they, but they smell not’.

104

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country Yet it is difficult to realise, impossible to exaggerate, the importance of the faculty of smell to the individual and to the nation. Both personal and public hygiene would make rapid strides were the faculty of smell even only slightly cultivated.15

Listing medical disasters incurred through such ignorance, Piesse emphasizes that: ‘One of the most important uses of a perfectly refined sense of smell, coupled with an exquisitely delicate taste, is that of detecting impure water’.16 Burying a tragedy (the deaths of two Spragg children from typhoid) in its narrative’s prehistory, The Custom of the Country picks up such notes. The taint lingers far into the novel. Taking on other tones, it permeates a major strand of the satire: the Apex Pure Water movement on which so many fortunes turn; and the characters’ related drive for progressive deodorization – of origins, the past, the money, the deals that flow and falter: ‘Seen this morning’s Radiator? I don’t know how the thing leaked out – but the reformers somehow got a smell of the scheme, and whenever they get swishing round something’s bound to get spilt’ (p. 461). Though sanitation might appear to generate the most obviously dominant odours, The Custom of the Country, as a whole, offers a supreme example of Wharton’s precision and nuance across a broad olfactory spectrum – the most nebulous emotional and subjective elements included. To delineate their traces and appreciate Wharton’s fine tuning of such motifs throughout this central text, it will be helpful to approach through some clearly marked examples from her work elsewhere. Accordingly, the section that follows will recall some instances where olfaction is in the foreground. Dwelling in particular on an early novel and a late one, it will set up some coordinates for mapping the variants Wharton uses across many of her writings, and which feature in The Custom of the Country in especially subtle forms. In its social notes, The House of Mirth offers an obvious point of entry, representing, in some aspects, one of Wharton’s own forays into the avenues of naturalism. Tropes of the abyss, the stink and contagion of smell, infused not only many late nineteenth-century novels about sordid moral and social territory, but also many reviews. We might recall the images of noses held in 1899 against Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, or the Argonaut’s contention that Mr Norris ‘might have changed his sub-title and called his book, “McTeague: A Study in Stinks”’.17 In The House of Mirth, smell conspicuously marks social terrain, and the value in which it is held. Following the passage of a heroine whose very name becomes socially malodorous (here, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’),18 readers soon become alert to odours as essence of place – the ‘fresh scent of mignonette and petunias’ wafting from Lawrence Selden’s balcony flower-box; at Bellomont, the ‘vase of carnations filling the air with perfume’ in Lily’s room; the fragrance of late-blooming honeysuckle on the balustrade (that ‘seemed an emanation of the tranquil scene’); the scent of the

A ‘Mist of Opopanax’

105

fading woods where she feels liberated from care. Less agreeable tinctures imbue the atmosphere that suffocates Lily, from the ‘faded flowers at luncheon’ that mark the Bart family’s decline, to Mrs Peniston’s sapolio and furniture polish, or the smell of cooking and kitchens that increasingly pervade her less luxurious settings.19 As a landmark sociological study of the late twentieth century would remark: ‘Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies and political orders; they can enforce social structures or transgress them’.20 In The House of Mirth, all these, the scents Lily is drawn to, and those from which she recoils, compose a smellscape of the society; or, to use the terms of cultural anthropology, an osmology, that infuses and subtly underpins Wharton’s visual delineation of the material spaces through which Lily passes, the boundary lines she crosses, in her descent. In registering her characters’ sensitivities, here as later in The Custom of the Country, Wharton demonstrates through literary means what her contemporary Georg Simmel, the pioneering theorist of the modern city, saw as a vital sociological project. As he would point out in 1907: ‘One will no longer be able to consider as unworthy of attention the delicate, invisible threads that are spun from one person to another if one wishes to understand the web of society according to its productive form’.21 Aroma is one of the means that materialize for the reader’s imagination the presence of such ‘delicate, invisible’ connections. Drawing into her construction phenomena familiar in nineteenth-century olfactory studies, Wharton gives Lily a sensitivity that Piesse terms ‘hyperosmic’.22 In her sensory refinement, nasal as well as visual good taste, Lily bears out Piesse’s hypothesis about the force of early training in discrimination. Her mother gave her a nose for the faintest whiff of dinginess, for those who ‘lived like pigs’; and who shaped in her a self-conception impossible outside the exclusive sphere of leisure: that sense that her only function is ‘diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume’.23 Similarly, Selden, raised by a tasteful mother, is roused to indignation at the world’s crude measures of beauty. His quiver of contempt, triggered by Van Alstyne’s salacious praise of Lily, is ‘unexpected’, but Wharton primes the reader through an anticipatory hint: the allusion to Van Alstyne’s ‘scented white moustache’, which ‘had brushed Selden’s shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline’.24 Whether of dinginess or decadence, such discriminations potentially go further. As Piesse pronounces: ‘What lady is there who could not tell a servants’ bedroom blindfold, simply by the sense of smell?’;25 and olfaction takes us into often contentious areas about Wharton’s narratives’ deeper ideological contours. As Janice Carlisle describes, typically, in Dickens or Gaskell and numerous other mid-nineteenth-century novelists, smells reinforce dominant hierarchies of value, marking ‘otherness’ in class, monetary, racial, ethnic and moral terms. With the accumulations of dozens of small motions of disgust, as one character

106

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

sniffs, judges and classifies another, such narratives define and often entrench the ‘relative status’ of the individuals involved.26 At the same time, Wharton offers a counter-dynamic: aroma can also unsettle judgement, permeate barriers. As with Undine later, Wharton makes it part of her heroine’s indefinable beauty, her power to charm even the most wary. It is ‘the scent of her dress’ that agitates Gryce, as the jolt of the train seems to precipitate her into his arms. A strand of Lily’s hair, that ‘swept Gerty’s cheek with its fragrance’, overbears her friend’s tortured reserve even as it substantiates her sense of inferiority: ‘Everything about her was warm and soft and scented’.27 In The House of Mirth, however, it seems significant that Wharton’s osmology tends to register the smells of physical spaces, rather than of bodies which inhabit them. Within broader critical debates over Wharton’s ideological position, olfactory data complicate any reductive labelling. In this text, for instance, how far do the unpleasant odours and threats of contagion emanate from any particular social groups? Or how far, perhaps, from a different order of anxieties altogether, moral or spiritual – hinted at in the stifling stuffiness of Gryce, the sulphurous fumes in the ambience of the Dorsets? If we take up Drobnik’s categories, they might suggest that, overall, the text exhibits perhaps not so much an ‘Odorophobia’ (a landscape rife with social fears, mapping the offensive or dangerous), but Wharton’s novelistic interest in a ‘Toposmia’ – a spatial realm, where odours ‘define and subtly alter the functioning of places’.28 Although these questions do not dissipate with later novels, even so, here, Wharton demonstrates the craft she found lacking in many other works of fiction. Olfactory highlights are already part of her structural tools, her art of nuance through which she heightens key moments in her central character’s journey (presents, in her own apt words, ‘the shape and growth of [her] soul’): the ‘stifling odour of fresh mourning’ as Mrs Peniston’s lawyer begins the preamble of the devastating will; or the ‘odour of violets’ she shakes out of the Reynolds dress, which ‘came to her like a breath from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence Selden and disowned her fate’.29 In Lily’s story, Wharton reserves for her novel’s final stages this most intense and intimate use of scent, to evoke erotics, aesthetics and memory. Such elements enter, with various colourings, key moments of emotion in the writings that follow. Out of many possible instances, we might recall, for example, in The Fruit of the Tree, Amherst’s baffled awareness of Bessy’s scent, even when the ‘intimate charm’ has lost its allure; or Wharton’s own appeal to Fullerton in her diary, to be to him, ‘like the scent of an ... invisible garden, that one passes on an unknown road at night’; or, in Ethan’s barren world, the faint sharp scent of geraniums in his evening with Mattie, or on the verge of her departure, his smelling in her hair ‘the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun’. Or, in more sordid vein, in The Reef, Wharton’s conveying to the reader Darrow’s seduction of Sophy, as

A ‘Mist of Opopanax’

107

he registers on her palms ‘the lingering scent of some stuff he had bought on the Boulevard’; or Anna’s deepening knowledge – as for the first time she enters his room: ‘Every object about her seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him, steeping her in the sense of his intimate presence’.30 All such private aspects would be crucial to her shaping of Ralph Marvell’s experience in The Custom of the Country. However, before we return to the novel, an example from her late career, where Wharton worked with aromatics in a particularly self-conscious form, will bring out further relevant aspects of her technique. In Hudson River Bracketed, the subjective emphasis dominates from early on. Here, in her major study of the growth of an artist’s soul, and in its companion, The Gods Arrive, olfaction is integral to her mapping of Vance Weston’s inner landscapes. Repeatedly, his story witnesses to the power of ‘olfactory miracle’. So, Wharton presents Vance, away from home for the first time, as overwhelmed by a scent: he felt a qualm of homesickness, and thought longingly of the spring sunsets across the fields at Crampton, and the perfume of his grandmother’s neglected lilacs. So strong was the impression that the perfume was actually in his nostrils. He raised himself on his elbow, and there, on the pillow, lay a spray of white lilac, filling the room with June. ‘Well, that’s nice of them,’ Vance thought, burying his face in the ivory-coloured clusters. He remembered his grandmother’s once saying as they sat on the Crampton porch on a hot June evening: ‘I guess that box of ointment Mary Magdalen broke over our Lord’s feet must have been made out of lilacs’, and he had liked the fancy, and wished he knew how to make a poem out of it, rich and heavy with perfumed words.31

Here, Wharton, like Marcel Proust, her contemporary, explores, as part of her character’s personal and artistic journey, the elusive, borderland nature of scent impressions.32 The topic had tantalized many writers from Montaigne to Oliver Wendall Holmes;33 and, in the early twentieth century, the years when Wharton was working on The Custom of the Country, had been refreshed in the accounts of another, younger contemporary, the deaf-blind Helen Keller. In The World I Live In (1908), Keller had meditated on the sense of smell as: ‘almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things’; ‘a fallen angel’, a ‘demon’; ‘a sense of distance’ – a ‘horizon, the line where odor and fancy meet at the farthest limit of scent’.34 Wharton’s passage captures many such ambiguities – smell exists somewhere between the object in which it inheres and the subject who engages it, between intangible emotion and mundane physiology (Vance’s nostrils), between memory and actuality, past and present, the sacred and the profane (the prostitute Magdalen, and the ointment). In Wharton’s sweeping Künstlerroman, this passage is also a piece of meta-olfactics. Vance’s attraction to the perfumed poem represents only one phase of his aesthetic experiments. It seems a decadent

108

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

throwback to a fin-de-siècle fascination with synaesthesia, or Walter Pater’s preference for musicality over meaning, or the sensory overload of Joris-Karl Huysman’s A rebours (1884). The flâneur, here, is also – to borrow Jim Drobnik’s term, a ‘Flaireurs’ – an olfactory aesthete, a ‘scentsualist’.35 Such efforts had parallels in technical studies, as for instance, in the parfumier Septimus Piesse’s ambitious concept of the odophone. In this experiment in transposing scent into a system of musical notation, he envisaged a kind of keyboard spectrum – ‘the “Gamut of Odours,” in which each of a series of odours (forty-six in number) is placed side by side against its equivalent note in music’.36 Wharton depicts Vance, too, struggling, in similar terms, with the process of composition: ‘Heavy with all the scent of summers gone –’ how would that do for the lilac? No, too heavy. He wanted to say that the mere scent of the lilac was rich enough for bees to make honey out of it; to say that lightly, whirringly, like bees humming about before they settle. And then one organ note at the close, where the box of ointment is broken, and Christ likens the Magdalen’s gesture to the perfume of holiness, the lovely fragrance it should give out, but so often does not. Scentless holiness … there too was something to write about. How one image beckoned another!’37

In the sweep of her own narrative, however, Wharton writes fully what her artist cannot. In her sequence of virtuoso renditions, perfume marks creative peaks – as the layering of the past in the ‘million calyxes’ exhaling sweetness at the Willows stimulates Vance’s first novel, Instead; and it marks the betrayals – the scent of Mrs Pulsifer’s clothes, that haunt Vance, or the literature marketed along with scents by Bunty Hayes and ‘Storecraft’ that sickens him.38 Returning to The Custom of the Country in the light of all such moments heightens its textual landscape, quickening apprehension of the aromatics of its sensory spectrum, along with the panorama of its sights, its sounds and its touch. Like Mrs Fairford, orchestrating the conversation, ‘giving each a turn … and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said’ (p. 23), Wharton adeptly draws in each major mode of her olfactory repertoire. In a minor key of composition, she enjoys a few small flourishes of signature scents, trying out for herself the classificatory device of a ‘whiff of white rose’ to mark character. There is a Dickensian cast to Mr Spragg, with his perpetual cigar. Though never rendered in terms of direct sensation, the leitmotif becomes not only a register of his ‘presence’, but an extension of his responses (‘growling out here and there a tentative correction, and turning his cigar between his lips as he seemed to turn the problem over in the loose grasp of his mind’ (p. 259)). Such small indices also cumulatively create a ‘Toposmia’, coding alien social territory, which prompts some questions, again, about Wharton’s broader narrative politics. To the discomfort of modern readers, hints of inappropriate, exotic or dubious scents tinge two of the most unacceptable adventurers in the text. Brought to

A ‘Mist of Opopanax’

109

Undine’s (and readers’) attention only along with his Semitic name, his origins and his record as a swindler, the riding-master Aaronson’s ‘pommaded’ hair consolidates Undine’s ‘sickened’ sense of her social near-disaster (p. 26). A variant move introduces another, and, for readers, more devastatingly successful, pirate. The ‘small swarthy’ (p. 529) man, only later named as the dealer Mr Fleischauer (p. 533), is again presented in terms of social otherness and imposture: ‘who, in spite of his conspicuously London-made clothes, had an odd exotic air, as if he had worn rings in his ears or left a bale of spices at the door’ (p. 529).39 Sniffing out a treasure, with eye-glasses fitted to ‘a nose that was like an instrument of precision’ (p. 530), his appraisal of the tapestries presages one of the novel’s major betrayals. In an earlier phase of Undine’s devastation – Ralph’s intensifying sense of exclusion from his own marriage – scents are part of the bustle and intrusion; the ‘slender vendeuses floating by in a mist of opopanax’ (p. 181) before whom Ralph painfully effaces himself as Undine reaches the climax of her Parisian splurge.40 In another ripple of warning, an aroma tinges Ralph’s encounter with the rising Elmer Moffatt, now ‘smoother, broader, more supremely tailored, and his whole person exhaled the faintest whiff of an expensive scent’ (p. 450). At a more systemic level, osmic topography underpins the novel’s ambitious narrative structure. Unlike Lily, Undine’s nose is untutored. Deploring her parents’ taste, hyper-conscious of critical disdain, she always ‘scented ridicule in the unknown’ (p. 191). Wharton charts her drive to get her bearings, to understand classificatory signposts (the angle of the Marquise de Trézac’s superciliously ‘drooping nose’ (p. 390) is a recurring signal of disapprobation). As in Lily’s journeys, Wharton marks the stages of Undine’s trajectory, in all its geographical range and social reach, through spatial olfactory tropes: here, stuffiness and freshness. Undine’s ambition is always for an airier, less stifling space, beyond. In her first rise, to the ‘splendours of hotel life’ at the Mealey House, ‘the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became … insufferable’ (p. 53). A similar decline into staleness afflicts every phase, whether in the ‘sumptuous stuff y’ Stentorian breakfast-room, ‘where coffee-fumes hung perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling’ (p. 40) to the tedium of Saint Désert: ‘the slow hot crape-smelling months’ (p. 492) in ‘the great empty house’ where everything ‘smelt of dampness’ (p. 490). In a variant, despairing of entering the delights of the Van Degen dining room, she pre-empts the phenomenon in imagination: ‘she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere’ (p. 62). At each stage, her beauty dims or blooms accordingly. In the ‘high air’ of St Moritz, ‘Ralph had never seen her so touched with morning freshness’ (pp. 158–9); at Saint Désert in contrast, she looks to manufactured substitutes to work the miracle: The dulness of her life seemed to have passed into her blood: her complexion was less animated, her hair less shining. The change in her looks alarmed her, and she scanned

110

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country the fashion-papers for new scents and powders, and experimented in facial bandaging, electric massage and other processes of renovation. (p. 521)

Within this set of tropes, Wharton again deploys olfaction as a key narrative signal, to mark transitions and underscore many of Undine’s moments of conflict. It features in Undine’s constant minor manoeuvrings, as she presses her doctors to order fresher, more expensive, air. (She would no doubt have endorsed with enthusiasm Piesse’s hypothesis that ‘pure country air owes its invigorating properties to the infinite number of minute particles floating in it that may be described as Nature’s perfumes’.)41 It gives force, too, to critical moments where colliding world views begin to emerge frighteningly into the open. In two marriages, Undine’s derision strikes at the heart of her husband’s values. For Ralph, on honeymoon, in Italy, the Sienese air is a restorative, creative, medium: [it] was not only breathable but intoxicating. The sun, treading the air like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances, crushed out of it new colours … As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. (p. 140)

Ralph’s appreciation of the chords of sensation, akin to his animating synaesthesic apprehension of words (‘flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead’ (p. 141)) anticipates Wharton’s later rendering of Vance Weston as artist. In this moment of plenitude, where past and present, inner and outer, converge and overspill, he feels in touch with ‘the secret treasures of Italy’ (p. 140). Undine, regarding herself cheated of a promise, responds to his rapture with a ‘faint accent of reproach’ (the first words we hear from the new Mrs Marvell): ‘I don’t feel cool. You said there’d be a breeze up here’ (p. 142). For Ralph, as for Wharton herself, Italy is an inspiration, a constant touchstone for beauty. For Undine, in her outpouring towards the end of the chapter, it is ‘dirty and ugly – all the towns we’ve been to are disgustingly dirty. I loathe the smells and the beggars. I’m sick and tired of the stuff y rooms in the hotels’ (p. 153). Later in the novel, she recalls it as an affront. Exhilarated with Paris, Undine’s ‘senses luxuriated in all its material details’, ‘all the surface-sparkle and variety’ (p. 281). Wharton registers the excitements of the city, across two dazzling paragraphs, through Undine’s gaze, with no osmological notes. Then, as Undine turns in memory to her earlier monotonous summers, she lights on Italy as the focus for all her resentment. The serial text included a visual descriptor that might have emanated from Lily Bart: ‘the face of life had been fresh and radiant and she had been doomed to waste such opportunities on a succession of ill-smelling dingy Italian towns!’42 In the book, the phraseology is all Undine’s; stripped of the

A ‘Mist of Opopanax’

111

superfluous adjective and exclamation mark, Italy is reduced to a single dismissive sniff : ‘a succession of ill-smelling Italian towns’ (p. 283).43 With such a penumbra of association, simple words accumulate force. As with Lily’s ‘dingy’, in Undine’s economy of language, ‘stuff y’ becomes a key term of opprobrium. Even lightly used, the word vibrates with warnings. As Undine explains to Ralph, in her first Parisian experience: ‘That’s why I was willing to come to this stuff y little hotel – I wanted to save every scrap I could to get a few decent things’ (p. 167). In the emerging struggles over cost-cutting, the word, coloured with Undine’s tone, sounds a recurring accusatory note. Braced to announce an end to their tour, Ralph enters ‘the little salon she called “stuff y”’ (p. 170), to find his wife in conference with a jeweller. The scene leads into the rising series of confrontations that culminate in Undine’s triumph. Between the serial and the first edition, again, a single change – from ‘stupid’ to ‘stuff y’ – sharpens her exultation:44 While you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was spending (oh, you needn’t fib – I know you were!) I was saving you hundreds and thousands. I’ve saved you the price of our passage! (p. 175, my italics)

With such carefully placed terms still echoing, parallel moments with Raymond again hint at the end of a marriage. Undine rejects tea in Saint Désert’s gallery, as ‘It’s so cold here – and the tapestries smell so of rain’ (p. 498); and rages at confinement to his bachelor rooms in the Paris ‘Hôtel’: ‘that stuff y little hole, with Hubert and his wife splurging round on top of our heads!’ (p. 503). Such feelings were not confined to Undine. As one early reviewer exclaimed, the novel tells of ‘the hothouse … and fresh air is a thing unknown. One feels a strong desire to break the glass and let in a little wind and rain.’45 In contrast, Elmer Moffatt grows to experience Parisian air as invigorating, a supplement to visual delight: ‘He seemed to be breathing in deeply the impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy avenues and long-drawn architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze’ (p. 422). It is with, Ralph, however, that Wharton uses olfaction to full emotional force – as memory, desire, erotics, to show, in effect, his heart-strings cracking. As with Newland Archer, later,46 Wharton writes his story as a crisis of disembodiment. As love takes Ralph out of the sphere in which he was formed, all his senses fall into disarray. Wharton represents much of Ralph’s battle in the disaster of his marriage as a struggle between desire and distance, to yield to feeling, and to put up barriers. As Piesse observes: Our senses may be regarded as sentinels which keep guard over the body, and the health or happiness of every individual are to a very great extent dependent on the state of wholesome discipline in which these sentinels are kept.47

112

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Wharton would treat this theme in comic mode in ‘Velvet Earpads’. There, she launches her narrative with the Professor’s programme of resistance: ‘by negativing persistently every superfluous hint of his visual, auditive or olfactory organs he had sheathed himself in a general impenetrability’.48 In Ralph’s buttoned-up world, the Washington Square ‘Reservation’ (p. 74), sentinels are on guard. Harriet Ray is an exemplar: ‘sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her’ (p. 83). She is sheltered, but also self-defensive: ‘Miss Ray pinched her lips together without speaking’ (p. 103); and, at her moment of defeat, demonstrates a self-discipline almost as conspicuous as Undine’s self-display: ‘Harriet would come – I call it Spartan!’ (p. 98, italics in original). In his own anguish, surrounded with ‘taciturnity’, Ralph ‘began to feel the tonic effect of silence’ (p. 338). But with a returning image of impure waters readers sense a fatal pollution: ‘There were thoughts and thoughts: they bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery’ (p. 338). While he forces himself into temporary health – ‘an outer skin of indifference slowly forming over his lacerated soul’ (p. 339) – the breakdown seems inevitable. Wharton writes Ralph’s marital history in a series of scenes of intrusion and abrasion. Again, olfaction intensifies the drama. For a time, in his protracted miseries, Ralph draws a ‘nebulous satisfaction’ from Undine’s ‘brief and colourless’ (p. 306) letters: ‘Sometimes the mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet and breathing its scent was like holding his wife’s hand and being enveloped in her fresh young fragrance: the sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating physical sensation’ (pp. 307–8). Here, for the reader, in Undine’s absence Wharton presents one of the novel’s most intimately explicit evocations of her sensual hold: Though his feeling for her had changed, it still ruled his life. If he saw her in her weakness he felt her in her power: the power of youth and physical radiance that clung to his disenchanted memories as the scent she used clung to her letters. (p. 309, my italics)

Disappointed, even of a letter, he can hardly breathe: ‘his baffled youth fought in him for air’ (p. 310). Deserted, Ralph seeks solace in the scent of the familiar, his own kind: in Clare’s ‘cool room, with its scents and shadows’ (pp. 323–4); and in her presence where ‘some of the qualities that had become most precious to him were as native to her as its perfume to a flower’ (p. 456). At the climax, in one of Wharton’s most distressing passages, Ralph’s defences tumble. As he stares at Moffatt, he sees himself as like ‘a modern man in medieval armour’ (p. 469). With the collapse of ‘the whole archaic structure of his rites and sanctions’ (p. 469) sense becomes acute, and at the same time numb. Wharton produces his vision of the city, as it impacts with no protective vigilance:

A ‘Mist of Opopanax’

113

He stood at the corner of Wall Street, looking up and down its hot summer perspective. He noticed the swirls of dust in the cracks of the pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring faces that poured by under tilted hats. (p. 469)

The scene strips Ralph of his skin, leaving him at once alive and dead: The blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of these offenses was a complete indifference to them, as though he were some vivisected animal deprived of the power of discrimination. (p. 470)49

As she had with Lily, Wharton leads to Ralph’s final moments – his obliteration of all sense – with an intense olfactory memory. Ralph thinks back to Siena: As he thought of it, there came to him, for the first time in months, that overwhelming sense of her physical nearness which had once so haunted and tortured him. Her freshness, her fragrance, the luminous haze of her youth, filled the room with a mocking glory; and he dropped his head on his hands to shut it out (pp. 471–2)

In all such moments, then, olfaction seems, in Wharton’s hands, not a mere mechanical narrative code, hoisted from some notional nineteenth-century handbook of realism, or ‘The Problem Novel’ (p. 27) of the order discussed by Mabel Lipscomb’s debating clubs, and which Ralph begins to write. It is, rather, a technique more akin to dialogue, as Wharton would express it in The Writing of Fiction: ‘It should be reserved for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore’. Such touches, she explains, generate a ‘contrast between such climaxes and the smooth effaced gliding of the narrative intervals’.50 In the final section of The Custom of the Country, however, she takes her technique further, restraining her hand, to leave the reader in a scentscape as memorable for its barren flatlands as for its sharpest peaks. In her change of focus, she encloses little Paul, and the reader, in an olfactory blank. In the grand hôtel, experience retreats to the distance of the visual: the locked books, the empty inkstands, the decorative fruits – everything seems ‘immense’, ‘immaculate’ (p. 580). Even eating seems denatured, in a dining room of ‘immense marble’ (p. 577) (the coldest, purest and, traditionally, least odoriferous of substances); and Paul’s lonely room repels engagement of any material kind: ‘the white fur rugs and brocade chairs seemed maliciously on the watch for smears and ink-spots’ (p. 588). In such a terrain, the reader is prepared for Wharton’s portent of a future as shaped by Undine and her sort – the society of spectacle, auguring late capitalism. Whether spray, mist or notes in a chord, olfaction, then, in its subtle, almost unnoticed signals, contributes to Wharton’s air of reality, her conviction that character, narrative and social subjects are embodied in a space and in a history, grounded in all the senses.

8 LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF UNDINE Margaret P. Murray

A reader will not find it easy to put up with the ‘hero’ of a long narrative who proves to be an absolutely unmitigated scoundrel. Alter, Rogue’s Progress1 A caricature does not remain interesting to the length of six hundred pages. Boynton, ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Manner’2

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country is usually regarded generically as a picaresque novel. But a novel cannot be considered picaresque without a picaroon.3 Undine Spragg is anything but a picaroon, who, by definition, survives by her wits; tends towards criminal behaviour of a financially remunerative nature, but never causes physical harm; explores the various customs and cultures of the society into which she is inserted through the episodic nature of the text and her malleable identity; brings a complete sense of ingenuousness, so that the impressions garnered on her travels through the cultural country may be left to the reader for judgement and evaluation. Ultimately, the picaroon is a charming rogue who succeeds; however, Undine is witless, vicious in her narcissism, careers from one tier of upper-class society to another, completely disingenuous, ruthless, distasteful to the reader and, ultimately, a failure. She is not the subject of The Custom of the Country, nor is she an agent of the customs or the country. The most famous picaresque novels tend to be eponymous: Roderick Random, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Though not picaresque, the subject of The Custom of the Country is most definitely contained in the title. It is the custom of the country that Edith Wharton asserts is of interest, not Undine Spragg. Like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the focus of the novel is the panorama of detail, not Icarus, who is invisible in his descent and barely visible in his demise. Undine flies too high; there is nowhere to go but down, and anyone familiar with the customs of the country could have told her it would happen, just as Daedalus told Icarus. Undine was first identified as a picaro by Blake Nevius in 1953. He draws – 115 –

116

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country a direct line of descent from the picaresque narrative to the novel of manners [because] the characteristic interest of the former, the upward or downward progress of the rogue through the social hierarchy, cannot be effectively developed without the constant and precise notation of manners.4

Nevius’s 1953 Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction has a primacy of place in the history of critical approaches to Wharton. Only two full-length books about her were written previous to Nevius. Edward K. Brown’s 1935 ‘Edith Wharton: Etudes Critiques’ is a French doctoral dissertation that had an extremely limited distribution. Percy Lubbock’s 1947 Portrait of Edith Wharton does for its subject what Rufus Griswold, referred to as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘literary executioner’, does for his. Previous to Nevius, essays and contemporaneous reviews supply the critical materials for studies of Wharton’s work. His book enters the field of Wharton studies as the first accessible scholarly study, since it contains a critical apparatus, which Lubbock’s memoir does not. Thus, Nevius assumes primacy of place as a source for the next generation of Wharton critics.5 Proceeding from this literary patrimony, Margaret McDowell, in 1976, offers what is the first essentially feminist treatment of Wharton. Published by Twayne, whose United States Authors Series was automatically purchased by public and academic libraries, it became an easily located source for critics. It is difficult to find a critical treatment of Wharton from the date of publication of McDowell’s Edith Wharton through the 1980s that does not cite this text. In her chapter on The Custom of the Country, her first subheading is a quote from Nevius: ‘The Reckless Picaro’.6 Henceforward, Undine enters what may be referred to as the ‘critical imaginary’ as a picaro. By the time Carol Wershoven, in her splendid study The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton, casually remarks in 1982 on Undine’s ‘capacity to become whatever the occasion demands’ (a characteristic of a picaroon),7 the categorization of Undine as picaroon has been internalized in the critical imaginary. Wershoven and McDowell (along with Elizabeth Ammons) became the necessary texts for a generation of feminist Wharton scholars. After them, the flood of feminist criticism grew exponentially; as did the donneé that Undine Spragg is a picaroon, and thus worthy of intense critical interest. As Stuart Miller points out, ‘one’s first and fundamental descriptive and critical judgment of a new work arises from [one’s] awareness of what kind of thing it is’.8 His epigraph to The Picaresque Novel reminds us of Irving Howe’s assessment that ‘[A] certain kind of mind, called, perhaps a little too easily, the academic mind, insists upon exhaustive rites of classification’.9 Because Nevius identifies The Custom of the Country as a picaresque novel, the protagonist, Undine, must be a picaro, a role which he does assign to her. Nevius’s legacy is transmitted to the critical community because academics need to classify. And because of this

Landscape with the Fall of Undine

117

classification, a picaresque novel is, de facto, the ‘kind of thing’ that The Custom of the Country is. Like Ethan Frome, published two years previously, The Custom of the Country is a masterful study in misdirection. Just as in Ethan Frome, where the reader’s attention is riveted by the tale of ‘thwarted love’ and the misbegotten lives of its characters, rather than the thread of narrative veracity by which the whole tale hangs, in The Custom of the Country the reader concentrates on Undine Spragg. Edith Wharton, who felt in full possession of her narrative powers in the composition of Ethan Frome, is, by 1913, able to guide the reader through her flood subject, the customs of old New York. The ‘guide’ is the narrator, just as it was in Ethan Frome, but the cynosure of all attention is the picaroon, Undine. The problem is that Undine is not a picaroon. And there lies the rub. Undine has very little in common with a picaroon, and The Custom of the Country has even less in common with a picaresque novel, which is ‘the adventurous story of a rogue’s life, usually told in the first person … [an] episodic account of wanderings, adversity and ingenious role-playing [that] incorporates a satiric view of society’. Alter goes on to point out that ‘some’ will append the term to ‘any episodic novel-on-the-road’ or because the protagonist happens to be ‘a quasi-criminal wanderer or outsider’. Of one thing he is certain: ‘picaresque literature is a literature of learning’ and the picaroon is fundamentally innocent, ‘a child of the gods … never seriously hurt and never perceptibly tainted’. ‘What is most essential in the career of a picaroon [is] the endless wanderings, the untiring assumption of new roles’.10 Undine survives by the feral instincts of the predator that she is and is the same creature she always was at the end of the novel. Any ostensible changes are merely the result of Undine’s desire to appear in a particular role. To solidify the point, in the dénouement, Wharton has Undine fleetingly consider divorcing Moffatt again. Undine exits just as she has entered: on the cusp of shedding Moffatt. The Custom of the Country is not episodic. Each chapter, each scene, depends wholly on what previously transpired. Pulling out any thread of the tale unravels the carefully crafted narrative. One reason the picaresque novel is episodic is to convey the chaos in the world it delineates.11 The implosive flaw of old New York is that it is static, unable to respond to the invasions of the likes of Popple, Van Degen and, ultimately, Undine. Further, in the picaresque plot, ‘nothing strictly happens. [It] merely records fragmented happening after fragmented happening.’12 Everything happens in The Custom of the Country, and for all the events, reasons abound. It is indeed a novel, according to the rubric of James Tuttleton, and therefore requires that events be both plausible and have an explicable relationship to the past.13 Further, The Custom of the Country is not autobiographical, nor is there a hint of first-person narration.

118

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

To succeed, a novel must have a protagonist who will engage the attentions of the reader. As the first epigraph to this essay makes clear, unmitigated scoundrels do not fit the bill. Its author, Robert Alter, implies that such a character does not warrant the reader’s attention, and Henry W. Boynton, the contemporaneous reviewer at the Nation, specifically cites Undine as particularly uninteresting, because the reader is asked to sustain interest in her for 600 pages, as noted in the second epigraph. A picaroon must be likeable, and Undine is categorically unlikable. He was not alone in his opinion. Contemporary critics of The Custom of the Country were at pains to point out how thoroughly distasteful Undine was to them. The New York Sun saw her as ‘an ideal monster … absolutely unmoral and has no sense of decency’.14 The New York Times Review of Books offered that ‘she is merely greed personified – without heart, conscience, sense of honor or sense of humor … scruples never enter her head … she has no intelligence … Undine is repellant’.15 The always mild Frederick Taber Cooper ‘almost … wince[d]’, while the staunchly American F. M. Colby writing in the North American Review ‘found [him]self disliking almost everyone in the volume’.16 James Huneker in Forum succinctly states that Undine is the ‘most disagreeable girl in newest fiction’.17 English critics were no less severe than their colonial counterparts. The Athenaeum cites her ‘monstrous record’ as ‘a cold and selfish character’.18 The Saturday Review echoes Boynton’s complaint in that ‘Mrs. Wharton has assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack between the covers of a six-hundred-page novel’. We may assume Undine to be the most detestable, because ‘She has not a single redeeming moral feature’.19 Not only is Undine not Alter’s untainted child of god, she appears to have crossed the thin line between rogue and villain. The distinction between the two is clarified by Frank Wadleigh Chandler: ‘The latter is a creature of malice, if not pathological conditions; its evil proceeds to extremes. The former is less vicious; it regards rascality with humor, or explains it as the result of social environment.’20 Whether or not Undine is malicious is an important question. We often couple the words ‘malice’ and ‘aforethought’, yet they are two distinctly different terms. Malice implies intention. Undine intends only her success at whatever is her current endeavour. Yet, her narcissism, and the complete lack of empathy, which is indeed a ‘pathological condition’ by any definition, situates her firmly in the villainous category. The reason for Ralph Marvell’s suicide is Undine’s insouciant duplicity. But the reader already is disgusted with her behaviour 270 pages before that event, when she forgets her son Paul’s second birthday. The signature statement, ‘How could you, Undine?’ hovers over the scene, as ‘the poor boy … cried his eyes out’ (p. 220). Any writer worth the cost of her ink knows that the easiest way to make a character hateful to a reader is to have that character hurt a child. Lacking a physical assault, leaving the child dissolved in tears is more than adequate to the occasion. Whether the assault is physical or

Landscape with the Fall of Undine

119

psychological, ‘the use of personal violence usually ends [her] career as a rogue and stamps [her] the villain’.21 My purpose in delineating Undine’s character is not to dispute Nevius. It is, however, central to the project of removing Undine as the focus of The Custom of the Country. If she is not a picaroon, then this is not a picaresque novel. Inversely, if this is not a picaresque novel, she is not a picaroon, and in either case, Undine is not the issue that Wharton wanted the reader to understand. ‘As the title insists’, writes Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ‘the novel was written to display “the custom of the country”’.22 Wharton wrote the book over a period extending from 1908 to 1913. Undine gestated at the same time as did Wharton’s divorce.23 It was also the period of her active affaire de coeur with the unreliable Morton Fullerton. The product of both the latter and the former is a novel in a ‘mood [that] is martial, furious, and devastating’.24 Mood, which sets the tone, should not be mistaken for autobiography. Wharton’s rage is focused on old New York, from which she had, as a divorcee, just been the recipient of double-veiled felicity. In The Custom of the Country, she demonstrates for the world exactly what level of privilege should be afforded to those who would judge her. The guide to that world is Undine Spragg, occasionally the focalizer, the one who sees, and whose perceptions the narrator tells, but more often, the one who focuses the reader’s attention on the world in which she immerses herself. As a guide to the customs of the country, Undine’s credentials might seem a bit lacking. She has not, as the Saturday Review pointed out, ‘a single redeeming moral feature’. Undine wants everything, and only a narcissist can think that everything is deserved. She is, literally, witless, devoid of perception, humour or ironic possibility. And that is rather the point. How did she gain entry to this social stratosphere? Why is she intimate with the top tier of society on two continents? And when she plummets from the height of her second marriage to Elmer Moffatt, should the reader care at all? She captures the interest of the avatar of old New York values, Ralph Marvell, as he dabbles in the salon of the society artist Claud Walsingham Popple. If Ralph is as artistically sensitive as he thinks he is, he should be nowhere near the studio of a man who ‘always subordinated art to elegance’ (p. 187), while surrounded by Knickerbockers, each ‘[un]troubled by any personal theory of art’ (p. 195). Popple fades as Ralph’s entertainment because the worst of him was that ‘he really expressed the ideals of the world he frequented’ (p. 72), of which Ralph is very much a part. What interests Ralph about Undine is simply that she ‘has nothing and is nothing but her beauty … Unsupported by any gifts of character whatever … [she is] nothing but an exquisite object’.25 Ralph, smitten by her beauty, believes that he can inscribe anything on this tabula rasa. Added to this motivation is his desire to save her from ‘Van Degenism’, a battle he has lost once in the case of his soulmate, Clare Van Degen, the other character whom

120

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Wharton posits as the best of old New York. Yet, if she is indeed the very best, why is she Clare Van Degen at all? What caused her to marry this exemplar of overly moneyed vulgarity? Wharton gives no hint. The author however does give some startling insights into this other agent of the customs of the country. The over-dressed and over-jewelled Clare does condescend to sitting for Popple to please Ralph (p. 36). Exactly as with Wharton’s peers, Clare Van Degen is appalled at the notion of divorce. Yet, her relentless pining – it would be a misnomer to call it ‘lusting’ – after Ralph seems to be absent of any moral compunctions, which are clear to even Indiana Frusk, who simply states the obvious when she names her ‘A woman who’s in love with another woman’s husband’ (p. 347). Clare follows her husband’s formula for ‘domestic happiness’ to the letter: ‘Marry somebody who likes all the things you don’t, and make love to somebody who likes all the things you do’ (p. 174). Finally, her yearnings are rewarded when she lends Ralph money, and he ‘kissed her vehemently’ (p. 455). Beyond the sexual, there are also Clare’s social sins. She finds Elmer Moffatt insufferably vulgar, yet is able to endure him for the perverse entertainment value he offers. With the insouciance of the hunter who does not realize that she is the prey (as is all of old New York), she offers that ‘it might be amusing to fish him out’ as a representative of the ‘picturesque types’ for a performance in the drawing room (p. 216). It is left to Laura Fairford to poke the tiger, as she ‘seemed to enjoy provoking him to fresh excesses of slang and hyperbole’ (p. 252). It is in scenes such as this that the manners indicate the morals, demonstrating the inverse of James Tuttleton’s rubric for the novel of manners: ‘Sometimes morals and manners are so inextricably mixed that we cannot tell whether characters act as they do because it is morally right or because it is socially proper’.26 It is socially improper to offer hospitality to a guest who thinks himself warmly received, yet is there only for comic entertainment. Morally, it comes under the same heading as Hawthorne’s unpardonable sin – the cold-blooded violation of the sanctity of the human heart: using another human being for one’s personal purpose, without consideration of how that person would respond if they knew the purpose. The narrator of The Custom of the Country points out that ‘Every Wall Street term had its equivalent in the language of Fifth Avenue’ (p. 537). Wharton leaves it to the reader to decide what is worse: the use of slang or the use of people? Ultimately, Clare and Ralph are the same person. ‘She is light and frivolous, without strength of will or depth of purpose’ (p. 215). What separates them from Undine are manners, which dissolve upon excruciation, and energy. Undine is always energetic, ‘doubling and twisting’ even when at rest (pp. 6, 222). The Dagonets are characterized by their singular languor. Wolff has noticed that Ralph’s ‘habitual postures’ are ‘sitting, leaning, waiting, reclining’.27 These too are the characteristic postures of Walt Whitman, a favourite of Wharton’s, and the topic of

Landscape with the Fall of Undine

121

the arrhythmic Ralph’s essay, ‘The Rhythmical Structures of Walt Whitman’ (p. 77). But whereas the reader waits for Whitman’s propulsive moment when he is launched into the swirling mass of humanity that he constantly addresses, waiting for Ralph to do anything is a vain occupation, since ‘energy is vulgar’.28 Even Urban Dagonet knows that his grandson is useless, as he explains to Abner Spragg that he could not have afforded to teach his heir to work (p. 122). Karin Garlepp Burns identifies Ralph as a ‘Romantic poet’.29 She seems to be categorizing him as a Byronesque figure. Yet Whitman, a product of the American Romantic period, may be classified as the last Romantic poet or the first American modern poet. The crevasse that separates the manners of modernism and Romanticism is the focus of The Custom of the Country, for manners are the signifiers of ‘a culture’s hum and buzz of implication … made up of half-uttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm.’30 Simply put, manners are customs. Nonetheless, the ever-recumbent Ralph Marvell – and surely the name cannot be a coincidence – acts more like Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress: ‘Had we but world enough and time … / We would sit down, and think which way / to walk, and pass our long love’s day’. This is exactly Ralph’s psychological position, reified in his physical inertia. The alternate to seizing love’s possibilities immediately – and this is, after all, a honeymoon – is death: ‘The graves a fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace’.31 Ralph unknowingly accepts the role of the speaker in Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Mower’s Song’, as Undine becomes Juliana: ‘And flow’rs, and grass, and I and all, / For Juliana comes, and she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me’.32 Both Ralph and his higher thoughts of creativity, artistic and hubristic, will be mowed down by his inability to think clearly in the presence of Undine. Undine, in an interior monologue, asks a simple question: ‘Why should [old New York] make room for an intruder’? The answer is that they should not, but they do, because ‘fashionable society was horribly immoral’ (p. 62), a concept that is beyond the pale to the amoral Undine. Besides ‘saving’ her from ‘Van Degenism’, Ralph’s entire purpose is to inscribe himself on the tabula rasa that is his beautiful object. He will teach her to think as he does and feel as he does. Ticien Marie Sassoubre notices that ‘Ralph and Undine share neither sensibilities nor interests. Instead, Ralph’s decision to pursue her is described in terms of his physical attraction to her and his desire to complete her spiritually.’33 His Pygmalionesque aspiration demonstrates him as no less a narcissist than Undine. His ‘affection for Undine is the lust of a creator to shape’.34 He knows that he should not be socializing with people who live in hotels. He knows that his hurried engagement of two months is inappropriate. And, if he cared to notice, despite his befuddlement at Undine’s beauty, she gives away her entire hand at the dinner she has with his family, when she defends divorce as an invaluable social tool.

122

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Yet he cannot wait to whisk her away to a wedding journey in the stifling countryside of Siena, where she is held incommunicado for four months, to admire him as he admires shifting cloud formations. And yet, so lost is he in his own fantasy of life, which is taking place while he fantasizes it, that ‘it came to him with the sharpness of a knife-thrust … that she was sick to death of being alone with him’ (p. 146). Undine is quite correct in her assessment of her husband and honeymoon. The purpose of the wedding journey, besides that of accustoming the new couple to each other, is to insinuate the newlyweds into society as a couple. By not fulfilling his obligation, Ralph fails on a social level, and his narcissistic reason for doing so is a moral failure. He loses faith in himself, his ‘indestructible dream’, what he had imagined would be ‘the great adventure to come’ (p. 83). Like John Marcher in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ ‘he had never thought of her [Undine] … but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use’.35 Ralph constantly imagines what his life will be like, and when he realizes what it actually is, unable to summon the raw energy to save his son, the beast leaps, and he is gone. But like another Ralph, in another Jamesian tale, The Portrait of a Lady, he has enabled the entry of beautiful, young American woman into the European society of which American manners are an outgrowth, a declension clarified by an anomalous character in Wharton’s fiction, the Howellsean spokesman, Charles Bowen. The trendy young set’s manners are ‘imitating the imitation’ (p. 273), the latter being American upper-class manners, the former a mirror image of European manners. The only other function that Bowen serves is that of a social appurtenance to Laura Fairford. He meets his old friend, Count Raymond de Chelles, at the Nouveau Luxe (the European watering ground for the fashionable Van Degen set), while composing a letter to Mrs Fairford, thus solidifying the connection between the two social strata. As in the instance of Mrs Fairford and Clare Van Degen’s provocation of Elmer Moffatt, Bowen too likes to ‘slum’. In this case, he enjoys ‘the undisturbed amusement … the special titillation’ of surveying ‘a phantom “society”, with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice’ (p. 273). Regardless of the nascence of the facial expression, the use of a ‘smirk’ is never approbatory, and the means to that end do not justify it. However, his dinner guest, de Chelles, a practitioner of manners solidified by centuries of aristocratic privilege, is assured that his annual two-month sojourn amidst this crowd will enhance his ‘pursuit [of ] discriminating taste and transient ardour’ (p. 275). He, too, is stricken by the beauty of the married Undine, and in rapid succession, those manners which are meant to represent centuries of moral rectitude will find themselves sacrificed to expediency. The bastion of social order is depicted as sordid, deceitful and hypocritical. The de Chelles family knows it is impossible for the Count to marry Undine, and

Landscape with the Fall of Undine

123

the women cut her for simply sullying him with her company. When she tells de Chelles she can no longer see him – a strategic ploy to engage him – he rains down ‘his wrathful comments on his relatives’ (p. 410). Yet Raymond, twice as cultured as Ralph Marvell (the former dabbles in art and music, whereas Ralph’s literary aspirations are simply ‘scribbled’ (p. 75)), is quite comfortable in suggesting that Undine seek an annulment of her marriage, a technical sidestepping of probity, while he maintains the appearance of virtue (p. 410). Even though the grand dames of the famille de Chelles know that ‘manner and morals, alas, [have] deplorably declined’ they believe ‘the customs of Saint Désert’ will rehabilitate her reputation – if not her (p. 514). Undine’s first instruction in the blatant hypocrisy of the customs of the country of the French aristocracy comes under the tutelage of de Chelles’s cousin, the Princess Estradina, who uses her as a blind for her extramarital affairs. From this point on, the slights, equivocations and duplicities tumble over each other. Undine does become the Countess, eventually Marquise, de Chelles. Like her second marriage, she brings no intelligence, culture or wit as dowry. Her only currency is her beauty, which still enchants. De Chelles knows he should not be with her, ‘signaled’ by ‘the change of [his] expression’ when he encounters Undine with her fast friends, as he socializes with ‘the most eminent ladies’ (p. 355). Unfortunately, she soon learns, as she did as Mrs Marvell, that her life is not as glamorous as she thought it would be. She is to lead a penurious life, and bear the onus of superficiality – and what is beauty but superficiality? She simply wants what she has always wanted: fine clothes, manicures, massages and lively, if déclassé, company. She is silently censured because she wants to heat the gallery properly, a financial burden, while de Chelles endlessly abets his brother Hubert’s profligacy. Technically a widow, she is barely acceptable to his family, yet it is well known, and entirely acceptable, that Raymond carries on love affairs on his trips to Paris for ‘politics’. Likewise, everyone knows about Lilli Estradina’s affairs, yet she is received everywhere, for the sake of her family’s eminence. Mannered rectitude completely collapses when, for the sake of financial expediency, Hubert is allowed to marry during the mourning period for his father. De Chelles compounds the violation by agreeing to a season in Paris during the same period. Yet, when Undine suggests a separation, when it is apparent that Raymond is no longer in love with her, he responds that ‘It’s one of the things we don’t do’ (p. 528). Obviously, there are very few things that are considered beyond the pale. But each of those few exceptions have to do with the appearance of morality and not morality itself. It is perhaps the final irony that Undine, who is wholly dedicated to her own appearance, should be undone by a family working in concert to preserve the appearance of morals, which they substantiate through their impeccable manners.

124

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

De Chelles is finally moved to fury upon discovery that Undine is having the talismanic tapestries appraised. He excoriates her because she has done exactly what he has: You come among us from a country we don’t know and can’t imagine … You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean … aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about, and we’re fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways, and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honorable for us!

Undine rightly points out that his honour and decency are perfectly exemplified in speaking to a woman in such a manner (pp. 545–6). The deterioration of manners has come full circle: from European to old American to new American, back to Europe. Raymond de Chelles married a woman he should not have, ignoring all she cared about, while he indulged in the behaviours for which the young American Undine, who gave the appearance of immorality, earns his contempt. Yet her only sexual sin was with Van Degen, long ago and it was not for the pleasure, but what his money could buy. She has long regretted that misstep. De Chelles’s ostensible reverence for family, which does not seem to include his wife, is the basis of his ‘honour and decency’. Undine, ‘the Apex puritan’ (p. 353), cannot fathom his moral code, not because she is moral, but because he is immoral, yet purports, in the theatricality of his statement, to be moral (p. 546). Therein lies a logical disconnect. Perhaps Edmund Morgan’s famous tenet regarding the Puritans can be slightly edited to reflect the calibre of aristocratic French values: ‘When morals became the handmaid of genealogy, virtue no longer deserved its name’.36 Virtue’s requirement is that one rise to meet moral challenges. Raymond de Chelles is a moral challenge. Lacking virtue, Undine must leave him. Ralph Marvell, unable to rise to the challenge of Undine’s legal kidnapping of their son, is by this standard certainly not a virtuous man. Rescuing Paul is a duty of the highest moral order. All Ralph needed to do was ask Clare Van Degen to use her despicable husband’s funds. But Clare and Ralph cannot even discuss the possibility. ‘The novel’, Tuttleton avers, ‘emphasize[s] character as revealed in everyday life’.37 Perhaps the greatest irony is that the letter of recommendation required to introduce one to ‘better’ society is called ‘a character’. No one in The Custom of the Country is in the position to offer one. It is ultimately the character – in both senses of the word – of Undine that is crucial to discrimination of interest in The Custom of the Country. She must be compared to the great picaroons in English-language literature. Contemporaneous and modern readers nod appreciatively at Moll Flanders’s tactics, as she pleads her belly to escape the noose. One can sympathize with her, because hanging is a morally inappropriate response to pickpocketing. So too is there a sigh of

Landscape with the Fall of Undine

125

relief as Huck Finn allows that, well, yes, there is smallpox on the raft. Otherwise, the best that can be hoped for is that Jim will be returned to Miss Watson, who is quietly vicious in her pietistic hypocrisy. After all, there is too much truth in Huck’s contention that ‘I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another’.38 Yet what sympathy is appropriate to the situation when Undine rips her son from all that he knows and loves in order to deploy and finally sacrifice him as a strategic pawn in her latest campaign to snare yet another husband? In this misdirection of sympathy lies Wharton’s mastery. Throughout the picaresque tradition readers groan knowingly at each faux pas of the picaroon. In the case of Undine, one winces. Perhaps the last test of the picaroon is that readers must like them. And what reader will confess to liking Undine? If Undine is not a picaroon, she is merely ‘a very nasty woman indeed’.39 If one removes Undine as the centre of The Custom of the Country, instead choosing to focus on the title Wharton gave the book, what is left is the conduct of Edith Wharton’s peers. Left open to scrutiny, the mores of these people make it difficult to understand how Lewis can see Ralph Marvell as ‘suggest[ing] Edith’s growing tenderness toward the vanishing New York she has known’.40 Logic demands that the reader recognize that if the resolutely moral Lily Bart crashes down, within this same social hierarchy, readers should be unsurprised at the success of the determinedly amoral Undine Spragg. Undine’s career as an adventuress flames out five times, with four men, in what seems, at 600 pages, a rather short space for what is such a rich enterprise. Each episode grows organically out of the last; yet, like Icarus, ‘her aspirations beat an impatient wing’ (p. 352). The reader knows that she can aspire no higher than she has already flown, for ‘her imagination was incapable’, Wharton writes, ‘of long flights’ (p. 236). It is always someone else who suggests her next step. Her beauty will fail – a process Moffatt suggests has started – she has no one’s affections to depend on and, like Icarus, will fall unnoticed from the scene. All that will be left is a bi-continental social landscape, rich in detail, but ultimately inconsequential to the task of assessing Edith Wharton’s life and art.

9 GIRLS FROM THE PROVINCES: WHARTON’S UNDINE SPRAGG AND CATHER’S THEA KRONBORG Julie Olin-Ammentorp

In 1948, Lionel Trilling observed that Henry James’s novel The Princess Casamassima ‘belongs to a great line of novels which runs through the nineteenth century as … the very backbone of its fiction’, that is, the novel about ‘the Young Man from the Provinces’.1 According to Trilling, this subgenre – which includes (among others) Balzac’s Père Goriot, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Dickens’s Great Expectations – tells the story of the young man who goes off to ‘seek his fortune’ in the enticing but bewildering world of the great city.2 The young man, usually ‘equipped with poverty, pride, and intelligence’, is ‘likely to be in some doubt about his parentage’; he ‘move[s] from an obscure position into one of considerable eminence in Paris or London or St. Petersburg’. Although he meets obstacles, ‘it is not his part merely to be puzzled and hurt … [H]e is concerned to know how the political and social world are run and enjoyed; he wants a share in power and pleasure and in consequence he takes real risks’. Through his experience readers ‘have learned most of what we know about modern society, about class and its strange rituals, about power and influence and about money, the hard fluent fact in which modern society has its being’.3 Trilling and others, however, have said little about what one might call the younger sister of the novel about the young man from the provinces – the novel about the girl from the provinces.4 Yet in many ways, Trilling’s delineation of the subgenre describes not only the novels he mentions, but also Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915). Wharton and Cather – both of whom were widely read in nineteenthcentury English and European novels like the ones Trilling mentions – play variations on the theme of the young man from the provinces, chronicling the careers of ambitious young women who leave the provinces of their childhood to try for success in the sophisticated, confusing and morally complex world of the great city. – 127 –

128

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Moreover, looking at Wharton’s Undine Spragg and Cather’s Thea Kronborg from the perspective of Trilling’s concept allows us to read both characters, both novels and perhaps both novelists in rather different and possibly more nuanced ways. Historically, Thea and Undine have been seen in very different terms. Undine has been reviled since her first appearance in print, with contemporary reviewers calling her ‘the most repellent heroine we have encountered in many a long day’, ‘a mere monster of vulgarity’, and ‘[c]old, greedy, heartless, and wayward, without a soul’.5 Edmund Wilson labelled Undine for a generation in 1941, calling her ‘the prototype in fiction of the “gold-digger”, of the international cocktail bitch’.6 In 1975 R. W. B. Lewis described Undine, slightly more sympathetically, as what Edith Wharton might have been if ‘all her best and most loveable … features had been suddenly cut away’.7 More recently, feminist criticism has worked from Charles Bowen’s comment in the novel that Undine is the ‘monstrously perfect result of the [American] system’ of ‘pretend[ing]’ that money and what it can buy are ‘what really constitute life’ (p. 208), portraying her not so much victimizer as victim. If Undine is ‘monstrous’, critics such as Cynthia Griffin Wolff have argued, it is because she has had her energies and abilities ‘grotesquely perverted … by reasons of her sex’.8 As a woman, she is excluded by her society from achieving her ambition – reaching the pinnacle of social and financial prominence – through any means except marriage. Even such arguments are, of course, apologies for Undine – a character readers love to hate. In contrast, readers love to love Cather’s Thea Kronborg, the young woman who ‘makes [her]self born’ as an artist.9 Contemporary reviews state admiringly that ‘Thea Kronborg … was a genius’; ‘Thea Kronborg we believe in … She becomes a great singer not only because she is born with the gift, but because she has the strength to develop it’.10 The remark of one early reviewer – ‘Sorry indeed must be the condition of one in whom Thea Kronborg’s struggle would not stir some answering pulse’ – captures the tone most critics assume when they discuss Thea.11 Yet pairing Thea and Undine allows us to see how similar these two characters are: how egotistical and sometimes ruthless Thea can be – that is, how much like Undine. This, in turn, allows us to see Undine as more like Thea, and therefore a bit less ‘monstrous’ than she is usually thought. In the end, Thea and Undine are separated by some fundamental differences; but first it is important to see how much they have in common as ‘girls from the provinces’ – and how much they resemble their literary brothers. Like Trilling’s young man, ‘the girl from the provinces’ comes seemingly from nowhere – that is, from a place so provincial that it seems to have no meaningful association with the kind of life and activities she will pursue in the big city. In describing Eden Bower, one of the main characters in her 1920 short story ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’, Cather summarizes the mystery of such figures:

Girls from the Provinces

129

People like Eden Bower are inexplicable. Her father sold farming machinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with no acquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from her earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with the people about her … Before she was out of short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be much admired by men and would have everything she wanted.12

Not even Eden’s own family can explain how she came to have the ambitions and the talents she possesses: like the young man Trilling describes, there seems to be ‘some doubt about [her] parentage’.13 Although there is no biological mystery behind Eden Bower, Thea Kronborg or Undine Spragg, Cather and Wharton portray the gulf that separates these young women from their provincial families, as well as the vast differences that lie between these girls’ provincial upbringing and their adult successes in a wider and more sophisticated world. Like Eden, Thea is a mystery to her family; her unusual musical ability leads her older siblings, Gus, Charley and Anna, to resent what they see as unfair special treatment given to her. When Thea returns home from her first sojourn in Chicago, for instance, her older brothers refuse to join the family in meeting her train; Charley tells his mother that Thea is ‘inclined to think pretty well of herself, anyhow, and if you go treating her like company, there’ll be no living in the house with her’. Shortly after her arrival, Thea remarks that, as she has overtaxed her voice during the winter, she should not sing at a young woman’s funeral. But as she says this, she notices a ‘look on Anna’s face’ which she had seen ‘often before’; only now, however, does she realize ‘that the look was distinctly spiteful’ and that ‘Anna had always disliked her’. (Anna had long believed that ‘everyone knew that music was nothing very real, and that it did not matter in a girl’s relationships with people’.)14 After Thea spends an evening singing with the Mexican community on the fringes of Moonstone, Anna, Gus and Charley (who look down on the Mexicans) make cutting remarks about her choice of company, driving Thea to see how different she is from her own siblings. Thea’s defence of the Mexicans as ‘kind’, ‘clean’ and ‘hav[ing] good manners’, as well as musically talented, carries no weight with them. Thea is so upset by their attack on her that she becomes ‘white as the Sunday tablecloth’; her legs are ‘heavy as lead’ as she climbs to her own room, where she realizes that ‘there was a hostility in the house now which [her bedroom] door could not shut out’ and acknowledges that ‘This would be her last summer in that room’. ‘Tears r[u]n down her cheeks’ as she realizes that – sooner than she had imagined, or is quite ready for – she must make a final break with her family: ‘she saw that Anna and Gus and Charley were among the people she had always recognized as her natural enemies’.15 Although her biological kin, her own family seems no relation to her. Even her Aunt Tillie,

130

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

with her interest in the theatre, is a ridiculous figure, someone from whom Thea wants to distance herself. Eventually Thea will come to see that she does have her roots in the family – or at least in some members of it. As she grows into adulthood Thea begins to resemble her mother both in appearance and in character. When Fred Ottenburg speculates on what Thea’s life would have been like had she stayed in Moonstone and married Ray Kennedy – ‘Your children would have been the realities then’ – he gives a fair description of Thea’s mother. By the same token, Thea’s mother is described as the only one in Moonstone who understands what Thea’s first music teacher, Wunsch, means when he says that Thea has ‘talent’: ‘to any other woman there, it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled and must play in public’ – in short, to be treated like a Lily Fisher, Thea’s less able rival. In contrast, ‘Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice four hours a day’. Although Mrs Kronborg lacks ‘talent’ herself, her father ‘had played the oboe in an orchestra in Sweden’; she has an innate grasp of what it means to take music seriously. Yet in many ways, Thea is a mystery both to herself and to her family. As she leaves home for the second and final time, she feels only the vast distance – temperamental as well as geographic – between herself and her family, and ‘crie[s] all the way to Denver’.16 Similarly, Undine seems almost unrelated to her own parents: Mr. and Mrs. Spragg were both given to such long periods of ruminating apathy that the student of inheritance might have wondered whence Undine derived her overflowing activity. The answer would have been obtained by observing her father’s business life. From the moment he set foot in Wall Street Mr. Spragg became another man. (p. 119)

Only those who catch a glimpse of Mr Spragg’s single-minded determination in business matters can have any comprehension of how this apparently drab and exhausted couple could have produced the destructive dynamo of Undine’s energy.17 Moreover, as Wolff argues, Undine has learned to get what she wants ‘in numerous confrontations’ with her father.18 Nevertheless, the biological connection between the stylish, energetic Undine and her lacklustre progenitors is difficult for the outside observer to see. Undine’s overall relationship to her family is strikingly similar to Thea’s: both distance themselves. Undine seems as baffled as the reader to think that these people are her parents. When she asks her father to buy her season tickets for an opera box, for instance, he jokes, ‘I don’t s’pose you’re thinking of taking mother and me?’ – a remark ‘so obviously comic that they all laughed’ (p. 42); none of them seem to think it possible that parents and child would have similar interests, much less choose to attend the same event together. At times Undine treats her parents as if they were employees, people she has hired to facilitate her social

Girls from the Provinces

131

success, much as Carry Fisher in The House of Mirth works to introduce the nouveaux riches to New York’s upper-crust society. Accordingly, she also treats them as if she would like to fire them when they do not perform to her expectations. Frustrated by her limited success in New York, Undine blames much of her failure on her parents; ‘ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes’, she is ‘exasperated’ by ‘the blunders of her parents’ (p. 57), such as her father’s initial refusal to buy box seats at the opera – tickets he really cannot afford. Similarly, after Mrs Spragg mentions that Ralph Marvell has called for Undine in her absence and inexplicably remained to chat, she adds, ‘but I couldn’t make out what he was after’. Undine replies ‘with … chill commiseration’, ‘“You never can,” … and turned away’ (p. 51). At moments, Undine seems, like Thea, to count her family among her ‘natural enemies’. Trilling mentions that the young man from the provinces ‘is concerned to know how the political and social world are run and enjoyed; he wants a share in power and pleasure’.19 But he does not mention the characteristics that the desire for ‘power and pleasure’ may require; Wharton and Cather, however, imply much in their portraits of their young women. Foremost among the requisite traits are ‘talent, ambition, hard-headedness, egocentricity, and a certain ruthlessness’ – as one critic has summarized the characteristics of Cather’s Thea Kronborg,20 though this description suits Undine Spragg just as well. Although ‘ambition’, even blind or driving ambition, is frequently associated with Undine, many descriptions of Thea establish that she is equally ambitious – as well as egocentric, hard-headed and ruthless. In fact, many phrases used by or about one character apply equally well to the other; even readers who know both novels well might have a hard time knowing whether Thea or Undine is the character described in the following lines. One of the young women, asked what she ‘expects’ from life, replies, ‘Why, everything!’; the other says ‘I want only impossible things’.21 One character reflects that many ‘young people … meant to have things. But the difference was that she was going to get them!’22 Of both it could be said that they ‘will always get on better with men’.23 Both are reassured about their prospects by influential men: when one says, ‘I can’t wait to be off … I want to get at it!’ her wealthy male companion replies, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it’; the other is told by a socially prominent older man (after she states that she wants ‘everything!’), ‘My child, if you look like that you’ll get it’.24 Ambition makes both self-centred: a minor character notes of one, ‘She is very much interested in herself ’; another character tells her that she always has ‘an ulterior motive’.25 Both Undine and Thea want ‘everything’ – and are willing to do almost anything to ‘get it’. Further similarities between the ‘monstrous’ Undine and the much-admired Thea run deep. Both are repulsed by pictures of conventional domestic happiness, perhaps semi-consciously aware of how conventional female domesticity

132

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

would impair their ascent to the pinnacle of success. When Undine finds out she is pregnant, she expresses no happiness, nor is she pleased that she and her husband Ralph Marvell are establishing a family. Instead she bursts into tears and complains that pregnancy ‘takes a year – a whole year out of life!’ (p. 184). When Ralph attempts to reassure her that her feelings will change for the better, she refuses to believe it; he is struck by ‘the chill’ of her reaction towards the news (p. 184) and ‘the cold competence of her tone’ as she informs him that there is no mistake about her pregnancy (p. 185). Ralph’s words do eventually prove true, but not in the sense he intended. Undine begins to have some kind feelings for Paul, their son, once she realizes that her appearance with him in public is becoming to her; together they form a mother-and-son tableau attractive to the French aristocrat Raymond de Chelles, from whom she is hoping to extract a marriage proposal.26 Similarly, in her marriage to de Chelles, she comes to understand the importance of producing an heir in order to continue his family line, thereby assuring her own social position – but only after de Chelles begins tacitly expressing his disapproval of her by avoiding the marriage bed. In short, she becomes interested in having children only when she sees doing so as a rung on her ladder to social pre-eminence. Thea is similarly uninterested in conventional domestic happiness. When millionaire Fred Ottenburg tests her interest in marriage by describing conventional wedded bliss – ‘a comfortable flat … a summer camp up in the woods, musical evenings, and a family to bring up’ – Thea’s response is that such a prospect is ‘Perfectly hideous!’27 Such things would only impede her musical career. Even in physical terms, both girls are described as strikingly similar in one regard: the expressiveness of their backbone. Early in the novel, when Undine is displeased by her father’s reluctance to buy her an opera box, she ‘swept down the room … with scorn and anger in every line of her arrogant young back’ (p. 44); her spine – now rigid, now flexible – expresses her moods throughout the novel. Thea’s back is also expressive, whether she is singing (‘Her whole back seemed plastic, seemed to be moulding itself to the galloping rhythm of the song’) or hiking in the Southwest, when Fred Ottenburg tells her that ‘I’m becoming an expert at reading your meaning in your back. I’m behind you so much on these single-foot trails.’28 Both, in short, have plenty of backbone, which is exactly what they need for the road they will travel. Both girls are also fiercely competitive. From an early age, Undine Spragg judges her own beauty – which is, she knows, the main factor in her social success – against the beauty of other girls. On the summer trips Undine requires her parents to organize, she ‘discover[s] that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors’ (p. 53). She is aware that in ‘any competition on ordinary lines’ (those of ‘youth and beauty’) she is likely to triumph over all the other women present (p. 57). But when she finds that the

Girls from the Provinces

133

‘ordinary lines’ are not always the only ‘lines’ on which women are judged, she is confused and angered; her first experience of this is when she observes that she is ‘much handsomer’ than plain Nettie Wincher of Washington, DC, but realizes ‘that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness’ (p. 54). She is further frustrated when, during her years in France, she finds that the Madame de Trézac whose name appears so often in the Paris newspapers, is, in fact, her old rival Nettie (p. 286). The only factor other than physical beauty which Undine allows as a component in social success is social standing, or (as Henry James’s Daisy Miller might put it), how ‘exclusive’ a woman is – how high her standards are, both for her surroundings and for her companions. From her adolescence Undine is locked in competition with her neighbour Indiana Frusk; when Undine persuades her parents to take her to ‘the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House’ (p. 52), she perceives that its relative opulence has ‘the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks … making it possible for Undine … to chill [Indiana’s] advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life’ (p. 53). In Potash Springs, Virginia, she is ‘enraged’ when she hears Nettie Wincher and her parents describing the resort at which they are all staying as a ‘“dreadful hole”’ in which they have ‘nearly served their term’ and realizes that the Winchers have ‘classed her with the “hotel crew”’ (pp. 55, 56). She wants to exclude others, not to be excluded – and, unlike Daisy, she perceives the difference. Thea is just as competitive as Undine. Moreover, her sense of competition is much like Undine’s: she cannot comprehend (and is enraged by) women who have succeeded without having what she sees as the requisite attributes. Thea’s wrath, however, is triggered not by physical beauty, but by girls and women who have attained a level of success beyond her own, though they do not sing as well as she does.29 Her ‘Indiana Frusk’ is Lily Fisher, who steals the spotlight by winning some of the best roles available in Moonstone. Thea is aware that Lily ‘sang all songs and played all parts alike’ – and therefore cannot comprehend Lily’s popularity. Thea’s competitiveness with Lily reaches such a pitch that she reassures herself bitterly that she, Thea, ‘would rather be hated than be stupid, any day’; when she holds a seashell to her ear in her dream, she hears ‘distant voices calling, “Lily Fisher! Lily Fisher!”’ In her Chicago years, although she has begun to mature and to find herself as an artist, Thea expresses an equally bitter hatred for some other singers. Of Jessie Darcey, a popular soprano, Thea remarks, ‘I hate her for the sake of what I used to think a singer might be’. Even when she has become a successful opera singer in the final section of the novel, she is not beyond hating rivals who have succeeded beyond what she sees as their deserts, remarking that one soprano sings her role ‘big enough, and vulgar enough’. At the same time, however, she defends another singer whom she sees as ‘a great artist, whether she’s

134

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

in voice or not’, suggesting that her judgements, even when harsh, stem not merely from jealousy of another’s success, but from high standards of artistry.30 Both Wharton and Cather illustrate, moreover, the rapid, sometimes confusing education of Undine and Thea in a range of matters for which their provincial upbringing could not have prepared them; they are, like Trilling’s young man, ‘confronted by situations whose meanings are dark to [them]’.31 Thea, like Undine, is not above blaming her family (and her provincial background in general) for her lack of knowledge about the more sophisticated world. She must learn, quickly, a wide range of skills: how to sit – that is, not with ‘her knees far apart, her gloved hands lying stiffly in her lap, like a country girl’; how to acknowledge, even to herself, her own deepest artistic aspirations; how to work with a cynical teacher without being overwhelmed by cynicism herself. During her work in Chicago with her teacher Harsanyi – work that is crucial to her formation as an artist – ‘Things came too fast for her; she had not had enough preparation. There were times when she came home from her lesson and lay upon her bed hating Wunsch and her family, hating a world that had let her grow up so ignorant’.32 Undine too must learn many things – for instance, not to describe the upper class as ‘swell’ and ‘stylish’; to use locutions other than ‘“I don’t care if I do” when her host asked her to try some grapes, and “I wouldn’t wonder” when she thought any one was trying to astonish her’ (pp. 34–5). She must learn that the ‘new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink’ recommended in the Sunday paper is not necessarily in better taste than plain white stationery (p. 18), and that gilding and a ‘lavish diffusion of [electric] light’ (p. 32) is not necessarily an indication of social aristocracy. After her first year in Chicago, Thea reflects that ‘language was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away’.33 To some extent, both girls fear ‘giving themselves away’ – that their provincialism will be conspicuous just when it is most important to be (or at least to seem) a city sophisticate. Of the two, Undine is the more fearful, refining her gestures as well as her expressions, and becoming embarrassed when Midwestern friends just arrived in New York use the vocabulary she has discarded, the broad gestures she has refined, or otherwise reveal their provincial origins. Thea, as we will see, gradually becomes less fearful of giving herself away, and eventually is able to select the best of both the city she has mastered and the provinces she has left behind. But the manner in which Thea and Undine teach themselves also suggests what, in the end, separates these two young women: Undine learns the lessons that turn her from a provincial into a cosmopolitan – or at least the facsimile of one – by imitation; Thea learns them by becoming more and more herself. Paradoxically, Thea, though she has made a life of singing and acting a range of roles, is always essentially herself, while Undine – who is never called on to play a formal role, but

Girls from the Provinces

135

who is constantly pretending to be someone she is not – has, aside from her ambition, no essential self. In his remarks on the young man from the provinces, Trilling notes that the young man setting off ‘to seek his fortune’ is, in the tradition of the folk tale, really ‘seeking himself ’.34 To a large extent this observation is true of Thea. Even in listening half enviously to the ‘staccato accents’ of some presumably more sophisticated East Coast travellers, Thea thinks, ‘the important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was not’. Cather does not mean this simplistically: after all, Thea is embarking on a career which will require her to ‘pretend’ to be a wide range of people on stage. Even in doing so, however, Thea is seeking herself: ‘It was as if she had an appointment to meet the rest of herself sometime, somewhere’ – the self that is the best singer she can possibly be.35 This paradox leads to another: in seeking ‘the rest of herself ’, she is seeking not herself, but art. In My Ántonia Cather would write that happiness is ‘be[ing] dissolved into something complete and great’.36 This is exactly what happens to Thea when she is singing her best: lost in the music, she becomes the music – and, simultaneously, her best self. Only by caring for art, rather than for her own success or her own individuality, does she simultaneously become her best self and achieve her greatest success. Applying Trilling’s remark – that the young man seeking his fortune is really seeking himself – to Undine is a different matter. Near the opening of The Custom of the Country Wharton observes that Undine was ‘fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative … she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met’ (p. 19). Early in her career, Undine formulates one of her ‘guiding principles’: ‘It’s better to watch than to ask questions’ (p. 65, italics in original). In fact, she watches and imitates so successfully that she is able to marry her way up the social ladder, becoming – at least for the crucial time before each marriage proposal – exactly the sort of young woman her next prospective husband wants her to be. But except for her ambition, Undine has no central self; as Wolff has written, ‘at the core of Undine’s being is a void’.37 She ‘seeks her fortune’ in a merely literal way through the fortunes of her consecutive husbands. Possessing no central self, she can have no personal integrity; she is loyal to no one and has no principle except her own ambition. In spite of her many successes, Undine will ultimately fail – largely because her understanding of what constitutes success is too narrow. The novel is bookended with scenes which suggest her defining limitation. Early in the novel, during her dinner with the Fairfords, Undine ignores the indications that to be truly successful a woman must cultivate her mind as well as her beauty. Similarly, near the novel’s end, the plain yet successful Nettie Wincher (now Madame de Trézac) explains to Undine why she has not been admitted to the most exclusive levels of French society: she bores people. Nettie explains, ‘a woman has got to be something more than good-looking to have a chance to be intimate with them: she’s

136

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

got to know what’s being said about things’ (p. 541); moreover, she must be able to express interesting ideas of her own. Even being told in such plain language what she must do to achieve the success she wants, however, Undine fails to rise to the occasion. After a brief effort to ‘cultivate’ her understanding by attending ‘one or two lectures’ and going to the Louvre (for a morning), she finds that, although she has plenty of opinions, ‘everybody appeared to know about the things she thought she had discovered, and her comments clearly produced more bewilderment than interest’ (p. 542). Concluding that Nettie must simply have been wrong, she returns to her dressmaker and those who help her ‘cultivate’ not her mind but her physical appearance. Never willing to lose herself in the larger world as Thea loses herself in music, Undine will always remain peripheral to that larger world. Many critics have suggested that Undine will eventually hurdle the obstacle she faces at the end of the novel, as she has leapt over other obstacles which had seemed insuperable; but it is equally possible that, as the years roll past and Undine’s beauty (in spite of her best efforts) fades, she will be decreasingly successful and increasingly desperate, bitterly wondering how she could have failed where someone as plain as Nettie Wincher has succeeded. A further distinction between Thea and Undine is their attitude towards their provincial roots. Despite Thea’s turning her back so decidedly on Moonstone, she eventually returns to ‘Moonstone standards’ in some matters. Undine, in contrast, looks back to Apex only when it is strategic to do so. For instance, both young women refer at times to the moral standards, and specifically the sexual standards, of their youth in the provinces: the assumption that women should be faithful within marriage and celibate outside it. This is a standard to which Undine adheres – usually – but not so much because she wishes to adhere to a ‘moral standard’ per se as because doing so seems habitual with her. For instance, when Madame de Trézac suggests to Undine that, within the code of what is socially acceptable in French society, she might be able to carry on a discreet affair, Undine rejects the concept by invoking the purity of her origins, saying, ‘We don’t look at things that way out at Apex’ – a reply that makes Madame de Trézac blush and reassure Undine that she – a fellow American, after all – has ‘never quite got used to the French view’ (p. 403). Later in the novel, however, when Undine’s marriage to Raymond de Chelles founders, she suggests to Elmer Moffatt that they become lovers: ‘They think so differently about marriage over here … As long as a woman doesn’t make a show of herself no one cares’ (p. 570). In this case, however, it is Moffatt who invokes the provincial standard: ‘Look here, Undine, if I’m to have you again I don’t want to have you that way … you were my wife once … and if you want to come back you’ve got to come that way’ (p. 572). Moreover, he blames what he sees as a corruption of her morals on her residence in France, equating her increased sophistication with decreased morality: ‘You’ve got all muddled, being out here among a lot of

Girls from the Provinces

137

loafers who call it a career to run round after every petticoat’ (p. 573). Undine ends up adhering to her provincial standards, but only because Moffatt insists on it; doing what he thinks best will be, she knows, the best way to win him back. There is one notable exception to Undine’s adherence to the sexual mores of her youth, however: her affair with Peter Van Degen while she is still married to Ralph Marvell. She comes to regret this not because she sees it as immoral, but because it was a strategic misstep: it failed to motivate Van Degen to divorce his wife and marry her. The only lesson she learns is the one her much divorced and remarried friend Mrs Rolliver states: ‘A divorce is always a good thing to have: you never can tell when you may want it. You ought to have attended to that before you even began with Peter Van Degen’ (p. 346). Undine normally adheres to the sexual mores of her youth, but only because doing so is socially advantageous. The daughter of the driving force behind Apex’s ‘Pure Water move’ (p. 81), Undine too wants to profit from purity. Thea’s relationship to the sexual mores of her youth is more complex. Although Undine’s extramarital affair with Van Degen is one of the many factors readers use to condemn her, Thea’s relationship with Fred Ottenburg (presumably a sexual one) causes hardly a ripple in the moral surface of the novel.38 Moreover, once Thea realizes that Fred is married, she refuses any further sexual or financial relationship with him, invoking the moral standards of her youth. When Dr Archie is about to give Thea the loan she needs in order to study in Germany – the next logical step in her artistic growth – Fred offers to loan Thea the money himself, with Dr Archie as a co-signer, telling her, ‘That would constitute a perfectly regular business transaction’.39 But this Thea staunchly refuses, much as Lily Bart, who has suffered from accepting money from Gus Trenor in The House of Mirth, refuses Simon Rosedale’s offer of financial help even as ‘a plain business arrangement’, telling him that ‘I can never again be sure of understanding the plainest business arrangement’.40 Thea’s situation is even clearer: if she accepted Fred’s money now, she tells him, ‘you’d simply be keeping me’. Fred argues with her, telling her that the idea of being ‘kept’ is ‘pure Moonstone’ – a meaningless label left over from her provincial girlhood. But Thea defends her perspective, going so far as to embrace the standard he scoffs at: ‘Well, I’ve never said I wasn’t Moonstone, have I? … Being married is one thing and not being married is the other thing, and that’s all there is to it.’ Although Thea has previously accepted many of Fred’s suggestions about moving beyond her provincial expressions and mannerisms, she refuses to adopt his perspective on this one. In rejecting Fred’s advice she realigns herself with Moonstone not only in morals, but in loyalty: leaving New York for Germany, she tells Fred, it is not for him or even for herself she goes, but ‘to make good to my friends out there [in Colorado]. That’s all there is left for me.’41 In doing so Thea demonstrates her ability to integrate the different phases

138

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

of her life; the Moonstone she once rejected now offers her a touchstone as she moves ahead in the process of making herself a cosmopolitan. Thea’s Moonstone ‘standard’ even gives her a sense of what we might call financial morality. The young man from the provinces, in his pursuit of pleasure and power, both ‘takes real risks’ and teaches his readers about the relationship between life and the ‘hard fluent fact’ of ‘money’.42 So, too, Thea risks a great deal but gains a great deal, personally, musically and materially, as she journeys from the provinces to and through the world of the great city, coming to terms not only with herself and with art but with money. She explains to Dr Archie late in the novel that, although some have thought her unnecessarily parsimonious, I can’t be careless with money. I began the world on six hundred dollars, and it was the price of a man’s life … I always measure things by that six hundred dollars, just as I measure high buildings by the Moonstone standpipe. There are standards we can’t get away from.43

Nor is this accomplishment of Thea’s a trivial one, as Undine’s failure to comprehend this particular ‘hard fluent fact’ demonstrates. Like Thea and the young man, Undine also ‘wants a share of power and pleasure’; but as we have seen, there is one ‘real risk’ she is unwilling to take: she refuses to think analytically. One aspect of this failure is her refusal to comprehend how money functions in the world to which she aspires. From the time she was small she has been allowed to believe that ‘business’ was ‘man’s province; and what did men go “down town” for but to bring back the spoils to their women?’ (p. 44). Both her second husband, Ralph Marvell, and her third, Raymond de Chelles, belong to families with well-defined financial codes – codes which assume that women who marry into the family will, at the very least, not impair the financial well-being of the family as a whole. Undine, however, never goes beyond her assumption that it is a husband’s or father’s role to provide women with whatever luxuries they desire – although Undine calls these ‘the necessities of life’ (p. 45). It is Elmer Moffatt’s ability to provide Undine with nearly unlimited wealth which eventually draws her back to him. In the end, however, even Moffatt’s vast wealth cannot expand Undine’s limited perspective; Undine remains a provincial, tied to her materialistic standard and focused only on herself, her limitations epitomized by her belief that beautiful things matter only because they provide a setting for her. At the novel’s end Undine stands where she did at its outset; like the young man from the provinces at the beginning of his journey, she is still ‘outside life and seek[ing] to enter’.44 The questions she ponders late in the novel are the same ones she asked at its beginning: how many times do her name and photograph appear in the paper? Is she the most beautiful, and therefore the most important, woman in a room? How much money can her husband spend on her, and how frequently and luxuriously can they travel? It is no coincidence that Wharton describes Undine’s

Girls from the Provinces

139

first romance with Elmer only late in the novel: to Undine, New York and Paris are merely larger versions of Apex. Despite her many experiences in the world, Undine has learned very little. She may have acquired ‘turns of speech, tricks of attitude’ (p. 558) that many of her compatriots have not, but these are, indeed, merely ‘turns’ and ‘tricks’. She can tell Moffatt a few things about the works of Ingres, but she has no real understanding of the world of art; she has merely picked up ‘as much of the jargon as a pretty woman needs to produce the impression of being well-informed’ (p. 561). In his one outburst against Undine, de Chelles summarizes her merely apparent sophistication, telling her that ‘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’ (p. 545). Surely Ralph could have said the same. In contrast, Thea becomes a cosmopolitan, able to claim the best of Moonstone standards while also engaging the wider perspective on art and life which she has learned in great cities – the perspective her ‘natural enemies’ refuse even to contemplate. Having developed ‘ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home – ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically within the small’, Thea embodies the very definition of the cosmopolitan.45 Though there is some truth in Dr Archie’s statement that Thea ‘was born a cosmopolitan’,46 his remark also undervalues Thea’s accomplishments: just as she has had to give birth to herself as an artist, so she has had to create herself as a cosmopolitan. Given the different backgrounds of Cather and Wharton, it is perhaps surprising that both authors would be drawn to the story of the girl from the provinces; certainly the relationship of each to her provincial character differs significantly. Cather’s biographers have often noted the autobiographical quality of The Song of the Lark, observing that Cather recreated in Thea’s experience her own sense of ‘escape’ from a narrowly provincial Nebraska.47 Even in her 1932 ‘Preface’ to this 1915 novel, Cather still expressed relief regarding Thea’s – and her own – escape, commenting that she had ‘set out to tell of an artist’s awakening and struggle; her floundering escape from a smug, domestic, self-satisfied provincial world of utter ignorance … What I cared about, and still care about, was the girl’s escape’.48 Yet Cather, like Thea, also remained loyal to her roots in the ‘provinces’. She visited her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, many times in her adult life (frequently for extended stays), helping Nebraska relatives and friends through the Great Depression, and, during a 1936 family reunion, writing to a friend that ‘she was feeling great affection for her patria, which to most people seemed so unattractive’.49 Wharton’s relationship to her ‘provincial’ character is more complex. In her creation of Undine, Wharton, the product of ‘old’ New York, was in part protesting against the social ‘upheavals’ caused by the arrival of ‘big money-makers

140

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

from the West’.50 Almost without exception, Wharton depicted such people as being, like Undine, raw and uncultured; she seemed oblivious to the fact that many came, like Cather’s family, from long-established families in the eastern United States, or, like the Rosens portrayed in Cather’s story ‘Old Mrs. Harris’, from cultivated European traditions. Yet she was also fascinated by the energy these newcomers displayed.51 In another way, however, Wharton depicted her own background as provincial. In A Backward Glance she portrays the New York of her youth in the 1860s and 1870s as a place with ‘customs’ that were still ‘simple’. Wharton wrote in her memoir that, after The Age of Innocence was published in 1920, ‘My French and English friends told me … that they had no idea New York life in the ’seventies had been so like that of the English cathedral town, or the French “ville de province,” of the same date’.52 More significantly for the aspiring writer, her parents’ New York provided her with no useful examples of authors on whom she could model herself: my parents … though they held literature in great esteem, stood in nervous dread of those who produced it … In the eyes of our provincial society authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labour.53

In this context, her early efforts to attract Henry James’s attention by wearing a new dress or her prettiest hat recall strikingly Undine’s anguished decision about what to wear to Laura Fairford’s dinner; Wharton was equally anxious to make an impression on the sophisticates whose ranks she hoped to join, and to do so by her choice of attractive clothing. Only later, when she became friends with writers such as Paul Bourget and Henry James, did she find her home in the ‘Land of Letters’ – moving at last from the provinces of her youth into the great metaphorical city that would be her adult home.54 Yet no reader of The Custom of the Country is likely to think that Wharton identified deeply with Undine; it is a long way from Wharton’s old New York (as it is from ‘the English cathedral town, or the French “ville de province”’) to Undine’s Apex. On the contrary, Wharton seems to want to distance herself from Undine even more than from Elmer Moffatt, through whom, after all, she sketches the story of the successful young man from the provinces. Elmer retains his provincial mannerisms, but his intuitive understanding of the beauty of art reflects his understanding of a world larger than himself; like Henry James’s Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl, he transcends his limitations as a businessman from the uncultivated Midwest of the United States to become a true connoisseur. In contrast, Wharton’s harsh treatment of Undine suggests that she needed first to create this transgressive woman and then to separate herself from her, as if to distinguish her own (justifiable) divorce from Undine’s series of exploitative divorces and to separate her own (legitimate and understated) ambitions

Girls from the Provinces

141

from Undine’s ruthless grasping. In making Undine’s main limitation her refusal to learn new ways of thinking, Wharton established a fundamental difference between herself and her character. Moreover, she made it impossible for Undine to enter the exclusive society of the Faubourg St Germain in Paris – the place Wharton herself lived. Mrs Wharton, who might, after all, be described as an ambitious divorcee, takes great pains to hold at arm’s length that other ambitious divorcee, Undine Spragg Moffatt Marvell de Chelles Moffatt. The power of these stories of girls from the provinces derives not only from their roots in their authors’ lives, but from the way in which such tales have, as Trilling said, ‘roots both in legend and in the very heart of the modern actuality’.55 These narratives, dealing as they do with ‘the modern actuality’ of their own time and with the perennially fascinating narrative of the young person leaving the provinces to seek his or her fortune in the city, retain their appeal; the theme appears not only in literary forms but in popular forms across the twentieth century and beyond, emerging in songs like ‘New York, New York’, popularized by Frank Sinatra (‘if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere’) and in films, including the recent, nightmarish David Lynch film Mulholland Drive. Certainly one of the most underappreciated ‘girl from the provinces’ novels of the later twentieth century is Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, which chronicles the experiences of Morag Gunn, a girl who leaves small-town Canada in order to seek experience and success as a novelist. It may be one of the few portraits we have, even now, of a woman’s successful endeavour to embrace the wider world – and to create within it both a personal and a professional life. The very success of Laurence’s Morag, however, sends us back to Thea and Undine. Thea is a success – there is no doubt about it. But Cather does not romanticize success; as she wrote at the end of ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’, ‘a “big” career takes its toll’56 – not only on Eden Bower, but on Thea, who is haggard and exhausted after performing, and who tells Dr Archie that she has no personal life. If she has found herself by losing herself in her art, that art will ultimately consume her. Like Undine, Thea too will finally reach an obstacle she will be unable to overcome. In the light of the early twenty-first century, one feels how hard both Cather and Wharton are on their heroines: Cather’s achieves professional success, but to do so must sacrifice her personal life; Wharton’s, though energetic and determined, is limited by her egocentricity and her provincial blinders. Yet both draw readers in. Cather and Wharton accomplish exactly what Henry James wanted to in his portrait of Hyacinth Robinson, the character who, after all, occasioned Trilling’s remarks on the young man from the provinces. ‘Like any primitive storyteller’, Trilling observes, James ‘wished to hold the reader against his will, to enchant, as we say’.57

10 MEN AT WORK IN THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY William Blazek

Six years after the publication of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton wrote in her First World War propagandist tract French Ways and Their Meaning: ‘The French woman is distinctly more grown up than her American sister; and she is so because she plays a much larger and more interesting part in men’s lives’. She also explains that France’s social cohesion, expressed in rich cultural values and a stable national character, stems from something that Puritan America feared: ‘frank and free social relations between men and women’.1 Because French Ways was aimed at two specific contemporary readerships – primarily US troops arriving to serve on the Western Front who would be keen for tips in cultural comportment from a distinguished expatriate author, as well as a more discrete audience of French readers eager to see how Wharton would depict them – the text both exaggerates French national traits and attempts to be fair in its overview. Thus, she acknowledges that ‘The French are not generous, and they are not trustful’ and are ‘indifferent to the rights of others’; they are also ‘enslaved by social conventions’2 – features readily discernible in the de Chelles family in The Custom of the Country. The thrust of Wharton’s analysis in French Ways, however, rests on comparisons between French and American gender relations; and they provide insights that can be applied to the novel. A key word in her praise of French society in French Ways – especially in education, marriage and business – is balance. She notes the care taken in seating arrangements at dinner parties, with sexes alternating and articulate guests ‘as carefully chosen as boxers for a championship’. Geographically blessed, France enjoys a secure position within European boundaries, serendipitously placed between mountain ranges and seas, with a varied climate across its borders. Assuming such ingrained advantages as a foundation, she can assert, ‘it is possible to have a ruling caste of grown-up men and women only in a civilization where the power of each sex is balanced by that of the other’. In French marriages, social and individual needs are ‘perfectly balanced’ because marriages are based on family rather than unattainable ideal love.3 Elsewhere, Wharton – 143 –

144

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

argues from the principle of gender balance to explain French creativity in ‘the art of living’, wherein curiosity, sustained application in education and paradoxically ‘absence of financial ambition’ all play a part. With cultivated tastes and time for leisure, ‘every Frenchman and every Frenchwoman takes time to live’. Among the commercial class, wives are partners and advisors to their husbands, sharing their skills and common interests; and despite legal inequalities against them, Wharton claims, French women are more advanced than their English or American counterparts because of ‘practical, personal, and daily participation’ in their husbands’ jobs.4 Charles Bowen’s observation in The Custom of the Country follows the same reasoning: 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. (p. 207)

However, supporting evidence in the novel for such a state of affairs in France is dubious, as when Undine is stuck in her third marriage, to Raymond de Chelles, within the French aristocracy’s ‘huge, voracious fetish they called The Family’ (p. 513) and lives in a chateau where ‘as far back as memory went, the ladies of the line of Chelles had always sat at their needle-work on the terrace of Saint Désert, while the men of the house lamented the corruption of the government’ (p. 514). A stranger in this strange world of ‘immemorial customs’ (p. 518), Undine is made further aware of its gender divisions by Princess Estadina’s womanly insight about Raymond’s absences: ‘And what do you suppose he does with himself when he runs up to Paris? Politics? … Politics don’t occupy a man after midnight’ (p. 516). Wharton, therefore, separates her personal beliefs expressed in French Ways from the fictional effects required in The Custom of the Country, both to skewer Bowen as the gratuitous social commentator and cynical cicerone that he becomes, and thematically to emphasize the universal problem of gender-imbalanced customs in economically mature but morally regressing Western countries. Her 1913 novel outlines the attractions of noble connections and the benefits of European female companionship for Undine, but it does not demonstrate equalities among the French, whose women are characterized as generally quite happy allowing men to dominate public affairs and to pursue their own private ones.5 Moreover, the text satisfies a fundamental precept of turn-of-thecentury American life, expressed in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s blunt statement about humans: ‘We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation’.6 With her unalterable compunction and irresistible determination always to acquire ‘something beyond’ (p. 54), Undine Spragg Moffatt Marvell de Chelles

Men at Work in The Custom of the Country

145

Moffatt serves in The Custom of the Country not only as the epitome of America’s aggressive new commercial and social ‘rising forces’ (p. 280) but also as a ruthless expression of Gilman’s delineation of gender relations. The novel presents as atavistic heritage the division between men’s and women’s work when Undine visits her father’s office: ‘Her eyes grew absent-minded, as they always did when he alluded to business. That was man’s province; and what did men go “down town” for but to bring back the spoils to their women?’ (p. 44, italics in original). Undine expects to be sustained by ‘the quick rise to affluence which was man’s natural tribute to women’s merits’ (p. 227). Furthermore, ‘she assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral insouciance with Sheban elegance’, so that when money is short from her extravagances, she slyly coaxes her second husband, Ralph Marvell, with ‘she “didn’t mean to worry”; and her tone implied that it was his business to do so for her’ (p. 149). Weighted by a supreme ego, evolved from the expectations of her due as a woman, Undine’s psychology is diagnosed by the narrator: ‘If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable’ (p. 266). The American male works compulsively, in a variety of business ventures, to obtain and maintain Undine – and also to meet her demands, to keep her quiet, to prevent her from becoming ill with headaches or neurasthenia or in the hope of seeing ‘her eyes widening trustfully, and the limpid smile flowing up to them’ (p. 247). Only on the foreign cultural fields of France does she find tribute difficult to obtain, matched against Raymond, ‘one who still sees through the humbug’ (p. 208). She is so effectively repulsed by French fiscal conservatism because ‘it was impossible for Undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of women as its first purpose’ (p. 543). Her consumer desires are, however, generously gratified by American men’s productivity; fathers, husbands and lovers provide the constantly stretched means to support her imitative activities. This arrangement reveals the shortcomings of a society built on imbalanced gender roles and endlessly repeated market cycles of success and failure, abundance and scarcity, hope and unhappiness. Janet Malcolm, Elaine Showalter, Cecelia Tichi and others have examined this critical ground with a focus on Wharton’s admiration for the ideals of men, her ‘much acknowledged self-identification with the masculine’ and her ‘fear that the feminization of American culture was bringing about its intellectual and moral decline’.7 A further implication of these views in relation to The Custom of the Country is that the depiction of American men in the novel also privileges gendered opportunities for men to engage in all-consuming work, and the main target of the remainder of this essay is to examine features of their participation in business and professional life. Two important themes emerge in this analysis: an expression of the vibrancy as well as the volatility of American business culture, and the ways in which men whose minds are sharpened by the parry and thrust

146

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

of commercial politics can transfer that public experience to the private sphere. In particular, in The Custom of the Country men exhibit aesthetic sensibilities and an underlying desire for social harmony and more balanced gender relations. In contrast to Undine, men are not ‘insensible to the touch of the heart’ (p. 224). In addition, men largely value variety over sameness, originality over replication, and often aspire to if not fully achieve what Ralph Marvell imagines: ‘mergings of the personal with the general life’ (p. 140). Such an ideal of unity is not the same as the collapse of private and public spheres that Beverly Voloshin identifies in her examination of types of exchanges in The Custom of the Country, in which she argues that in Undine’s career the traditionally separate domains of female and male authority, ‘home and market, private and public, self and commodity are thoroughly and shockingly interfused’, with Undine transformed in the process into ‘a monstrous combination’ of these dichotomies.8 Likewise, Elmer Moffatt’s manipulation of Undine’s public career and his acquisitive connoisseurship,9 notably involving interior decoration, might also seem to demonstrate more permeable gender boundaries – ones that allow Undine to operate in the marriage market, using herself as fluid capital, and Elmer to employ his millions to fill the role of patron of high culture (previously the public outlet for female domesticity) and to ameliorate Undine’s maternal neglect for her son by attempting to become Paul’s caring step-parent. Together in marriage for the second time, Undine and Elmer make love and money, home and business, masculine and feminine spheres seem both inseparable and forever incompatible. Yet such social and personal interchanges seem to be heavily weighted against Undine, especially when considering the ways that Wharton grants men the means to gain ‘something beyond’. Voloshin acknowledges the qualifications on Undine’s freedom, for ‘[s]tanding behind the scenes and directing when Undine appears to be acting, Moffatt is the engine of the plot’.10 Other, more fundamental reasons for Undine’s lack of agency can be offered, too. For despite her vibrant energy and admirable forward drive, Undine finds it difficult to look back and use the advantages of leisure or memory to consider who she is and why she desires what she desires. Opportunities for achieving self-fulfilment and spaces for critical self-awareness seem the preserve of men in the novel, even though men are most visibly working for Undine’s unattainable happiness. The men depicted in the business of stocks and shares, property speculation, and financial investment are most at home away from home. In their offices, or the bars and hotel lobbies that serve as office annexes, men’s separation from the domestic sphere is most acute.11 Moreover, these separate spaces, located ‘down town’ (p. 44) and travelled to by subway, combine the features of the mythic labyrinth – where mysterious financial affairs are conducted (symbolized by Abner Spragg’s Masonic fob on his watch-chain) and from which successful financial

Men at Work in The Custom of the Country

147

heroes emerge – with the characteristics of the modern commercial world, stimulating and addictive as a drug but equally capable of wearing down the heavy user. The ageing Abner Spragg is transformed in his place of work: From the moment he set foot in Wall Street Mr. Spragg became another man. Physically the change revealed itself only by the subtlest signs … as the gleam of a night-watchman’s light might flash across the darkness of a shuttered house-front. (p. 119)

The simile hints at the secretiveness and white-collar criminality that are implicated in business matters; and Abner Spragg’s earlier professions as undertaker, minister and druggist chart his uneven but inevitable progress towards Wall Street.12 As a newcomer to the corporate colossi of Manhattan, he is positioned as a relatively minor player, operating from ‘the steel and concrete tower in which his office occupied a lofty pigeon-hole’ (pp. 119–20). His characteristic pose in the Ararat Trust Building is leaning ‘back in his revolving chair, with feet adroitly balanced against a tilted scrap basket’, exuding an ‘air of relaxed power’ (p. 120). The description is worth noting, for elsewhere the narrative illustrates the revolving fortunes and risky balancing acts of business deals, particularly those involving potential jackpots for Elmer, Ralph or Undine. In addition, by displaying an ‘air of ’ certainty, the most successful businessman, like Undine in the marriage business, is the one who can most readily perform power.13 And the significance of scraps of paper in the novel goes further than the implication that Abner Spragg himself will eventually tip over into the scrap-pile of providers for Undine’s ever-expanding needs. When Elmer Moffatt visits Abner’s office, the transfer of power within the confidential, masculine space of the office is clear from the description: ‘Behind an inner glazed enclosure, with its one window dimmed by a sooty perspective barred by chimneys, [Abner] seated himself at a dusty littered desk, and groped instinctively for the support of the scrap basket’ (p. 128; cf. p. 331). By contrast, Elmer Moffatt’s ascendancy is reflected openly in his remodelled office: Paint, varnish and brass railings gave an air of opulence to the outer precincts, and the inner room, with its mahogany bookcases containing morocco-bound ‘sets’ and its wide blue leather arm-chairs, lacked only a palm or two to resemble the lounge of a fashionable hotel. Moffatt himself, as he came forward, gave Ralph the impression of having been done over by the same hand (p. 450)

This description contains evidence of Elmer’s feeling for design and textures, his stated ambition to own ‘the best’ (p. 538) and of his innate sense of performance filtering down into the material fabric of his surroundings. The sheen and smell of the office yields ‘an air of opulence’, and his fresh appearance and manner give ‘the impression’ of his handiwork. The self-made effort is clear, even if the result

148

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

is a griffonic mish-mash of hotel and office, referents to exotic climes and domestic comforts, all assembled together with the urgent energy of the well-satisfied but not well-established nouveau riche. John Clubbe’s observation about women in Wharton’s fiction having the ability to adapt to their surroundings stands in contrast with men’s ability to shape their own environments.14 As Elmer with his office decoration or in filling his Paris mansion-cum-museum, these physical spaces are both external proof of concerted ownership and indicators of personal sensibilities. Clubbe examines scenes in The House of Mirth that lend themselves to these distinctions and insights, and focuses on Lily Bart’s chameleon-like mobility to adapt herself to various interior settings – similar to Undine Spragg’s mimetic skills in adapting to different social sets and copying other people’s mannerisms and tastes. In comparison, Lawrence Seldon’s bachelor flat-house in The House of Mirth indicates his creativity and sophistication, as well as his autonomy. Additionally, it reflects ‘intimacy and books and the thoughts that books can evoke’15 and more: ‘[Lily] noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk’.16 The signs of Seldon’s public life – his walking sticks, the letters, acquisitions from foreign lands – are blended with an incoming breeze and filtered light that position intangible nature alongside abstractions of thought and intimacy in this symbolic space.17 The contrast with Lily’s inability to possess either a flat or the imagination behind its individualized making is paralleled in Undine’s early hotel life in New York and her subsequent restlessness in America and Europe. Failure to establish a place truly her own represents a crucial shortcoming that relates not only to Undine’s economic dependence but also to her inability to think and feel with an open heart, rather than simply to mimic sophistication and emotion. Cursed with an overabundance of feeling and a Pygmalion complex with regard to his wife, Ralph Marvell, the patrician observer of Elmer and Abner’s business dealings, is an office ingénu who finds work with an estate-agency firm completely enervating and debilitating. Yet he learns to admire the qualities of those who are better suited by disposition or training to inhabit business workplaces. Thereby, to the cultural critic John Pettegrew’s list of activities in which ‘the masculinist culture of mimicry … casts fighting, killing, and dying in combat as essential male experience’,18 The Custom of the Country adds the act of male bonding in the competitive world of capital enterprise. Furthermore, because of his own practice as a writer, Ralph recognizes that successful businessmen like Elmer have to be adept at reading human character in order to make deals work. In ‘that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved about like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface’ (p. 258), Ralph is a minnow indeed; yet he finds a rich analogy from

Men at Work in The Custom of the Country

149

his experience as a writer, likening Elmer Moffatt to a great actor and ‘wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts’ (p. 262). His experience of office life leads directly to Ralph’s short-lived transformation from a confused and desultory writer stymied by conflicting urges, unable to finish a dramatic poem or a piece of literary criticism (p. 75), into a productive fiction writer (p. 456), whose work is halted abruptly by the real-life narrative involving his ex-wife’s blackmail over the custody of their son. In the gap after that situation arises and before his suicide, we see Ralph starting to achieve something artistically worthwhile alongside the grinding work he has taken to earn money. In fact, writing in a room of his own redefines his relation to office life. Before learning of Undine’s suit for divorce, Ralph complains: ‘A man doesn’t know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one’s fit for, even if there’s time for both’ (p. 321). His comment is directed as much at the overwhelming burden and tedium of his office work as it is at the misuse of a man’s talents and energies. Then, in the two years following his divorce, Ralph turns his room in his family’s Washington Square home into a genuine workplace. After he begins his novel, the relationship between earning money and artistic endeavour is better reconciled, potentially even unified in the transactions between mind and occupation, life experience and literary production: Material needs obliged him to go on with his regular business; but, the day’s work over, he was possessed of a leisure as bare and as blank as an unfurnished house, yet that was his own to furnish as he pleased. (p. 424)

Writing is valuable for him not merely in ‘filling the void’ (pp. 423–4) of time and romantic disillusionment. In fact, he stubbornly reacts to the urgings of family and friends who recommend writing as therapy (p. 425). No longer the aesthete and dilettante whom Tichi associates with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Beverly Hume with Edgar Allan Poe, and abandoning the poetic path he might have followed from Andrew Marvell, Ralph is driven by a new desire and will to achieve. Writing at night, he is re-energized altogether: ‘In the morning, when he woke, instead of his habitual sense of lassitude, he felt an eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task was a necessary part of the world’s machinery’ (p. 427). Wharton’s phrasing suggests that the task is twofold, working for material needs and for literature, and that social and individual benefits flow from that relationship. Lying in the Seinese countryside on his honeymoon he dreams of personal fulfilment and perhaps fame as a poet in the pursuit of beauty:

150

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain … He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one’s self a mere wave on the wild stream of being (pp. 140–1)

The exaggerated Romantic moment is spoiled not only by Undine’s indifference to his fancy but also by Ralph’s ineffectual thoughts, his inability to turn personal desire and talent into public action and literary production. Until, that is, he arrives at a new moment, gradually and steadfastly developed, and gained from disappointment and difficult experience. His novel-in-progress is work that is born of marriage, divorce, business on Wall Street and his brown room at home. Writing fiction from these materials, ‘He no longer saw life on the heroic scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than the insects they were’ (p. 427). However, the hopeful result of this vision in social realism is missing one crucial element of experience for Ralph, one that finally breaks his resilience and his spirit. In the stages leading up to his death, Wharton portrays his steady disillusionment and records the accumulated reasons for his fall: he discovers on his honeymoon that Undine can be neither his muse nor his Galatea. She undermines what Ticien Marie Sassoubre calls ‘thick’ connections of family heritage by having the Dagonet jewels reset (p. 213).19 She departs for Europe to prepare her marital escape and ignores family pleas to return home to tend to Ralph in his desperate illness (pp. 296–8). He is told in his father-in-law’s office that Undine has departed to the divorce mill of Sioux Falls, South Dakota (pp. 331–3), and later he learns from the Sunday papers that she is seeking a papal annulment in order to allow her to marry into the Catholic de Chelles family (p. 430). Two years afterwards Undine blackmails him for money with the threat of taking away his son (p. 448). Endangering family money and honour, he gives Elmer Moffatt $50,000 to make a high-risk investment, but the promise of a 100 per cent profit is stalled in the machinery of business politics (pp. 450–63). All this Ralph overcomes, but the final shock involves more than financial strain and Undine’s betrayals. When he is told that Elmer had married Undine first, Ralph is horrified by the implication that the marriage had been consummated, even though later annulled. As Elmer explains: ‘[I]t was a marriage fast enough, as they found out when they tried to undo it. Trouble was, they caught on too soon; we only had a fortnight’ (p. 467). Ralph’s revulsion is focused on the monstrous impression of Elmer’s physical presence: ‘His redness, his glossiness, his baldness’ (p. 468). Undine’s deception unites here with the rival male’s body and Ralph’s unstated recognition of his own inability to see ‘something beyond’, as he thinks: ‘“This man … this man …” he couldn’t get beyond the thought: whichever way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the perspective’ (p. 468). While earlier Ralph could look with admiration

Men at Work in The Custom of the Country

151

on Elmer Moffatt’s demeanour and objectively observe Elmer’s actorly skills, with the recognition of his own more personal ties to the speculator Ralph is stunned by the reality of the homo-synthesis that entwines them in a neatly balanced $50,000 plus $50,000 investment partnership and in their common past intimacy with Undine. To Ralph’s imbalanced mind, these realizations form a hideous and unnatural union between men of different classes and moral principles. In Wharton’s larger terms, the combinations challenge the ideal heterodoxy of balanced social and marital relations between men and women, and between the domestic and business worlds. Perhaps the missing ingredient in Ralph’s unfinished novel, then, is sex, or the threat of sexual betrayal, a supposition encouraged by the narrator’s comment that ‘His two objects in life were his boy and his book’ (p. 423). Therefore, Ralph’s efforts ‘to readjust his values’ (p. 423) and escape his old New York habits of thought fall short, not only in finally realizing the depths of Undine’s ‘violent drives and cold tenacity’ (p. 432) but also in failing to access the sensual scope of literature. He finds himself ‘stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour’ (p. 469). Importantly, the revelation scene in which his illusions finally topple is played out in Elmer’s office, the realm of the brutish and frighteningly successful modern man. Ralph’s rusty mentality is tragically incapable of reaching further than a combination of an urge to write and an emerging cultural purpose to his writing. Instead of achieving a successful literary fusion of its author’s skill and experience, his novel remains unfinished. He stumbles out of Elmer Moffatt’s office into a naturalist urban scene, noticing ‘the swirls of dust in the cracks of the pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring faces that poured by under tilted hats’ (p. 469), an affective modern crowd that compounds his confusion. His novel ends along with his life in Chapter XXXVI of Wharton’s text, when he heads home, ‘saying half-aloud: “The office – I ought to be at the office”’ (p. 470). The liminal intersection of action and thought, of office and home, is also marked by a juxtaposition of images when he reaches his room at home. ‘The house was empty’, we are assured (p. 470), yet a parlour-maid appears at his door. We can guess that his novel manuscript overlooks such people, too, with their senseless talk and careless ways. Time, also, slips in and out of his reckoning, a clock striking for the dinner hour while his thoughts bend back to an afternoon with Undine in Siena and half-remembered moments with her. This workplace – where with his writing he could forget her in the contemplation of his project, immersed in the flow of work, or a state of ‘intense raptured attention’ – now becomes one of Wharton’s ‘waiting-rooms before the inevitability of death’.20 The ironic grounds for his divorce, as related to readers through a newspaper subheading, that he was ‘Too Absorbed in Business To Make Home Happy’ (p. 343), gathers further momentum when the home where he attempts

152

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

to be a good single-parent and becomes absorbed in creativity also turns cruelly against him.21 The image of Ralph’s hand clenched into a fist is significant, too, particularly when compared with an earlier scene in which Ralph studies Undine’s hand, looking for some signs of the inspiration she might provide: ‘He turned the hand over … then he put a kiss in the warm hollow between. The upper world had vanished: his universe had shrunk to the palm of a hand’ (p. 142).22 When his universe collapses in his death room, his hands compact into fists pressed against his eyelids (p. 472). The gesture is repeated from the time when he finds himself torn over the decision to marry outside of his social circle, ‘pressing his fists into his temples’ (p. 84). Finally unable to reconcile his life and work, having woefully under-imagined Undine’s devious ingenuity, Ralph wraps his hand around a revolver taken from a drawer under a bookcase, one that had been fitted during his college days and thus representative of his idealistic, younger self. He dies a deluded Romantic altruist, the words ‘My wife … this will make it all right for her’ on his lips, and a gun instead of a pen in his hand (p. 474).23 Ralph Marvell’s death marks the end of hope in The Custom of the Country, as the novel turns from that point more clearly towards its determinist narrative line; but the lingering absence of the most sensitive male also reminds the reader of the emotional and intellectual capacities of men generally in the text, especially in comparison with Undine’s constitutional shortcomings and environmental handicaps. If the office represents a place of masculine knowledge and risky endeavour, as well as solace and escape, men in The Custom of the Country are equally capable of finding separate enclaves for personal reflection and creativity. Ralph’s openness to ‘the world of wonders’ (p. 75) is represented in a secluded childhood space: ‘As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave – a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky’ (pp. 75–6). Symbolically, this is an exclusively personal masculine space, spiritually linked to the invigorating transcendental forces of nature, and one that appropriates female imagery to the extent that ‘it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with the same joy of furtive possession’ (p. 76). Ralph successfully excludes from it the female company of his cousin Clare Dagonet, whose ‘light foot had reached the threshold … there had been a summer when her voice had sounded far down the windings’ (p. 76).24 The isolated cave is framed in the text alongside Wall Street offices, Peter Van Degen’s yacht the Sorceress, Raymond de Chelles’s family chateau and Elmer Moffatt’s library as settings that women might occasionally pass into or even occupy but never own or fully understand their meaning to men. These settings allow men opportunities not only to indulge in the privileges of patriarchal sexual or cultural dominance, but also to engage in an important

Men at Work in The Custom of the Country

153

activity that underpins that authority: thinking. Within such personal spaces, men become writers, connoisseurs, sybarites or financial wizards. These varied male occupations and avocations present sharp contrasts to Undine’s progress as a divorcee, and we are repeatedly told of her limitations when Undine becomes bored or attempts to copy cultivated behaviour: ‘allusions to pictures and books escaped her’ (p. 35). Madame de Trézac confides: ‘Well, you don’t work hard enough – you don’t keep up … I watched you the other night at the Duchess’s, and half the time you hadn’t an idea what they were talking about’ (p. 541). In her youth, ‘Undine’s preference was for the worldly parties, at which games were played’ (p. 27). On their honeymoon, Harvard and Oxfordtrained Ralph realizes that ‘[h]er mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated’ (p. 147). She views the Saint Désert treasures about her with the eyes of a narcissist: ‘without any real sense of their meaning she felt them to be the appropriate setting of a pretty woman, to embody something of the rareness and distinction she had always considered she possessed’ (p. 548). Acting as Elmer Moffatt’s undercover agent and inside trader among the French elite, ‘she showed a surprising quickness in picking up “tips”, ferreting out rare things and getting sight of hidden treasures. She even acquired as much of the jargon as a pretty woman needs to produce the impression of being well-informed’ (p. 561). Nevertheless, in a telling passage in Chapter XLIV, as she is about to place herself under his controlling power, she realizes that ‘[s]ome of [Elmer’s] enjoyments were beyond her range’ (p. 563). The latter extract is followed by a sentence that demonstrates the consequences of a life without the means or motivations to cultivate internal sensibilities through art, beauty or pleasure: ‘When she took him to see some inaccessible picture, or went with him to inspect the treasures of a famous dealer, she saw that the things he looked at moved him in a way she could not understand’ (p. 563). Men’s employment and enjoyment in their independently fashioned personal spaces involve working and playing hard – often the two activities seem inseparable – while for Undine and her reprographic mind the art of living and the pursuit of happiness remain forever elusive. Her failure to perceive beyond surface features lies at the heart of the failure of male-female relationships in the novel, too. The text’s delineation of gender imbalances, therefore, goes beyond the financial and occupational inequalities exposed in the social satire. Men in The Custom of the Country are granted sensitivity and idealism, mostly because they work to gain those levels of insight. Ralph Marvell epitomizes those qualities when he exposes himself in marriage to ‘the imaginative man’s indestructible dream of a rounded passion’ (p. 83). Even the seasoned adulterer Peter Van Degen reveals something of this hopeful bliss when we learn that he broke off relations with Undine because he imagined himself abandoned as her future husband just as callously as she had treated Ralph

154

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

in his illness. Van Degen’s leisure allows him gradually to understand that her cold behaviour was unforgivable because, as Indiana Frusk Binch tells her: ‘You see, you were his ideal’ (p. 360). However, although Undine shares Van Degen’s ‘contempt for everything he did not understand or could not buy’ and lures herself into his world of ‘the showy and promiscuous’ (pp. 192–3), bad fortune and a Puritanical resistance to sensual pleasure rule her out even of his limited conception of love. Moreover, as Carol Baker Sapora asserts: ‘She does not imitate the spirit, the intellect, or the sensitivity of the ideal [Whartonian?] woman, only her appearance’.25 Perhaps Undine’s second marriage to Elmer Moffatt will last longer than her others because the couple’s youthful elopement ended in a practical reassessment of romantic ideals (pp. 571–2). Because perception and feeling go hand in hand, Wharton’s satire first sets up the possibility that Undine truly possesses the caring heart of an ideal wife. In language redolent of the sentimental literary style, she expresses her version of love: ‘You’re so strong: that’s what I feel about you, Elmer. I was the only one to feel it that time they all turned against you out at Apex’ (p. 568), after their youthful, forced separation. ‘She had never spoken more sincerely’, the narrator guarantees us: ‘For the moment all thought of self-interest was in abeyance, and she felt again, as she had felt that day, the instinctive yearning of her nature to be one with his’ (p. 568). A chapter’s leap and two years into their remarriage, however, and the narrative’s satirical bite arrives: there were hours when she still felt his dominion and exulted in it. But there were others when she saw his defects and was irritated by them: when his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends, jarred on perceptions that had developed in her unawares (p. 591)

The mannerly refinement gained from her aborted venture among the French aristocracy has taught her ‘shades of conduct, turns of speech, tricks of attitude’ (p. 558); but her perception of the world and of herself is limited within those meagre parameters. Wharton also weaves within her text a material symbol of communication failures which are bound to perpetuate misunderstandings and misdirect common goals in male-female relationships. She repeatedly inserts images that most often combine paper, money and marriage into a kind of textual shredder or compactor. A scrap-basket rests under Abner Spragg’s foot (pp. 120, 128, 238, 331), and newspaper clippings direct and recount Undine’s public life. Undine crumples the telegraph warning of the severity of Ralph’s illness and throws it away (pp. 297–8). Ralph burns one of her letters (p. 308), and he tosses into his scrap-basket an advertisement for a private-detective agency that he could hire to spy on Undine (p. 325). Her Riviera hotel contains bookshelves of ‘mutilated fic-

Men at Work in The Custom of the Country

155

tion’ of incomplete volumes (p. 362). Ralph crumples the letter from her lawyers about taking custody of their son (p. 435), and the revolver that Ralph uses to kill himself is directly associated with his unfinished novel (p. 474). Charles Bowen’s letters to America are drafted on stationery with ‘The Parisian Diamond Company – Anglo-American branch’ letterhead, and although fully sketched they are rarely completed or sent (p. 272). Raymond de Chelles tears up the letter from the agent offering to purchase his family’s ancient tapestries (p. 546). Most notoriously, Moffatt’s expensive books are locked behind gilded cases (pp. 578–9), and Undine dismisses the pride that her son takes in his composition prize (p. 588). This trope, in all its complex variety, might be read in several different ways, but it can be interpreted as Wharton’s sign of the incompleteness of America, the loss of faith in social contracts, and the new disposability of American ideals. Moreover, the American society depicted in The Custom of the Country has allowed the centre of its intellectual, artistic and emotional life to derive mostly from men’s business. Although the novel allows the potential for a more fully developed American culture to emerge from the vitality of the nation’s commercial enterprises, like Undine’s desire, that goal is always ever beyond reach. A favourite word in the text – want – goes to the heart of this problem. It contains a variety of meanings, all aimed at the ‘something still better beyond’ (p. 54) that Undine seeks. ‘Want’ as need, desire, absence and lack circulates through the narrative. At first the word seems an inchoate response to abundance and opportunity: when the society artist Popple is engaged to paint a flattering portrait of Undine, her instructions are ‘I want what the others want’ (p. 100). If we read her response as ‘I lack what the others lack’, then the implications for her and the rest of her society are ominous. ‘Want’ becomes tied to her manipulative nature on her honeymoon: ‘If Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because her wants were as few’ (p. 149). The term changes into a moral choice when Undine reads the cable from her sister-in-law about Ralph’s severe illness, stating ‘She says Ralph wants [rather than ‘needs’] me’ (p. 298). It migrates into commanding desire in the reach of Elmer Moffatt, leaning ‘back in his chair with an air of placid power, as if he were so sure of getting what he wanted that there was no longer any use in hurrying, huge as his vistas had become’ (p. 538). Finally, combining Undine’s dissatisfactions and Elmer’s insatiable acquisitiveness, ‘want’ reverts into abstraction, defining itself as both emptiness and disjunction. ‘All her own attempts to get what she wanted had come to nothing’ (p. 555), the narration reveals about the teenager Undine, but with Elmer she sees a way forward. With their repeated union complete, the bond becomes a chasm and a precipice: ‘She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them’ (p. 591). Elmer Moffatt knows what he wants, and why – ‘I mean to have the best, you know; not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because I know it when I see

156

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

it’ (p. 538). The declaration is not merely an exercise in will, but a statement of authoritative taste and personal wholeness. However, even working with Undine to develop his vast collection will – at best – bring him only a measure of completeness, and certainly not happiness beyond the momentary and the aesthetic.26 Nancy Bentley suggests that ‘modernity is less an epoch than a tempo’, one of accelerated mobility and rapid change;27 and temporariness and insubstantiality are the ironic companions of the Moffatts’ success. The ultimate sign of those sour consequences is contained in the Boucher tapestries bought from the chateau in Saint Désert and installed in the Moffatts’ Paris residence. Their significance in Wharton’s text lies beyond the destruction of the tapestries’ ‘aura’ that Debra Ann MacComb identifies in their transplantation out of their natural cultural setting, with its weight of tradition and history.28 These functional artworks also indicate that ownership is something that must be earned and not merely paid for, and their essential quality radiates from a settled culture more than from a settling of accounts. Tapestries also represent the work of many hands, male and female, and require both intensive manual labour and mechanical craft in their production. To remove such a comprehensive, unified network of art, industry and community is an act of vandalism that American taste and money conspire to commit. This crime is men’s work, too, in collaboration with commodity culture and its changeable values, supported by the acquiescence of women. The tapestries provide Elmer, a man of unknown origins (pp. 216, 457, 549), with the semblance of family heritage in the house he shares with a triple divorcee29 and her neglected son, their only heir. In contrast, the coloured fabric and intricate composition of the French tapestries tell a coherent story in images, and this wordless work of art speaks for the richest meanings of French culture for Wharton.30 Besides praising the social balances between working men and women in France, in French Ways she includes an epigram that might be used to indict the Invaders in The Custom of the Country and one that illustrates the benefits of art and the balanced art of living well: ‘The essence of taste is suitability … it expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order’.31 Men in The Custom of the Country obtain glimpses of that ideal balance in shaping their lives, through their challenging and risky work in business, their sensibility to art or literature and their joy in creative endeavour. Wharton’s literary tapestry, however, deliberately frays the threads of expectation that women might join hands with men in that utopian cultural enterprise.

11 ‘LOST IN TRANSLATION’: FINANCIAL PLOTS AND THE MODERNIST READER IN THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY Hildegard Hoeller

The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing. Barthes, S/Z1 Many intelligent people have no clear idea of what a certificate of stock or a bond really is. And the words ‘money’, ‘stock-exchange’, and ‘finance’ are mere terms they glibly use without knowledge of their meaning. Lawson, Frenzied Finance2

‘Absorbed in his theme, and forgetting her inability to follow him, Moffatt launched out on an epic recital of plot and counterplot, and she hung, a new Desdemona, on his conflict with the new anthropophagi’ (p. 537). In this line, late in the novel, Wharton hints at the fact that The Custom of the Country contains another, new story and a new listener, a new Desdemona. In this moment of pivotal closeness between Undine and Moffatt, Undine is both ‘absorbed’ in the ‘theme’ and unable to follow Elmer Moffatt’s epic ‘plots and counterplots’. Moffatt, in turn, forgets about her ‘inability’ to follow. And Undine herself is rather unconcerned with this ‘inability’; instead, she simply translates Moffatt’s words into her own meaning without paying attention to the story’s details: It was of no consequence that the details and technicalities escaped her: she knew their meaningless syllables stood for success, and what that meant was as clear as day to her. Every Wall Street term had its equivalent in the language of Fifth Avenue, and while he talked of building up railways she was building up palaces, and picturing all the multiple lives he would lead in them. (p. 537)

Undine’s ‘translation’ from ‘Wall Street language’ into ‘Fifth Avenue language’ paradoxically relies on her not understanding Moffatt’s ‘meaningless syllables’ and the ‘details and technicalities’ of Moffatt’s Wall Street tales and yet knowing – 157 –

158

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

precisely, ‘as clear as day’, what they mean to her. This translation, I argue, is at the centre of Wharton’s novel, and Wharton’s own language suggests that it is a ‘new dynamic’ of storytelling, with a new Othello, a new Desdemona and new anthropophagi. In The Custom of the Country Wharton chooses as her theme the levels of incomprehension that surround her characters, and the ways in which the world they live in can no longer be understood fully but only vaguely and in fragments. This sense of fragmentation and loss in translation is particularly linked to the underlying epic financial plot of the novel – that of the Ararat investigation and the Apex consolidation. Faced with these plots, Wharton’s characters and readers – like William Faulkner’s characters and readers – are lost in their own versions of reality with no omniscient narrator to guide them and to allow us, the readers, to see clearly the nature and extent of their distortions. Instead, Wharton – abandoning the narrative conventions of the nineteenth century – stands back and lets us see how her characters and thus we ourselves are lost in translation, unable to read with clarity the epic plots that determine their and our modern lives. Instead, they engage in writing a meaning, constituting their own reality. Through depicting her characters as writerly readers and making us, in turn, writerly readers as well, Wharton shows how an emergent capitalist order creates a modernist world in which each reader becomes his or her own writer, never able to check an individual reading against a master narrative. We are all lost in translation, propelled to write our own unstable, fragmentary versions of reality. After all, the scene of translation between Undine and Moffatt is emblematic of the narrative dynamics of Wharton’s entire novel. Wharton never gives us the words of Moffatt’s epic recital, and so we are merely left with looking at the heroine’s and others’ responses to it. Throughout the novel, Wharton keeps her own narrative focus on her characters and the fictions into which they translate Moffatt’s tale. Like Lily Bart, Undine knows little about Wall Street, and she therefore simply re-envisions the meaning of Moffatt’s words in her own Fifth Avenue world, the realm of consumption rather than investment and speculation where Moffatt resides. To a degree Wharton, of course, suggests that women do not care to understand the financial underpinnings of their lives, nor do men care to make them understand. That, according to Charles Bowen, is ‘the custom of the country … Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don’t take enough interest in them’ (p. 206, italics in original). But Wharton seems to be doing more as well. Unlike Lily and the women Bowen describes, Undine is intensely interested in Moffatt’s tale, as much as Desdemona was in Othello’s. Increasingly in the novel she is lured by the voice and tone of financial plots without understanding their meanings. Wharton then focuses more energy on depicting Undine’s way of reading financial plots than on merely showing her disinterest in them. Other characters as well, such

‘Lost in Translation’

159

as Mrs Spragg, Ralph Marvell and Paul Marvell, are depicted as lost in translation, trying to piece together, to write, their own versions of reality. Throughout the text these characters are searching for meaning, for coherence, for transparency, and for truth. But just as Wharton does not offer us an omniscient account against which we, as readers, could measure her characters’ writerly readings, her characters find no one who can tell them the truth. Instead, ironically the most solid version of reality they can find lies buried in Mrs Heeny’s handbag, which is filled with scraps and newspaper clippings. She, the mistress of her bag, is an important source of information and able to teach others how to read this new world. Fully adapted to a modern world of utter fragmentation, Mrs Heeny, the ‘“society” manicure and masseuse’ (p. 4), embodies the modern American reader and provides the only source of guidance to Wharton’s lost characters. This modernist scenario is significantly reflected in new plot choices Wharton makes in The Custom of the Country. Unlike The House of Mirth, in The Custom of the Country she is not just hinting at vague financial ups and downs in the market that disturb her characters’ lives; instead, this time Wharton lays out an elaborate subplot of the Ararat investigation and the Apex consolidation. Both are central to the novel’s story, and yet they remain for the casual reader merely recurring phrases, such as one might pick up from glancing at newspapers without ever getting the whole story. In the above passage, Wharton hints at the fact that American epic tales, the plots and counterplots of American fiction, can be found in those financial entanglements that ultimately determine her characters’ lives and fascinate them even as they are left to try to ‘read’ them in a writerly way. In a letter to Dr Morgan Dix in 1905 she writes: Social conditions as they are just now in the new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast & absorbing field for the novelist, & I wish a great master could arise to deal with it.3

Yet, Wharton never ‘recites’ that epic for us in the novel – at least not in the way nineteenth- and early twentieth-century realists and naturalists did. Consider Theodore Dreiser’s financial epic about Frank Algernon Cowperwood, his 1912 novel The Financier. Like Wharton, Dreiser recognizes that financial plots are the plots of American fiction, but he – unlike Wharton – leaves no financial detail unexplained. He acknowledges repeatedly that the public cannot understand the new financial system; for example, when discussing corruption, he writes, ‘the general public did not know. It could not find out. The newspapers were not at all vigilant, being pro-political. There were no persistent, enthusiastic reformers who obtained any political credence.’ But for Dreiser, the truth is there to be had. His hero Frank Cowperwood has a clarity of vision that allows him to master this confusing world: ‘He was a financier by

160

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

instinct, and all the knowledge that pertained to that great art was natural to him as the emotions and subtleties of life are to the poet’. Like his clairvoyant hero, Dreiser himself is in command, able to explain the muddy deals that determine our lives. His language is firm, certain, detail-oriented, didactic. ‘It was so easy and in a way so legitimate’, he affirms; and ‘dark as this transaction may seem to the uninitiated, it will appear quite clear to those who know’. Yet, he acknowledges the problem of reaching his readers: ‘It is difficult to make perfectly clear what a subtle and significant power this placed in the hands of Cowperwood’. Again, ‘Imagine yourself by nature versed in the arts of finance’, Dreiser addresses his uncomprehending readers directly, ‘or, better yet, imagine yourself one of those subtle masters of the mysteries of the higher forms of chess’. If you were like Cowperwood, you, too, would ‘know instinctively’ and ‘could see exactly’.4 As Cowperwood masters the market in his own speculations, Dreiser tries to convey his hero’s (and logically his own) clairvoyance to the reader who does not share the gift. With the certainty of nineteenth-century omniscience, Dreiser exhaustively educates his readers in the intricacies of financial speculations, putting us in a readerly position, making us in, Barthes’s terms, ‘idle’, ‘intransitive’, ‘serious’, relegating us to being ‘customers’ who can either ‘accept or reject the text’ but not partake in ‘the pleasure of writing’.5 Wharton on the other hand employs an opposite strategy – obscuring the central financial plot of the novel and allowing us only glimpses of it. She demands that we become modern, writerly readers. We need to piece together the central plot of the novel, through the fragmented lens of Undine’s and other characters’ perceptions. Perhaps because of this strategy, critics have disagreed about how much this plot holds together. In On Native Grounds Alfred Kazin compares Wharton and Dreiser and concludes that Wharton unconsciously decided to talk the language of the soul at a time when the best energies in American prose were devoted to the complex world of industrial capitalism. Yet, what a subject lay before Edith Wharton in that world, if only she had been able, or willing, to use it!6

Instead, in his eyes Wharton looked at the world of finance with contempt and hate.7 Kazin suggests that Wharton, perhaps like her heroine Undine, was unable to understand the financial world that was unfolding in front of her eyes. As Claire Preston points out, another critic, Stephen Orgel, agrees that ‘The new American world of capitalist enterprise is … nearly … opaque to Wharton’. But Preston herself counters: ‘Moffatt’s complex financial career is scattered within the novel, but it is completely coherent if pieced together’.8 Hermione Lee also notes that rather than offering a clear account of the financial plot of the novel ‘every so often Wharton pushes the financial exploits which underpin Undine’s story into the foreground, in a series of masterly dialogues between men in their Wall Street offices’. She suggests that The Custom of the Country ‘could have been a different

‘Lost in Translation’

161

kind of novel – Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, or William Dean Howells might have written’ one that would chronicle Mr Spragg’s and Elmer Moffatt’s careers and deals in a linear, detailed fashion. But for Lee, too, this is a choice rather than a sign of Wharton’s lack of understanding of financial dealings.9 Both Preston and Lee set about the task of ‘piecing together’ the financial subplot, and both succeed, but they not do come up with the same story. In that sense, their interpretations are not so much close readings that reveal the underlying coherent plot of the novel but writerly readings that perform their own meanings. The following comparison reveals the writerly work each critic does and the possibilities Wharton’s text allows. Imagining the plot as Howells, Dreiser or Norris might have presented it, in which the financial plot would be foregrounded, Lee writes: Two of Spragg’s three children die in a typhoid epidemic, and so he becomes involved in a move to bring ‘Pure Water’ to his city. He accepts some worthless land from his father-in-law for a bad debt, and sells it at a big profit to the Apex Water Company, for building a reservoir. In these ‘epic days’, he joins forces with a local politician, James Rolliver. Abner moves to New York to advance his daughter Undine’s social ambitions and to get her away from Elmer Moffatt.10

And Preston writes, summing up the same part of Wharton’s plot: Eventually [Moffatt] is found (emblematically) in the power-house of the Apex water-works. The water-works is controlled at that point by Undine’s father and his partner, Congressman James J. Rolliver, who have engineered a self-enriching scheme in Apex cleverly marketed as ‘The Pure Water Move’, a scheme to supply safe drinking water to the growing town … On the proceeds of Mr Spragg’s sale of his interest in Apex water, meanwhile, the Spraggs move to New York two or three years before the novel opens, either because the Pure Water Move in Apex was shady or to escape the notoriety of Undine’s elopement and divorce.11

Lee’s and Preston’s stories are significantly different. Importantly, Preston sees the Pure Water move solely as a clever market ploy, whereas Lee connects the move to the children’s death.12 In the Lee version, Spragg bails out his father-inlaw, redeems the death of his children and gets lucky in the market by selling the land. In Preston’s account, Spragg, his father-in-law and Rolliver are all part of the Apex water scheme until Spragg sells his interest. Preston is not clear on the motive for the move; even though her previous characterization makes it appear shady, she cannot be sure. Lee believes the move is motivated by the father trying to get Undine into New York and away from Elmer Moffatt. Both versions, substantially different in their points of view on what motivates the characters, are enabled by Wharton’s narrative – but neither is exactly corroborated. Instead, comparing both versions reveals that Wharton’s epic plot is nothing but a ‘perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably

162

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

make it past) can be superimposed’, to use Barthes’s definition of a writerly text already quoted in the epigraph. This is precisely why Wharton never uses, cannot use, an omniscient voice in telling the story; we only ever hear it represented, written indirectly, in the way in which it is present to the characters. Barthes observes of the writerly text that it ‘is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signified … we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one’.13 Wharton repeatedly offers us these unauthoritative entrances. The closest we come to the story is when we witness Mrs Spragg telling Ralph Marvell about it, and then later we hear briefly how Undine sees it, and yet Wharton stresses the unreliable, fragmentary, unauthoritative nature of these renditions: Her husband, she continued, could not, at the time, do much for his father-in-law. Mr. Spragg had come to Apex as a poor boy, and their early married life had been a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-works were built; and this calamity, by causing Mr. Spragg to resolve that thereafter Apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of his fortunes. ‘He had taken over some of my poor father’s land for a bad debt, and when he got up the Pure Water move the company voted to buy the land and build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began to be better off, and it did seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about the children’ … Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of Mrs. Spragg’s untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr. Spragg’s domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr. Spragg had ‘helped out’ his ruined fatherin-law, and had vowed on his children’s graves that no Apex child should ever drink poisoned water – and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. (pp. 80–1)

In this scene Wharton gives us both an unreliable narrator, Mrs Spragg, and an unreliable, inept reader, Ralph Marvell. We can see that Lee’s version of the story is more directly guided by Mrs Spragg’s version than Preston’s. But what we really observe here is Ralph’s shaky translation of Mrs Spragg’s version of her husband’s story. Wharton highlights the translation by putting words such as ‘helped out’ in quotation marks, making it clear that Ralph has no sense of what that phrase means and he can therefore not really translate the story. Ralph cannot decipher the ‘occult connections’ or understand the ‘impressive law of compensation’ that somehow would make sense of this story. He cannot, as Wharton puts it, ‘read between the lines of Mrs. Spragg’s untutored narrative’. Marvell weaves a moral tale out of Mrs Spragg’s rendering of Mr Spragg’s financial dealings – he, after all cannot even speak about money with his wife (p. 158). He fills in the ‘occult connection’ with poetry. And Mrs Spragg herself is vague in her perception of the story: ‘it did seem as if ’, she says, trying to give the story coherence and meaning. We observe in the scene Ralph’s translation of Mrs Spragg’s words, and we

‘Lost in Translation’

163

have been given signs that neither version can be trusted. Yet, the narrative never supplies another version – and this is reflected in the fact that even experienced, professional close readers like Preston and Lee arrive at different versions of the story. Thus we as readers are drawn into various characters’ translations of the underlying plot, experiencing their own ways of trying to piece it together and give it meaning. Wharton continues to think about Ralph’s reading of Moffatt’s story, emphasizing repeatedly the impossibility of arriving at an authoritative version of the story or the truth. Instead, Wharton shows the reading process in detail: [Ralph’s] thoughts had been drawn back to Moffatt by the insistence with which the latter’s name had lately been put forward by the press in connection with a revival of the Ararat investigation. Moffatt, it appeared, had been regarded as one of the most valuable witnesses for the State; his return from Europe had been anxiously awaited, his unreadiness to testify caustically criticized; then, at last he had arrived, had gone on to Washington – and had apparently had nothing to tell. (p. 449)

Ralph’s thoughts are determined by the press’s insistence on Moffatt’s name, and his only information is unreliable accounts of him in which things are juxtaposed as ‘connected’, in which things ‘appear’ to be one way, and in which the desire for his testimony is only matched by the disappointment over it. Indeed, in this passage Wharton might well be talking about the narrative strategies of her own novel, which never offers us Moffatt’s testimony. Moffatt simply remains an object of discourse throughout the novel without ever telling his own story directly. Whereas Dreiser in his exhaustive, explanatory, omniscient narrative offers a safe haven from a world of fragmentary, unreliable information, Wharton is more interested in the very reading processes such a world demands and engenders. Such reading processes are deeply modernist, acknowledging the fragmentary and perspectival nature of texts. And Marvell perhaps cannot write in such a modernist way. His ambition to write a money novel comes to naught because he never gains the knowledge he believes he needs to write it. He recognizes the power of Moffatt’s tale and wants to write about it. ‘Jove, I wish I could put him in a book! There’s something epic about him – a kind of epic effrontery’ (p. 254).14 But since he is incapable of grasping the story and, unable to write a modernist text that would allow him to accept the fragmentation of reality, he never writes it. Throughout the text, he continuously attempts to find Moffatt’s story, only to be frustrated over and over. Wharton concentrates her plot on this search: Meanwhile Ralph, from various sources, continued to pick up a good deal of more or less contradictory information about Elmer Moffatt. It seemed to be generally understood that Moffatt had come back from Europe with the intention of testifying in the Ararat investigation, and that his former patron, the great Harmon B. Driscoll, had managed to silence him; and it was implied that the price of this silence, which was set

164

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country at a considerable figure, had been turned to account in a series of speculations likely to lift Moffatt to permanent eminence among the rulers of Wall Street. The stories as to his latest achievement, and the theories as to the man himself, varied with the visual angle of each reporter; and whenever any attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him. (pp. 456–7)

Wharton emphasizes the reading process, the way in which Ralph Marvell is trying to get information. He has to sift through contradictory accounts, each one tainted by the writer’s own ‘visual angle’ on the subject, and no truth ever comes completely into focus. Instead, the ‘stories’ and ‘theories’ never remove the mystery about Elmer Moffatt. Wharton’s prose reads like Ralph’s summary and synthesis of various newspaper accounts, but even those, we see indirectly, cannot truly account for what is actually happening – rather things are ‘generally understood’, ‘implied’, had been ‘managed’ somehow, or are ‘likely’. The implication is that no source can actually get to the source, but that all news is to some large degree hearsay and speculation. Marvell’s death then might be read as the death of a reader and an author caught up in a nineteenth-century aesthetic that relies on omniscience and stability of meaning. He dies in light of a new reality, a modern world of reading and writing that he cannot grasp or endure. Wharton also makes us follow Undine’s process as a reader/writer, but her development is, of course, one of survival rather than defeat. While Marvell dies, she becomes a writerly reader, a ‘new Desdemona’ who makes her own meaning and lives by it. Right in the beginning we see that she grew up with the model of separate spheres in the relation between her parents. For example, in an early scene when Mr Spragg comes home and paces through the house instead of settling down, Mrs Spragg asks anxiously ‘What’s the matter – anything wrong down town?’ And Wharton comments: Mrs. Spragg’s knowledge of what went on ‘down town’ was of the most elementary kind, but her husband’s face was the barometer in which she had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly, or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be weathered (p. 16)

Mrs Spragg’s role is nearly reactive, passive, trying to adjust to changes she can only comprehend on the simplest terms. And initially, imitating her mother’s role, Undine is completely uninterested in the market: ‘Her eyes grew absent-minded, as they always did when he alluded to business. That was man’s province; and what did men go “down town” for but to bring back the spoils to their women?’ (p. 44, italics in original). Through much of the novel, Undine has little interest in understanding the financial details of her father’s life: Since he had changed his base of operations his affairs had followed an uncertain course, and Undine suspected that his breach with his old political ally, the Representative Rolliver who had seen him through the muddiest reaches of the Pure Water

‘Lost in Translation’

165

Move, was not unconnected with his failure to get a footing in Wall Street. But all this was vague and shadowy to her. Even had ‘business’ been less of a mystery, she was too much absorbed in her own affairs to project herself into her father’s case (p. 236)

Undine follows the separate spheres model of her mother, in which her ‘own affairs’ had nothing to do with her ‘father’s case.’ Wharton delineates the development in Undine’s mind from separating her world from finance to becoming engrossed in it. Slowly, Undine begins to grasp the connections and ultimately becomes absorbed in Moffatt’s business dealings, not to understand them on his terms but to translate them into hers. The turning point, though, happens suddenly in a conversation with Peter Van Degen: ‘Old Driscoll’s high and dry since the Ararat investigation.’ She threw him a puzzled glance, having no time, in her crowded existence, to follow the perturbations of Wall Street save as they affected the hospitality of Fifth Avenue. ‘You mean they’ve lost their money? Won’t they give their fancy ball, then?’ Van Degen shrugged. ‘Nobody knows how it’s coming out. That queer chap Elmer Moffatt threatens to give old Driscoll a fancy ball – says he’s going to dress him in stripes! It seems he knows too much about the Apex street-railways. Undine paled a little ... She had not had the curiosity to follow the reports of the ‘Ararat Trust Investigation’, but once or twice lately, in the snatches of smoking-room talk, she had been surprised by a vague allusion to Elmer Moffatt, as to an erratic financial influence, half ridiculed, yet already half redoubtable. Was it possible that the redoubtable element had prevailed? That the time had come when Elmer Moffatt – the Elmer Moffatt of Apex! – could, even for a moment, cause consternation in the Driscoll camp? … Her heart beat faster. (pp. 196–7)

While initially Undine can only think of Fifth Avenue hospitality, her interest in the ball gives way to her interest in Moffatt’s role in the Ararat investigation. It is as if at this moment – when she first ‘pales’ and then her ‘heart beats faster’ – her point of view changes, moving away from a nineteenth-century separate spheres model to a modern, exciting sense that Elmer Moffatt through his business dealing plays a significant part in the world from which she saw him excluded. It is, arguably, in this instance that he becomes her modern Othello, and she his new Desdemona, who understands that her life is inextricably linked to the mysterious workings of Wall Street, workings she only aims to understand on her own terms, as she reads/writes them into her own meaning. Her ability to make this move, to modernize her perspective, makes her the survivor to Lily’s and Marvell’s suicides. If Undine is modern compared to her mother, and Ralph stuck in a nineteenth-century aesthetic of reading and writing, then their son Paul Marvell may well represent the emerging new generation of modernist American readers. It is

166

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

not his mother, though, but Mrs Heeny who teaches him to adapt to this modern world. Like his grandmother and mother before him, he gathers the most central facts of his life from Mrs Heeny’s newspaper clippings. Left alone by his mother and forbidden to access the books in Moffatt’s library, Paul learns that his one access to information lies buried in Mrs Heeny’s bag. ‘Paul listened, fascinated. He had the feeling that Mrs Heeny’s clippings, aside from their great intrinsic interest, might furnish him the clue to many things he didn’t understand, and that nobody had ever had time to explain to him’ (p. 582). Mrs Heeny, who carries with her at all times a bag of miscellaneous clippings, is the one character in the novel who has a firm grip on reality precisely because she reads the world in fragments. With her ‘reassuring look of solidity and reality’ (p. 4) she becomes the source of information to everyone through her fragmented texts. Ironically, Mrs Spragg, Wharton tells us, repeats her stories because it ‘gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life’ (p. 79). When she advises Paul that ‘You’d ougther start a scrap-book yourself ’ (p. 582) she suggests that the only way he can comprehend his life is by creating his own collage, reading/writing the world by assembling pieces in his own order. Mrs Heeny tries to move Paul, in a way, beyond the readerly passivity of his grandmother towards a writerly practice of pastiche and bricolage. As she digs out of her bag ‘piles and piles of new clippings’ (p. 581), she tries to help him put together a version of his life. David Krause writes that ‘for Faulkner, the work of reading implicates both reader and writer in profound and radical problems of knowing and imagining, of being and loving’.15 Paul has to face these problems; alienated, devoid of intimate human love, he must master his life by reading it in his own way. In Paul, Wharton presents to us an example of a new, modernist American reader. In Mrs Heeny Wharton also offers us a model of a modern woman. Early on in the novel Wharton contrasts Mrs Spragg’s ignorance and silence with Mrs Heeny’s ‘omniscience’ (p. 8) and her sense of ‘solidity’ and ‘reality’ (p. 4). As a ‘stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet’ (p. 3), she is equipped to deal with the modern world, and she is able to explain it to Mrs Spragg and Undine. In her book Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Modernism Jennifer Haytock asks us to reconsider Wharton’s engagement with questions of modernism outside of an ‘established definition of modernism [that] has been built around a masculinist vision of art and the individual’.16 In Mrs Heeny Wharton may well be seen as positing a female model of modernist reading, a ‘mother’ of modernist practices that links modernism to female and mass culture.17 Appearing both at the beginning and the end of the novel, Wharton gives Mrs Heeny, the ‘pedagogue’ (p. 6), a prominent place. She, unlike any other character, teaches Wharton’s writerly reading practices to others, carrying with her at all times both scissors and jumbled clippings, which she puts into her own order whenever she needs

‘Lost in Translation’

167

to explain the world. Her ‘omniscience,’ her reading, consists of ‘swooping down on her bag, [drawing] from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, [spreading them] on her ample lap and [proceeding] to sort with a moistened forefinger’ (p. 8). Through Mrs Heeny’s lessons, Wharton describes to us an evolution of reading and being, showing how reading practices have to adjust to the increasingly fragmentary unknowable world of modern finance, and, in Paul’s generation, of modern life itself. In his 1905 book Frenzied Finance, also quoted in the epigraph to this essay, Thomas W. Lawson talks with great vehemence about the level of incomprehension most Americans have – seeing finance as a magic they can never understand. ‘Within the fairy realm of finance the laws of nature apparently are suspended.’18 Lawson, like Dreiser, sets out to explain that world to the average American. In The Custom of the Country Wharton focuses on this incomprehension, depicting the ways in which her characters are trying to make life decisions against the epic financial plots that they cannot understand but that determine their lives. While Dreiser explicates the world of finance to the reader so that they can stay in a stable if complicated world, Wharton’s choice to forego omniscience in the central financial plot of her novel allows her to focus on the reading practices engendered by the modern world of finance. Writing about Hugh Kenner’s writerly reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, Margot Norris notes: ‘For Kenner … the most significant sounds were sometimes the ones that were not audible, and the most interesting scenes in fiction … were lodged in a seeming void or gap’.19 The central void in Wharton’s narrative contains the actual words and facts of Moffatt’s epic recital spoken by him or an omniscient narrator. This void invites a reflection on what it means to read and be in modern life, and Paul’s scrap-book becomes emblematic of the writerly practices that replace reality with text in a modern world. In The Custom of the Country Wharton focuses on the way in which finance capitalism changes the foundations of our lives, the very way of reading and being. This modernism rings particularly true in the current climate of economic instability, in which we are forced, like Paul, to understand our lives through fragmentary, transitory, unreliable evidence. Like Paul, Americans can only vaguely comprehend their lives as they have little access to complete stories of the very financial epics that determine them. A new way of reading is needed – piecing together from clips and fragments, even in the literal sense of scrapbooks and collages, ideas about the very forces that shape our existence. In that sense, The Custom of the Country is a puzzle the reader must solve, as is perhaps American life itself in light of an increasingly complex financial order, an order that made Wharton turn to a modernist aesthetic.

NOTES

Rattray, ‘Introduction’ 1.

R. W. B. Lewis. Edith Wharton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1975), p. 348; H. Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), p. 399; C. G. Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, rev. edn (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing Co., 1995), pp. 223, 227; R. Peel, Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction before World War I (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), p. 198. 2. E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 433. 3. Wharton to Sara Norton, 29 May 1908, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and N. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 146. 4. Wharton to Morton Fullerton, 15 May 1911, in ibid., p. 241, n. 9. 5. Wharton to Bernard Berenson, 16 May 1911, in ibid., p. 240. 6. Wharton to Berenson, 6 August 1911, in ibid., p. 252. 7. Wharton to Berenson, 2 August 1913, in ibid., pp. 303–4. 8. Wharton to Berenson, 6 August 1911, in ibid., p. 252. 9. The English translation of the divorce decree, granted on 16 April 1913 in Paris declared ‘that Mr. Wharton maintained adulterous relations in Boston in 1908 and 1909 … [and] attached himself to various women both in London and Monte Carlo, and had relations with them of a character gravely injurious to the petitioner’. Cited in ibid., p. 302, n. 1. 10. Wharton to Fullerton, 3 May 1913, in ibid., pp. 300–1. 11. In the nightmare (which eerily occurred the year before the onset of the First World War), Wharton envisages even further torments in store. When the Demon has dragged out the last of the terrifying ‘Black Horrors’, the author, unconvinced the terrors are at an end, stares at ‘the great black pile’ and at the empty trunk, before enquiring of the Demon ‘Are you sure it hasn’t a false bottom?’ (Notebook, Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS42). 12. In these two fragmentary reminiscences, Wharton mused on topics including the importance of her father’s library and ‘the high regard in which letters are held in France’ (‘Adventures with Books’, MS Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). The phrase would also surface in her published 1934 memoir, Wharton writing of her avid youthful reading: ‘The child knows instinctively when it will be understood, and from the first I kept my adventures with books to myself ’ (A Backward Glance (London: Everyman, 1993), pp. 47–8). – 169 –

170

Notes to pages 2–5

13. Diary entry in June 1925 in ‘Quaderno dello Studente’, reprinted in The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, ed. L. Rattray, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), vol. 2, pp. 207–15. 14. Undated publishers’ advertisements; Leeds Mercury (6 December 1913). Clippings, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 4, folders 105–6. 15. ‘Novels’, Saturday Review, 116 (22 November 1913). Clipping, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 16. S. Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), p. 284. See also Lewis, Wharton: A Biography, p. 351. 17. ‘Critical Reviews of the Season’s Latest Book’, New York Sun (18 October 1913), p. 8; L. M. F., ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Novel: The Custom of the Country: A Book Which Will Excite Much Discussion’, New York Times Review of Books (19 October 1913), p. 557; H. W. B[oynton], ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Manner’, Nation, 97 (30 October, 1913), pp. 404–5. Clippings, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 18. E. Wilson, ‘Justice to Edith Wharton’ (1941), in I. Howe (ed.), Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 19–31, on p. 24. 19. E. Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 102; S. Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), p. 62; B. Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘The Reader as Misogynist in The Custom of Country’, Modern Language Studies, 21:2 (Winter 1991), pp. 45–53. 20. For a discussion of Wharton’s writing for the stage, see my ‘Edith Wharton as Playwright’, in The Unpublished Writings of Wharton, vol. 1, pp. xxvii–l. 21. A. A. Rogers, ‘Why American Marriages Fail’, Atlantic Monthly, 100:3 (September 1907), pp. 289–98, on pp. 290, 292–3. 22. E. Wharton, The Arch, in The Unpublished Writings of Wharton, vol. 1, pp. 93–109. While Rose is certainly no Undine (for instance, she actually wants her son – and not as a bargaining tool), the play’s projected, shifting position in relation to the beliefs and actions of The Arch’s female protagonist may well suggest a developing precursor to one of Wharton’s most memorable fictional creations. Through, among other motifs, its discourse on divorce, laced with hypocrisy, a young divorcee with a son caught up in a custody dispute, an old family friend in love with the divorcee’s new husband, an artistic husband driven to despair and suicide, The Arch offers resonances of The Custom of the Country. The manuscript is undated, however, thwarting attempts to fix the genesis of the play securely to the turbulent years of construction of Wharton’s novel. 23. D. M. MacComb, ‘New Wives for Old: Divorce and the Leisure-Class Marriage Market in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country’, American Literature, 68:4 (December 1996), pp. 765–97, on p. 765. 24. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 190. 25. ‘Undine Chronology’, The Custom of the Country holograph notes. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 4, folder 101. 26. C. J. Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 4; Peel, Apart from Modernism, p. 224. 27. Ammons, Wharton’s Argument with America, pp. 102, 109. 28. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 224; Benstock, No Gifts from Chance, pp. 283–4; A. Worth, ‘Edith Wharton’s Poetics of Telecommunication’, Studies in American Fiction, 36. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 95–121.

Notes to pages 5–16

171

29. Lewis, Wharton: A Biography, p. 350. 30. MacComb, ‘New Wives for Old’, p. 765. 31. C. Tichi, ‘Emerson, Darwin, and The Custom of the Country’, in C. J. Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 89–114, on p. 90; T. M. Sassoubre, ‘Property and Identity in The Custom of the Country’, Modern Fiction Studies, 49:4 (Winter 2003), pp. 687–713, on p. 687; C. Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 131. 32. L. M. F., ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Novel’. 33. Peel, Apart from Modernism, pp. 223–4. 34. Lee, Wharton, p. 425. 35. See Jennifer Haytock’s recent study, Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which includes a summary of critical work on Wharton and modernism, pp. 13–15. 36. See, for example, Wolff ’s reading in which ‘the young Ethan Frome is no more than a figment of the narrator’s imagination … The “story” of Ethan Frome is nothing more than a dream vision, a brief glimpse into the most appalling recesses of the narrator’s mind’ (A Feast of Words, pp. 160–1). 37. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 138. 38. See Haytock, Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism, p. 38. 39. Peel, Apart from Modernism, pp. 196–7; Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 223. 40. P. Lubbock, ‘The Novels of Edith Wharton’ (1915), in Howe (ed.), Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 43–61, on pp. 52, 53. 41. See Wolff, A Feast of Words, pp. 222–43. 42. Lee, Wharton, p. 427. 43. Peel, Apart from Modernism, p. 225 44. A. E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Culture in America (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 203. Also cited by Goodman, below, p. 16. 45. E. Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 35. 46. Wharton to Robert Grant, 19 November 1907, in The Letters of Wharton, p. 124. 47. A. Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (New York: Liveright, 1998), p. 74. Lewis suggests that Wharton believed Lorelei Lee ‘vindicated’ her characterization of Undine Spragg (Wharton: A Biography, p. 468). 48. Wharton to Sara Norton, 29 May 1908, in The Letters of Wharton, p. 146

1 Goodman, ‘Edith Wharton’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly’ 1. 2. 3.

H. E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell: A Biography, 2 vols (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), vol. 2, pp. 99–100. A. E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Culture in America (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 203. N. P. Willis to James T. Fields, 27 June 1853, quoted in W. S. Tryon, Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 226.

172 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Notes to pages 16–27 Edith Wharton to Bliss Perry, 9 November 1903, in E. Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909, Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 289–90. C. A. Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 15. W. D. Howells, Literature and Life (New York: Harper’s, 1902), p. 9. E. Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), p. 154. See K. Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 90, 264, n. 64. Henry James to Edith Wharton, 17 August 1902, in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915, ed. L. Powers (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1990), p. 34. See F. E. Leupp, ‘The Waning Power of the Press’, Atlantic Monthly, 105:2 (February 1910), pp. 145–56. J. C. Austin, Fields of The Atlantic Monthly: Letters to an Editor, 1861–1870 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1953), p. 32. Howells, Literature and Life, p. 271. C. M. Harvey, ‘The Dime Novel in American Life’, Atlantic Monthly, 100:1 ( July 1907), pp. 37–45, on p. 45. E. Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York and London: D. Appleton, 1919), p. 18. ‘Woman’s Work in the World is Marriage; Man the Breadwinner and Provider’, New York Times, 22 September 1907, p. SM3. A. A. Rogers, ‘Why American Marriages Fail’, Atlantic Monthly, 100:3 (September 1907), pp. 289–98, on pp. 290, 292–3. H. James, French Writers and American Women; Essays, ed. P. Buitenhuis (Branford, CT: Compass Publishing Co., 1960), p. 33. Rogers, ‘Why American Marriages Fail’, p. 292. Ibid., p. 292. E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905), in Novels, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 228. See A. A. Rogers, ‘Why American Mothers Fail’, Atlantic Monthly, 101:3 (March 1908), pp. 289–97. J. Huneker, ‘The Evolution of an Egoist: Maurice Barrès’, Atlantic Monthly, 100 (August 1907), pp. 205–15, on p. 214. E. Wharton and O. Codman, Jr, The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. 18. Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 337. Q. Ewing, ‘The Heart of the Race Problem’, Atlantic Monthly, 103:3 (March 1909), pp. 389–97, on pp. 389, 393. K. Miller, ‘The Ultimate Race Problem’, Atlantic Monthly, 103:4 (April 1909), pp. 536– 42, on p. 542. H. Monroe, ‘The Bigness of the World’, Atlantic Monthly, 108:3 (September, 1911), pp. 371–5, on pp. 374–5. A. M. Knapp, ‘Who are the Japanese?’, Atlantic Monthly, 110:3 (September 1912), pp. 333–40, on p. 340. K. Francke, ‘The Study of National Consciousness’, Atlantic Monthly, 99:3 (March 1907), pp. 409–16.

Notes to pages 27–44

173

30. K. Francke, Glimpses of Modern German Culture (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898), p. 9. 31. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. M. Bruccoli (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 140.

2 Towheed, ‘When the Reading Had to Stop’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, in Robert Browning: Selected Verse, ed. D. Karlin (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 75. E. Showalter, ‘Spragg: The Art of the Deal’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. M. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 87–97, on p. 95. See H. Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), p. 625; E. Wharton, Italian Backgrounds (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), p. 251. Browning, Selected Verse, pp. 73, 311. C. Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 69, 91. See J. Connolly, ‘What Middletown Read’, at http://www.bsu.edu/middletown/wmr/ [accessed 12 October 2009]. The database will be available from April 2010. See, for example, T. Augst and W. A. Wiegand (eds), Libraries as Agencies of Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); and C. F. Kaestle and H. DamonMoore, Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (Yale, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); and in a British context, A. Black, The Public Library in Britain, 1914–2000 (London: British Library, 2000); and M. Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 23–51. J. Bartlett, A Collection of Familiar Quotations, with Complete Indices of Authors and Subjects (Boston, MA: John Bartlett, 1856). A tenth edition appeared in 1914, just a matter of weeks after the volume publication of The Custom of the Country. K. Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 11. C. Preston, Edith Wharton’s Social Register (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 43. Lee, Wharton, p. 171. The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, ed. S. Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 156–60. This sum is equivalent to around £8,600 ($13,600) today. See the Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 42, Series V, Boxes 50–2.

3 McMullen, ‘“Don’t Cry – it ain’t that Kind of a Story”’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Wharton to Sara Norton, 17 March 1903, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and N. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 80. Wharton to Morton Fullerton, January 1910, in ibid., p. 195. Wharton to Sara Norton, 29 May 1908, in ibid., p. 146. S. Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 243. H. James, Washington Square (New York: Dell, 1959), p. 206. E. Wharton, ‘The Pretext’ (1908), in Edith Wharton Collected Stories: 1891–1910, ed. M. Howard (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 661.

174 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Notes to pages 44–51 E. Wharton, ‘The Debt’ (1908), in ibid., p. 756. Wharton’s New England; Seven Stories and Ethan Frome, ed. B. A. White (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1995), p. xvii. Wharton, ‘The Pretext’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, p. 633. Ibid., pp. 645–6. E. Fracasso, Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 66. Wharton, ‘The Pretext’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, p. 638 (my italics). C. G. Wolff, in A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 152, writes that the husband’s plunge is accidental, but the text leaves no doubt that he fell through the trap door opened by Wrayford as he enters the boathouse. Wolff also states that Wrayford attempts a rescue, but, as much has been made earlier in the story of the oiliness of the floor, I read his death by drowning as accidental. E. Wharton, ‘The Choice’ (1908), in Xingu and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 293, 305. B. Bender, The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871–1926 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 321–6. Wharton, ‘The Choice’, in Xingu, pp. 283, 305, 283. E. Wharton, ‘The Verdict’ (1908), in The Hermit and the Wild Woman (Marston Gate: Hard Press, n.d.), pp. 96, 98, 99. Ibid., pp. 102,100, 103. E. Wharton, ‘The Bolted Door’ (1909), in Tales of Men and Ghosts (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 16. Fracasso, Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness, pp. 52, 53. Wharton, ‘The Bolted Door’, in Tales of Men and Ghosts, pp. 19, 18. Wharton, ‘The Daunt Diana’ (1901), in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 735, 741. Ibid., p. 731. The title of a poem by Emily Dickinson (1830–86), ‘Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant’, not published in her lifetime. C. Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Wharton, ‘His Father’s Son’ (1909), in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 725, 729. Wharton, ‘Full Circle’ (1909), in ibid., pp. 774, 780–1. Wharton, ‘The Letters’ (1910), in ibid., pp. 886, 863, 887, 897. Fracasso, Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness, p. 20. Wharton, ‘The Letters’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, p. 897. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 336. Wharton, ‘The Legend’ (1910), in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, p. 795. Wharton to Morton Fullerton, 11 May 1914, in The Letters of Wharton, p. 324; Wharton, ‘The Eyes’ (1910), in Collected Stories: 1891–1810, p. 810. Letter of 16 April 1914, in The Letters of Wharton, p. 318. E. Wharton, ‘Life and I’, in The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, ed. L. Rattray, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), vol. 2, p. 191. Wharton, ‘Afterward’ (1909), in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 832, 854, 833. Ibid., pp. 830, 834, 844–5, 842, 833, 842, 845, 854. Ibid., p. 841.

Notes to pages 52–8 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

175

Ibid., pp. 856, 860. Ibid., pp. 834, 836, 844,845, 843. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 225. A. Worth, ‘Edith Wharton’s Poetics of Telecommunication’, Studies in American Fiction, 36:1 (Spring 2008), pp. 95–121, on p. 110. Wharton, ‘Afterward’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 830, 858. Wharton, ‘The Pretext’, in ibid., p. 642. E. Wharton, ‘The Triumph of Night’ (1914), in Edith Wharton Collected Stories: 1911– 1937, ed. M. Howard (New York: Library of America, 2001), pp. 159, 150, 144, 155–6, 158. Ibid., pp. 146–7, 144, 143, 146. Ibid., pp. 158, 142–3, 145, 159. Ibid., p. 165. Wharton’s New England, p. 181. Wharton, ‘The Triumph of Night’, in Collected Stories: 1911–1937, pp. 159, 147. Henry James to Howard Sturgis, 16 July 1909, in Henry James: Letters 1843–1916, ed. L. Edel, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), vol. 4, p. 527. Wharton, ‘The Triumph of Night’, in Collected Stories: 1911–1937, pp. 149, 158. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 141. Wharton, ‘The Eyes’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 810–11, 814, 811, 810, 817. Wharton, ‘The Triumph of Night’, in Collected Stories: 1911–1937, p. 146. Wharton, ‘The Eyes’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 821, 823, 812, 824, 811, 823, 825. Wharton, ‘Afterward’, in ibid., p. 830. Wharton, ‘The Eyes’, in ibid., pp. 810, 814. Wharton, ‘Afterward’, in ibid., p. 860. E. Wharton, ‘Visibility in Fiction’, in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. F. Wegener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 167–9. Wharton, ‘Afterward’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, pp. 848, 844. E. Wharton, Preface to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 2. Wharton, ‘Autres Temps’ (1911), in Collected Stories: 1911–1937, p. 85. Ibid., pp. 61–2. Wharton, ‘The Pretext’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, p. 647. E. Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 24. Wharton, ‘Xingu’ (1911), in Collected Stories: 1911–1937, pp. 8–9. Wharton, ‘The Long Run’ (1912), in ibid., pp. 112, 114, 134. Wharton to Robert Grant, 19 November 1907, in The Letters of Wharton, p. 124. Wharton to Morton Fullerton, 11 May 1914, in ibid., p. 324. Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, p. 35. Wharton, ‘Afterward’, in Collected Stories: 1891–1910, p. 832. Wharton, ‘The Verdict’, in The Hermit and the Wild Woman, pp. 99, 102.

176

Notes to pages 59–70

4 Singley, ‘Worst Parents Ever’ 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

See, for example, L. M. F., ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Novel: The Custom of the Country: A Book Which Will Excite Much Discussion’, New York Times Review of Books, 19 October 1913, p. 557, and H. W. B[oynton], ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Manner’, Nation, 97 (30 October 1913), pp. 404–5. P. Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1967), p. 290. H. Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 242, 256, 259. Ibid., p. 676. W. Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. J. Stillinger, Riverside Edition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 187. E. Wharton, ‘Life and I’, in Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, ed. C. G. Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 1091. Coveney, The Image of Childhood, p. 291. E. Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), p. 18. ‘The Custom of the Country’, Nation (15 May 1913), p. 494. Augustus, ‘Children of the Rich’, New York Observer and Chronicle, 82:18 (5 May 1904), p. 555. Ibid., p. 555. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 207. Augustus, ‘Children of the Rich’, p. 555. I thank Julie Yankanich, doctoral student in Childhood Studies at Rutgers-Camden, for her insights and stimulating conversation about Wharton’s allusion to Gainsborough. P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage, 1962). G. Walker, Solomon’s Children: Exploding the Myths of Divorce (New York: Arbor House, 1986), p. 41; V. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic, 1985). The divorce rate doubled from 1865 to 1900, from two to four per one thousand and continued rising, reaching eight per one thousand in 1940. P. R. Amato, ‘Divorce in Social and Historical Context: Changing Scientific Perspective on Children and Marital Dissolution’, in M. Coleman and L. H. Ganong (eds), Handbook of Contemporary Families: Considering the Past, Contemplating the Future (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), pp. 265–81, on p. 266. Ibid., p. 267. J. Wallerstein, J. Lewis and S. Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (New York: Hyperion, 2000), pp. xxiii–xxv. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 432. Wharton’s ethnographic interests are explored by J. W. Tuttleton, ‘Edith Wharton: The Archeological Motive’, Yale Review, 61 (1972), pp. 562–74, on pp. 562–4; M. E. Gibson, ‘Edith Wharton and the Ethnography of Old New York’, Studies in American Fiction, 13 (1985), pp. 57–69; and N. Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 160–212.

Notes to pages 71–2

177

5 Orlando, ‘Crude Ascending the Staircase’ I would like to thank Meredith Goldsmith, Nels Pearson and Laura Rattray for their generous encouragement and support of this essay. For assistance with rights and reproductions, I am deeply grateful to: Laura Rattray; Marta Fodor of ArtResource; Thomas Haggerty and Joanne Hardy of the Bridgeman Art Library; Karen Mansfield of the Worcester Art Museum; and Cassandra King of Design and Artists Copyright Society. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

M. W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Great Depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 48. M. W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (Greenwich, CT: Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1963), p. 110. Roosevelt, ‘Layman’s View of the Exhibition’, printed in the Outlook, at http://xroads. virginia.edu/~museum/armory/primitivism.html. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Great Depression, p. 47. H. Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 702. Examining Wharton’s travel writings on Italy and Morocco, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi locates the writer’s modernity in her acceptance of ‘visual experiences which had been “forbidden” to her 19th-century predecessors … Another sign of modernity could be seen in Wharton’s use of paintings to convey some of her visual experiences in her writing’ (Zorzi, ‘Edith Wharton, Painting and Modernity’, in M. Bottalico (ed.), Literature and the Visual Arts in 20th-Century America (Bari: Palomar, 2002), pp. 23–41, on p. 23). Zorzi focuses on Wharton’s ‘painterly’ descriptions in her travel writing and does not examine the writer’s fiction. Brown notes that while the show was ‘a smash hit’ in Chicago, it lost money in Boston: ‘There was a slight stir in the morass of Boston academicism, but Brahmin snobbery sailed through the crisis untouched. Disapproval was not clamorous, merely icy with indifference’ (American Painting from the Armory Show to the Great Depression, p. 50). Eleanor Dwight notes that Wharton ‘disdained American art and history’ (‘Wharton and Art’, in C. J. Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 181–210, on p. 185). ‘She repeatedly frowned at the lack of art in the lives of Americans and admired the way it enriched the lives of Europeans … Unlike America, where art was a luxury for the well-off, Italy, she believed, offered art to all’ (p. 191). Wharton’s distrust of modern art has been well documented: Hermione Lee notes that while Wharton was living at Ste-Claire, she ‘had wary relations with her most avant-garde neighbours’, like Charles de Noailles and his wife who ‘hung Picasso, Ernst, Braque, Gris, Chagall and Miro on their walls’ and screened films by Cocteau and Man Ray (Wharton, p. 541). As Lee observes, ‘Clark would say that he liked looking at paintings with her, not because she was good on the “purely pictorial qualities of paintings” but because of her “highly civilized non-specialist point of view.” When they went to stay with her in France … he admired her few good paintings: the Cezanne left to her by Walter [Berry], a Renoir still life and her “two ravishing Odilon Redons”’ (Wharton, p. 702). The Cézanne, displayed in Wharton’s library at Pavillon Colombe, was a lush landscape titled L’Allée au Jas de Bouffan (1874–5; now at the Tate Gallery, London) (source: Erica Donnis, unpublished document titled ‘Works of Art Owned by Edith Wharton’, dated 2 March 2006). Brown notes that while the public cited Duchamp’s Nude Descending as representative of all that was ridiculous in modern art, ‘Odilon Redon was a public success’ (American Painting

178

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

Notes to pages 72–3 from the Armory Show to the Great Depression, p. 49): ‘Of all the avant-garde artists he was accorded the most favorable reception in the press … Redon was by far the most successful of the exhibitors and the phenomenal acceptance of his work came while he was still alive. Thirteen of his paintings and pastels and twenty prints were sold from the Armory Show’ (Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 208). For the month the show was in New York, it was covered almost daily in the press and was on the tip of just about everyone’s tongue: ‘The galleries were full of people who came once to gape, artists who came often to study or deride, and celebrities who came as much to be seen as to see. It was taken up by New York society and became one of the things to do. Mrs. Astor came every morning after breakfast and the galleries were usually dotted with elegantly dressed ladies’ (Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 116). J. M. Nash, in D. Britt (ed.), Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 159. See Lee, Wharton, p. 445. In his chapter on The Custom of the Country Robin Peel notes that ‘[t]he novel’s completion in the same year that saw the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Alain Fournier’s Le grand meaulnes, and Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann suggests that Wharton had parted company with modernism before the interruption of World War I’ (Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction before World War I (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), p. 203). As his title suggests, Peel reads Wharton as anti-modernist, arguing that her belief in the moral purpose of art and literature led her to forego modernist experiment for ethical, not aesthetic, reasons. Jennifer Haytock’s Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), while acknowledging Wharton’s discomfort with modernism, argues that ‘Wharton concerned herself closely with the ideas of modernism: the break from Victorianism, the impact of World War I on the individual and society, the isolated self, the possibilities and limitations of language, and the nature of the artist and the artist’s role in society’ (p. 1). Haytock does ‘not postulate that Wharton was or was not a modernist, but rather [her] project investigates the ways in which Wharton participated in some of the literary and cultural conversations of her time’ (pp. 1–2). Munch’s haunting Nude with Red Hair (1901), with exaggeratedly long tresses, large eyes and oversized breasts and navel, provides one example of the oversexed woman (cat. 245, reprinted in Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, Catalogue Raisonne). Toulouse-Lautrec’s Woman Sitting at Table (1889) profiles a melancholy female leaning on a bistro table, with a bottle of alcohol and partially full glass before her (cat. 1061, reprinted in ibid., Catalogue Raisonne). Cezanne’s Femme au Chapelet (1900–4), depicting a matronly woman in a repentant pose, eyes cast downward, praying the rosary, was exhibited at the Armory Show (cat. 214, reprinted in ibid., Catalogue Raisonne). Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculpture titled Femme à Genoux (1911), representing a woman kneeling, also appeared at the Armory (cat. 600, reprinted in ibid., Catalogue Raisonne). Manolo’s sculpture Femme Nue Accroupie (Crouching Female Nude) presents a similar pose (cat. 621). Archipenko’s sculpture called Le Repos (The Repose) (1912) presents a traditional reclining female nude (cat. 602), though this figure shares with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon the provocative legs-splayed-open pose. Arthur B. Davies’s work titled Drawing (1911) depicts a young woman dressed in what seem to be bed clothes relaxing before a book (cat 927). Munch’s Vampyr II, discussed below, captures the type of vampiric female. Duchamp’s Nude Descending – often assumed to be a female – and

Notes to pages 73–5

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

179

Augustus John’s The Way Down to the Sea (1909–11; cat. 526) are both noteworthy in their depictions of women descending. C. Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 57. As Milton Brown notes, ‘there were two major sources out of which it emerged – the Independent movement led by [Robert] Henri and the Realists, and the modernist movement fostered by Stieglitz at “291,” movements which were mutually antagonistic but temporarily reconcilable. They united in an attack on the status quo of American art, its institutions, standards, and restrictions, although with varying intentions and in different degrees’ (The Story of the Armory Show, p. 206). Ibid., pp. 29, 30. The organizers’ agenda mirrors that of another short-lived young ‘fraternity’ across the Atlantic – Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which professed to be forward-thinking but ultimately was backwardlooking, in terms of its formulaic representations of women. For Wharton’s engagement with the Pre-Raphaelites, see my Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007). As Frank Anderson Trapp notes, ‘It had become all too clear that so conservative an organization as the National Academy of Design was of little benefit to the great majority of practicing artists – particularly to those who were in any sense unorthodox. Other facilities, both public and private, were inadequate to present the works of young aspirants’ (‘The Armory Show: A Review’, Art Journal, 23:1 (Autumn 1963), pp. 2–9, on p. 2). The National Academy of Design was founded in New York in 1825 as an American answer to London’s Royal Academy; its aim was to offer yearly exhibitions showcasing the work of living American artists and to offer classes and lectures (Dwight, ‘Wharton and Art’, p. 184). Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 30. Ibid., p. 26. Trapp, ‘The Armory Show’, p. 3. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 27. Ibid., pp. 28–9. The show was praised as ‘“sensational,” “magnificent,” and “unquestionably the most important ever held in New York”’ (ibid., p. 28). Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., pp. 113, 28–9. Trapp, ‘The Armory Show’, p. 3. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 27. Trapp, ‘The Armory Show’, p. 3. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 186. As Sarah Emsley notes in her 2008 edition of the novel, ‘The decade in which the novel is set is not specified in the text, but in a note on the manuscript (also in the Yale Collection of American Literature) Wharton wrote that “The story takes place between 1899 and 1906–07.” For most of the narrative Undine’s “sentimental memories went back no farther than the beginning of her New York career” (337): her new life begins in the new century’ (Wharton, Custom of the Country, ed. S. Elmsley (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), Appendix to The Custom of the Country, ‘Undine Chronology’, p. 410). As Brown notes, ‘An anonymous article in the American Magazine of Art expressed the general attitude of the academicians [towards modern visual art]. It contended that the deliberate turning of modernists toward the ugly was a menace to the development of art and the retention of high and pure ideals. Nature itself was never vulgar, the human form was the perfection of beauty and to distort nature or humanity was to desecrate the

180

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

Notes to pages 75–83 noblest work of God. Modern art, in stooping to vulgarity, was pulling down the ancient temple of art. Life was lovely and stood for everlasting truth, but modernism strove for deformity rather than perfection’ (American Painting from the Armory Show to the Great Depression, p. 55; referring to ‘Frightfulness in Art’, American Magazine of Art, 8 (April 1917), pp. 244–5). Peter Van Degen dismisses realism as a mode of (visual) representation when he notes, ‘a woman’s picture has got to be pleasing. Who wants it about if it isn’t? Those big chaps who blow about what they call realism – how do their portraits look in a drawing-room? … There’s where old Popp has the pull over ’em – he knows how we live and what we want’ (p. 122). Van Degen seems to refer to the harsh realism of the turn-of-the-century Ash Can painters like Robert Henri who held that ‘All art that is worth while is a record of intense life’ (The Art Spirit, compiled by M. Ryerson (Philadelphia, PA: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1923), p. 100). P. Bade, Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women (New York: Mayflower, 1979), p. 12. Ibid., p. 26. Bernard Denvir, in Britt (ed.), Modern Art, p. 122. Denvir, in ibid., p. 122. Wharton here anticipates Walter Benjamin’s 1936 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, as Ralph’s reaction is similar to the shift in modern society’s relationship to images that Benjamin theorizes. On the topic of mechanically reproducing a work of art, Benjamin writes: ‘One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind’ (section II, at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm). N. Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), p. xii. P. Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), p. 162. MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from the Museum of Modern Art New York, ed. H. Schoenholz Bee and C. Heliczer (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 92. French artists Picabia, Duchamp, Jean Cocteau and Alfred Jarry each engaged the trope of la jeune fille américaine in their work. As Elizabeth Hutton Turner observes, ‘she personified a modern American spirit – widely admired but as yet not widely emulated. In her freedom from convention, in her caprices and her almost comic innocence, she differed from the typical male artist’s muse or femme fatale; neither a Gibson Girl nor even John Singer Sargent’s Madame X. The jeune fille’s beauty and allure did not arise from a particular pose or proportion’ (‘La jeune fille américaine and the Dadaist Impulse’, in Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada, pp. 4–21, on p. 5). Turner further notes that ‘the jeune fille was, after all, a male fantasy, a ready and willing female conforming to men’s desires, a youthful sexual alter-ego for the Old World weighed down by tradition’ (p. 17). Troublingly, Picabia’s Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity; 1915) depicts a sparkplug, as if not very subtly to equate the essence of the modern American girl with machinery, while his 1917 image of a light bulb, titled Américaine (American Woman), is emblazoned with the

Notes to pages 83–95

181

words ‘flirt’ and ‘divorce,’ poignantly resounding with what has been called Wharton’s ‘divorce novel’ (reprinted. in Turner, ‘La jeune fille américaine’, p. 16). 42. Picabia, later associated with Dada, continued his preoccupation with woman as sexually ambitious, as seen in his Voila Elle (Behold Her; 1915), in which a woman’s voracious sexual appetite is represented by a continually firing pistol, a target and a furnace. As Willard Bohn explains, ‘Since these objects are clearly intended to function as sexual symbols, the portrait depicts a woman with nymphomaniacal tendencies, a woman with an insatiable need for sex. This interpretation is reinforced visually by a cable running from the target to a furnace in the background: as each bullet strikes the target, it not only causes the pistol to discharge again but also increases the temperature of the “furnace”’ (‘Visualizing Women in 291’, in Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada, pp. 240–61, on pp. 243–4). 43. As Dwight notes, ‘Collecting Old Masters or building mansions copied from European models are status symbols acquired by the nouveau riche for prestige, not for the profound artistic response that Wharton herself experienced or the sense of national pride that she assumed a European feels’ (‘Wharton and Art’, p. 193). 44. Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle, p. 34.

6 McCarthy, ‘It’s Better to Watch’ My thanks to Donna Campbell, Laura Rattray and Andrew McCarthy for their valuable critical insights and suggestions on drafts of this essay. 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

As Amy L. Blair notes, The House of Mirth sold 100,000 in the first two months of publication (‘Misreading The House of Mirth’, American Literature, 76:1 (March 2004), pp. 149–75, on p. 149). E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), p. 261. J. L. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 10 (italics in original). Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 41. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 44. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity, p. 199. Wharton, The House of Mirth, pp. 3, 256. Ibid., pp. 186–7. Ibid., pp. 216, 217. Wharton to William Brownell, 5 August 1905, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and N. Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 94. C. G. Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 222. For a more detailed discussion of reflections in this novel, see C. B. Sapora, ‘Undine Spragg, the Mirror and the Lamp in The Custom of the Country’, in G. Totten (ed.), Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 265–86. A. Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 84–6. Blair, ‘Misreading The House of Mirth’, p. 150.

182

Notes to pages 95–102

16. M. E. Montgomery, Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 34. 17. Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 38. 18. Ibid., p. 40. 19. Ibid., p. 427. 20. P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 187. 21. Montgomery, Displaying Women, p. 132. 22. Montgomery goes into greater detail regarding this scene and how Undine’s spectatorship shows her to resist being appropriated by the gazes of others, most notably Peter Van Degen (ibid., pp. 132–5). 23. J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 1, 95 (italics in original). 24. According to Shari Benstock’s No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), p. 386, art historian Kenneth Clark claimed that Wharton lost the Nobel Prize in 1927 because the Swedish committee believed the 1913 novel was ‘too cynical’. That The Custom of the Country would be seen as such a liability fourteen years after its publication certainly speaks to its impact upon readers. 25. J. Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 327–8. 26. It is interesting that while Bergson failed to note the manner in which capitalism challenged his idealistic view of the individual’s potential for unique perception, he did not fail to win the Nobel Prize for his work. 27. Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 86. 28. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 361. Here Crary draws largely on James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) and Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe (1912).

7 Knights, ‘A “Mist of Opopanax”’ I wish to thank the British Academy for a grant to attend the conference, ‘Edith Wharton and History’ (2008), where the first version of this paper was delivered; and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Durham University, for assistance with research funding. 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

R. Kipling, ‘Lichtenberg’: one of ‘Service Songs’, from his patriotic verses, in The Five Nations (New York: Doubleday, 1903), p. 191. J. H. Kenneth, Osmics: The Science of Smell, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1922– 4), vol. 1, p. 1, n. Kenneth cites the lines slightly inaccurately. For an overview, see J. Carlisle, Common Scents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 5–10. See, for example, M. M. Smith, Sensory History (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), p. 59; and J. Drobnik, ‘Introduction: Olfactocentrism’, in J. Drobnik (ed.), The Smell Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), pp. 1–9. Besides the works already noted, pioneering explorations include: A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (1982), trans. M. Kochan, R. Porter and C. Prendergast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); H. J. Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992); K. McSweeney The

Notes to pages 102–3

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

183

Landscape of the Senses (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998); and K. Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books, p. ix. H. Mantel, ‘At First Sniff ’, in Guardian, 1 January 2009, p. 6. For an attempt to fill this gap, see L. Turin and T. Sanchex, Perfumes: The Guide (London: Profile 2008); and, for an example of growing popular interest, see ‘Now Smell This: A Blog about Perfume’ at http://www.nstperfume.com/. ‘White Rose’, a Floris classic since the eighteenth century, remained on sale until 1940. References in this paragraph are to E. Wharton, ‘Tendencies in Modern Fiction’ (1934), in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. F. Wegener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 171. Wegener (p. 115, n. 6) notes two possible sources for James’s observation: his essay ‘Emile Zola’ (1903), collected in Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914); and an earlier variant in ‘Pierre Loti’ (1888), collected in Essays in London and Elsewhere (London: J. R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1893). H. Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), pp. 425–6, 427. Visual display is at the centre of a number of critical studies. While many of these focus on cultural and psycho-sexual dynamics – publicity, conspicuous wealth, art and representation, gender relations, the arousal of desire, voyeurism, narcissism – each offers richly diverse inflections. A few examples will suggest the range: Maureen E. Montgomery keeps the novel as a reference point in her discussion of turn-of-the-century social spectacles, singling out Undine, of all Wharton’s characters, for her ‘management of visibility’ (Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 132). Maureen Honey comments on Undine’s ‘consciously manipulat[ing] her body for the benefit of men’, and highlights erotic notes, within a network of allusions to contemporary paintings (‘Erotic Visual Tropes in the Fiction of Edith Wharton’, in C. Colquitt, S. Goodman and C. Waid (eds), A Forward Glance (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), pp. 76–99, on pp. 82, 83). Analysing Wharton’s relations with period portraiture, Emily J. Orlando, too, brings Undine into the foreground for her ‘defiant desire to make herself seen’, and for how she ‘disseminates her image by commissioning her portrait and promoting its visibility’ (Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007), esp. pp. 90–105). Martha H. Patterson stresses visual aspects to present an argument about evolutionary and economic change; she describes the methods of Wharton’s ‘panoptic investigation’, and points to Undine’s shifting roles, as a ‘rare but transplanted art object’, purchased by Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles ‘for their own personal viewing pleasure’ (Beyond the Gibson Girl (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 99, 86). Annette Benert presents the novel’s ‘spatial paradigms’ as key to the narrative’s central social conflicts, and takes Undine’s relationship to her mirror as the starting point for a far-reaching argument about changing social status in the Progressive Era: Undine ‘plays both roles, spectacle and spectator, in the complete perceptual loop that defines her’ (The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007) pp. 126, 113). This is an area analysed by M. V. Marchand, ‘Object Lessons: Wharton and the New Connoisseurship’ (Conference paper: ‘Edith Wharton and History’, Pittsfield, MA, 26–8 June 2008). D. McKenzie, Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells (London: William Heinemann (Medical Books), 1923), p. 49. The chapter ‘Olfactory Memory’ (pp. 43–58) is of particular interest.

184 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

Notes to pages 103–10 Rindisbacher offers an overview in The Smell of Books, pp. 22–7. C. H. Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses (London: Piesse and Lubin, 1887), p. iii. Ibid., p. 54. Quoted by K. Starr, Introduction to F. Norris, McTeague (1899; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1982), p. xxviii. Readers have picked up this association – as, for example, in Robin Beaty’s title, ‘Lilies that Fester: Sentimentality in The House of Mirth’, College Literature, 14:3 (1987), pp. 263–75. E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), pp. 9, 77, 102, 48. C. Classen, D. Howes and A. Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. i. G. Simmel, ‘Sociology of the Senses’ (1907), trans. M. Ritter and D. Frisby, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), p. 120. Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses, p. 59. Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 161. Ibid., p. 217. Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses, p. 9. Carlisle, Common Scents, p. 11. Wharton, The House of Mirth, pp. 27, 270. Drobnik, ‘Introduction: Olfactocentrism’, p. 5. Wharton, The House of Mirth, pp. 357, 513. References in this paragraph are all to E. Wharton, respectively: The Fruit of the Tree (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), p. 198; ‘The Life Apart’, in K. M. Price and P. McBride (eds), ‘The Life Apart: Text and Contexts of Edith Wharton’s Love Diary’, American Literature, 66:4 (December 1994), pp. 663–88, on p. 673; Ethan Frome (New York: Scribner’s, 1911) p. 158; The Reef (New York: Appleton, 1912), pp. 76, 342. In each of these texts, Wharton elaborates sensory networks of signification, more complex than this brief account can convey. E. Wharton, Hudson River Bracketed (1929; London: Virago, 1986), p. 43. Wharton’s work on aroma predated Proust’s. An admirer, she read each volume on publication (1913–27): see Lee, Wharton, p. 280. See McKenzie, Aromatics and the Soul, pp. 51–2. H. Keller, The World I Live In (New York: Century, 1908), pp. 42, 64, 71. Chapter VI, ‘Smell, The Fallen Angel’ (pp. 64–77), is of particular interest. Drobnik, ‘Flaireurs: Preface’, in Drobnik (ed.), The Smell Culture Reader, pp. 163–6. Discussed by his son, Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses, pp. 83, 153–5. Wharton, Hudson River Bracketed, p. 45. Ibid., pp. 315, 281. For observations on anti-Semitism in such references, see, for example, J. A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 109. Opoponax [sic] was a strong resin from Sicily (a site of early honeymoon bliss in Ralph’s memory (p. 140)). Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses, pp. 104–5. Scribner’s Magazine, 53:5 (May 1913), p. 647.

Notes to pages 111–18

185

43. Of the four uses of ‘Dingy’ in the text, only two appear in passages focalized through Undine: ‘the high-walled houses beyond the Seine which she had once thought so dull and dingy’ (p. 286) ‘the dingy hall-room that Moffatt had lodged in at Mrs. Flynn’s’ (p. 567). 44. Scribner’s Magazine, 53:3 (March 1913), p. 385. 45. L. M. F., ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Novel’ (1913), in J. W. Tuttleton, K. O. Lauer and M. P. Murray (eds), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 205. 46. See P. Knights, ‘Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. M. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 20–46, on pp. 34–7. 47. Piesse, Olfactics and the Physical Senses, p. 1. 48. E. Wharton, ‘Velvet Earpads’, in The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis, 2 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), vol. 2, p. 474. 49. In the serial, ‘indifference’ was given as ‘insensibility’, Scribner’s Magazine, 54:3 (September 1913), p. 375. 50. E. Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (1925; New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 55.

8 Murray, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Undine’ 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

R. Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 26. H. W. Boynton, ‘Mrs. Wharton’s Manner’ (1913), in J. Tuttleton, K. Lauer and M. Murray (eds), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 209. I will use the gender-specific term ‘picaro’ only when quoting others’ materials. B. Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961), p. 158. K. Lauer and M. Murray, Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), ch. 5. M. McDowell, Edith Wharton (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1976), p. 73. C. Wershoven, The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 60. S. Miller, The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), p. 3. I. Howe, Politics and the Novel, quoted in Miller, The Picaresque Novel, n.p. Alter, Rogue’s Progress, pp. viii, 28, 33–4, 59. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, p. 9. Ibid., p. 12 (italics in original). J. Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1972), passim. See Tuttleton et al. (eds), Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, p. 202. Ibid., pp. 204–5. Ibid., p. 216. See Lauer and Murray, Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography, p. 245. See Tuttleton et al. (eds), Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, p. 209. Ibid., p. 210. F. W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 1–2.

186

Notes to pages 119–27

21. Ibid., p. 4. 22. C. G. Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 2nd edn (New York: Addison Wesley Publishing Co., 1994), p. 232. 23. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1975), passim. 24. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 223. 25. P. Lubbock, ‘The Custom of the Country: The Critical Response’, in S. Hutchinson (ed.), Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 86–7. 26. Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America, p. 12. 27. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 230. 28. Ibid., p. 226. 29. K. G. Burns, ‘The Paradox of Objectivity in the Realist Fiction of Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 29:1 (1999), pp. 27–61, on p. 43. 30. L. Trilling, quoted in Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America, p. 8. 31. A. Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), pp. 93–137, on p. 104. 32. Marvell, ‘The Mower’s Song’, in ibid., p. 111. 33. T. M. Sassoubre, ‘Property and Identity in The Custom of the Country’, Modern Fiction Studies, 49:4 (Winter 2003), pp. 687–713, on p. 699. 34. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 228. 35. H. James, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, in Great Short Works of Henry James (New York: Perennial Classics, 1966), p. 489. 36. E. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Morgan’s statement on American Puritanism may be the most famous ultimate sentence in the study of early American culture. It reads: ‘When theology became the handmaid of genealogy, Puritanism no longer deserved the name’ (p. 186). 37. Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America, p. 18. 38. S. L. Clemens, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), p. 7. 39. Wershoven, The Female Intruder, p. 60. 40. Lewis, Wharton: A Biography, p. 349.

9 Olin-Ammentorp, ‘Girls from the Provinces’ 1.

2.

3. 4.

L. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, in L. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 58–92, on p. 58. My thanks to Elsa Nettels for directing me to this essay, which has been central to my thinking about The Custom of the Country and The Song of the Lark. Ibid., p. 59. Trilling also lists Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Balzac’s Lost Illusions, and notes that with ‘only a very slight extension of the definition’ it might include ‘Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Dostoevski’s The Idiot’ (p. 58). Trilling’s discussion of this subgenre is made in passing, en route to other points about James’s novel. Ibid., pp. 59, 60. In his essay ‘The Young Man from the Provinces’, A. K. Chanda remarks (citing Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie) that within this subgenre, ‘the protagonist can [also] be a young woman’ (‘The Young Man from the Provinces’, Comparative Literature, 33:4 (1981), pp. 321–41, on p. 322). Although I agree that the Young Man from

Notes to pages 127–33

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

187

the Provinces and the Girl have many things in common, they also differ in some ways, though I am unable to pursue those differences in this essay. Quotations are from the New York Times Review of Books, the Nation and the Saturday Review (England), in J. W. Tuttleton, K. O. Lauer and M. P. Murray (eds), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 204, 208, 210. E. Wilson, ‘Justice to Edith Wharton’ (1941), in I. Howe (ed.), Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 19–31, on p. 24. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 350. C. G. Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 233, 237. W. Cather, The Song of the Lark (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 162. Quotations are from the Boston Evening Transcript and the Nation, in M. A. O’Connor (ed.), Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 61–2, 63. Quotation from the Boston Evening Transcript, in ibid., p. 62. W. Cather, ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’, in Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1992), p. 374. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 59. Cather, The Song of the Lark, pp. 203, 204, 122. Ibid., pp. 217, 219, 220. Ibid., p. 328, 22, 226. A number of critics have commented on the merely apparent difference between Undine and her parents. For instance, see Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 236; and E. Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 107–8. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 236. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 60. S. Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 69. Wharton, The Custom of the Country, p. 96 (italics in original); Cather, The Song of the Lark, p. 223. Cather, The Song of the Lark, p. 200 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 333; Wharton, The Custom of the Country, p. 96. Cather, The Song of the Lark, pp. 256, 288. For more on Undine and maternal tableaux, see J. Olin-Ammentorp, ‘Wharton through a Kristevan Lens: The Maternality of The Gods Arrive’, in K. Joslin and A. Price (eds), Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 295–312, on p. 299. Cather, The Song of the Lark, p. 290. Ibid., pp. 249, 291. M. R. Ryder has shown that a sense of rivalry was often considered essential for singers of the day, with one handbook for singers, for instance, listing ‘five rules of temperament for prima donnas’, including ‘allowing no competition’ (‘That D—d Mob of Women Performers: Women Artists as Rivals in Cather’s Fiction’, Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter, 50:2 (Fall 2006), pp. 31–4, on p. 33).

188 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Notes to pages 134–41 Cather, The Song of the Lark, pp. 63, 59, 60, 244, 386. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 59. Cather, The Song of the Lark, pp. 151, 44. Ibid., p. 45. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 59. Cather, The Song of the Lark, pp. 202, 199. W. Cather, My Ántonia (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 20. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 233. This may be because Cather is not explicit about their relationship, allowing readers to infer only what they choose; it may also be because Cather invokes the Romantic concept of the artist’s need for the full range of experience so powerfully that readers rarely blink at Thea’s conduct. For more on the relationship between Thea’s physical and artistic development, see S. Meyer, ‘Coughing Girls in The Song of the Lark: Willa Cather, Breathing, and the Health of the Artist’, Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter, 50:2 (Fall 2006), pp. 27–30. Cather, The Song of the Lark, p. 323. E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), pp. 483–4. Cather, The Song of the Lark, pp. 325, 328–9. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 60. Cather, The Song of the Lark, p. 404. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 59. S. Pollock, H. K. Bhabha, C. A. Breckenridge and D. Chakrabarty, ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, in C. A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. K. Bhabha and D. Chakrabarty (eds), Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 1–14, on p. 11. My thanks to Ann M. Ryan for bringing this text to my attention, and for her insightful and very helpful reading of a late draft of this essay. Cather, The Song of the Lark, p. 337. For autobiographical elements in Cather’s portrait of Thea, see (for instance) J. Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), pp. 7–10, 266–8; and J. Stout, Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 132–6. W. Cather, ‘Preface’ (1932), in The Song of the Lark, ed. S. Harbison (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 434. Woodress, Cather, pp. 437, 436. E. Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribner’s, 1985), p. 6. See, for instance, Ammons, Wharton’s Argument with America, p. 107; Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 224; S. Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), p. 283. Wharton, A Backward Glance, pp. 21, 57, 175. Ibid., pp. 68, 69. Ibid., pp. 172, 119. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 60. Cather, ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’, p. 396. Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’, p. 61.

Notes to pages 143–6

189

10 Blazek, ‘Men at Work in The Custom of the Country’ 1.

E. Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), pp. 120, 112. 2. Ibid., pp. 145, 148. 3. Ibid., pp. 23, 86–7, 113, 132. 4. Ibid., pp. 93, 110, 106. 5. S. Orgel writes in his Introduction to The Custom of the Country: ‘The intellectual independence of French women does not liberate them from stifling marriages and tedious, pointless social chores, it only enables them to accept the inevitability of these arrangements’ (E. Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913), ed. S. Orgel, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxiii). 6. C. P. Gilman, Women and Economics (1898; London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), p. 5. 7. C. Tichi, ‘Emerson, Darwin, and The Custom of the Country’, in C. J. Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 89–114, on p. 100; M. H. Patterson, ‘Incorporating the New Woman in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country’, Studies in American Fiction, 26:2 (Autumn 1998), pp. 213–36, on p. 218. See also E. Showalter, ‘Spragg: The Art of the Deal’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. M. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 87–97, on p. 95; and J. Malcolm, ‘The Woman Who Hated Women’, New York Times Review of Books, 16 November 1986, pp. 11–12. B. Hume, ‘The Fall of the House of Marvell: Wharton’s Poesque Romantic in The Custom of the Country’, American Literary Realism, 40:2 (Winter 2008), pp. 137–53, on p. 141 and n. 27, also cites C. Tichi, G. Erlich and D. M. Bauer in regard to ‘Wharton’s “masculine” self-identification’. For a contrasting view that applies reader-response theory to the issues of how women are depicted and readers are conditioned to respond to mothers in The Custom of the Country, see B. Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘The Reader as Misogynist in The Custom of the Country’, Modern Language Studies, 21:1 (Winter 1991), pp. 45–53. 8. B. R. Voloshin, ‘Exchange in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country’, Pacific Coast Philology, 22:1/2 (November 1987), pp. 98–104, on pp. 101–2. 9. The range of debate concerning Elmer Moffatt’s influence over Undine as it relates to his key roles as business titan and connoisseur in the narrative is illustrated in criticism by Hume, ‘The Fall of the House of Marvell’, pp. 150–1; Orgel, ‘Introduction’, pp. xviii, xx; Showalter, ‘Spragg’, pp. 87, 94; Voloshin, ‘Exchange’, pp. 101–2; P. Knights, The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 89–90; and M. B. McDowell, Edith Wharton (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1976), pp. 82– 3. The critical division is generally between those who see Undine’s entrepreneurship as self-directed and those who address Elmer Moffatt’s overarching role in controlling her destiny. In addition, critics have argued about the ways to judge his connoisseurship, as a sign of his refined taste or of his callous acquisitiveness. My own argument is directed at the masculine space and opportunity that underlie his business and art dealings. 10. Voloshin, ‘Exchange’, p. 102. 11. Compare a passage from the opening of Wharton’s 1917 novel Summer: ‘North Dormer is at all times an empty place, and at three o’clock on a June afternoon its few able-bodied men are off in the field or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid household drudgery’ (in Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, ed. C. G. Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 160).

190

Notes to pages 147–54

12. G. M. Sweeney in ‘The Wealth of Abner Spragg: An Insider Narrative’, South Atlantic Review, 63:4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 48–57, has uncovered some intriguing information about the author’s relative Joseph Wharton as a source for the ironically named Pure Water Move that Abner’s wealth derives from. Water and wealth make an appropriately fluid combination in The Custom of the Country. 13. J. Bruni associates this American trait of performing identity with autopoesis, life as becoming rather than being; and he states: ‘Undine performs a self that is constantly destabilized in the act of “becoming” herself ’ (‘Becoming American: Evolution and Performance in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country’, Intertexts, 9:1 (Spring 2005), pp. 43–59, on p. 50). See also J. Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) for an in-depth examination of the cultural construction of turn-of-the-century masculinity, in particular the display and mimicry of aggressive and possessive traits. 14. J. Clubbe, ‘Interiors and the Interior Life in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth’, Studies in the Novel, 28:4 (Winter 1996), pp. 543–64, on p. 544. 15. Ibid., p. 557. 16. E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905), in Novels, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 6. 17. Ibid., pp. 6–7, 321. See also Clubbe, ‘Interiors and the Interior Life’, p. 557. 18. Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits, p. 18. 19. T. M. Sassoubre, ‘Property and Identity in The Custom of the Country’, Modern Fiction Studies, 49:4 (Winter 2003), pp. 687–713, on pp. 690, 695. 20. Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits, p. 141; Clubbe, ‘Interiors and the Interior Life’, p. 559. 21. D. M. MacComb, ‘New Wives for Old: Divorce and the Leisure-Class Marriage Market in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country’, American Literature, 68:4 (December 1996), pp. 765–97, on p. 770, argues through cultural economics via Walter Benjamin that in The Custom of the Country concentration and absorption are replaced by distraction. 22. Compare p. 468: ‘Ralph’s eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on the desk beside Moffatt’s hand. Faugh! That such a hand should have touched it!’ 23. Wharton’s virtuoso writing in Chapter XXXVI might fruitfully be seen as work that anticipates William Faulkner’s modernist depiction of Quentin’s Compson’s panicked struggle with time and sexuality in The Sound and the Fury. 24. Tichi, ‘Emerson, Darwin, and The Custom of the Country’, p. 101, notes also the Emersonian concordances of Ralph’s seaside cave, ‘a barometer of his spiritual state’ that follows transcendentalist principles of the individual self and its ties to nature. See also Hume’s argument about the cave’s association with confinement (‘The Fall of the House of Marvell’, pp. 143, 145), to which might be added shelter, refuge and escape. The isolation of the space, therefore, can be seen as transcendent or as representative of Ralph’s inability to interact and adapt. The association with childhood, and therefore an innate or early inculcated male drive for possession, is also reflected in Elmer Moffatt’s passion for art collection. Revealing his interest to Undine: ‘As he spoke she saw his expression change, and his eyes grow younger, almost boyish, with a concentrated look in them that reminded her of long-forgotten things’ (p. 538). The note of concentration is also related to the concept of absorption or ‘flow’ discussed above. 25. C. B. Sapora, ‘Undine Spragg, the Mirror and the Lamp in The Custom of the Country’, in G. Totten (ed.), Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 265–86, on p. 274.

Notes to pages 156–63

191

26. In relation to this analysis, E. Dwight’s essay ‘Wharton and Art’ has yet to be superseded; she writes: ‘[Wharton] uses art as a metaphor to show that a society that cares only for surface and appearance diminishes its members and reduces life to a competition based on wealth’ (‘Wharton and Art’, in Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Wharton, pp. 181– 210, on pp. 191–3). 27. N. Bentley, ‘Wharton, Travel, and Modernity’, in Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Wharton, pp. 147–79, on p. 149. 28. MacComb, ‘New Wives for Old’, p. 797. 29. Technically, Undine’s marriages are all annulled. 30. Besides discussing concepts of intrinsic and relative value in The Custom of the Country, Sassoubre argues that a major theme in the novel is the untrustworthiness of words (‘Property and Identity’, pp. 708–10). In Wharton’s subsequent writing, especially during the First World War, one can trace a fear of linguistic paralysis in the midst of social upheaval, as well as the novelist’s formal solutions to the difficulties of representing disorder and change. For further reflections on this topic, see W. Blazek, ‘Trench Vision: Obscurity in Edith Wharton’s War Writings’, in F. Sammarcelli (ed.), L’Obscur (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009), pp. 66–84. 31. Wharton, French Ways, p. 41.

11 Hoeller, ‘“Lost in Translation”’ 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

R. Barthes, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 5. T. W. Lawson, Frenzied Finance: The Crime of the Amalgamated (New York: RidgwayThayer Company, 1905), p. 197. Quoted in C. Preston, ‘Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel’, in K. Kilcup (ed.), Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1999), pp. 184–201, on p. 184. T. Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Meridian, 1995), pp. 87, 11, 90, 94, 99. Barthes, S/Z, p. 4. A. Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt Brace & World Inc., 1942), p. 79. Ibid., p. 81. Preston ‘Ladies Prefer Bonds’, pp. 201, 200. H. Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 436. Ibid., pp. 436–7. C. Preston, Edith Wharton’s Social Register (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 108. Preston notes at the end of her summary: ‘This story is neither exact nor public: Ralph and Undine, who have most dealings with Moffatt, do not understand his activities and can only report the vaguest impressions of them. Nor is the story told consecutively: its earliest instalment is retailed in one of the last chapters of the novel, and Moffatt himself, who surfaces intermittently in the plot, tends to offer laconic accounts of himself from which we must piece out the history of his doings’ (ibid., p. 109). And, ‘Wharton is careful to weave the full and coherent story of Moffatt’s epic finance into the woof of the novel … which is interesting to piece together, not least because, contrary to critical opinion, it shows Wharton fully immersed in the financial subject’ (ibid., p. 107). Barthes, S/Z, p. 5. Ralph clearly believes that Moffatt has knowledge of the truth he, Marvell, would need to write the novel. In that sense his figure can be compared to Dreiser’s. ‘Moffatt saw at once just where the difficulties lay and how the personal idiosyncracies of “the parties” affected

192

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

Notes to pages 163–7 them. Such insight fascinated Ralph, and he strayed off into wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts’ (p. 262). Dreiser, also, makes the connection between finances and art, and his book is, in a way, an imaginative collaboration between Cowperwood and the narrator. As I have argued elsewhere, Cowperwood is also Dreiser’s healthy alter ego and in that sense not so much a realistic depiction of a financier but a vision of a health the author never had. See H. Hoeller, ‘Herland and Hisland: Sickness and “Health” in the Writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Theodore Dreiser’, Dreiser Studies, 34:2 (Winter 2003), pp. 24–44. D. Krause ‘Reading Bon’s Letter and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!’, PMLA, 99:2 (March 1984), pp. 225–41, on p. 226. J. Haytock, Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 1. Haytock’s argument about Wharton and modernism differs substantially from mine here. Haytock sees Wharton engaging with issues of modernism such as the alienation of the self, impressionism, the First World War and women’s sexuality. She concludes that Wharton engages with these issues, but in the end she sees Wharton resisting the fundamental sense of loss of meaning I discuss in my essay. Haytock does mention some similar moves in Wharton’s fictions such as withholding Sophy’s point of view in The Reef (p. 38), allowing ‘the reader to see gaps and failures in Campton’s interpretation of George’ (p. 114) in A Son at the Front, or ‘relying on shifting narrators and contradictory interpretations of events’ (p. 141) in Twilight Sleep. Wharton’s resistance to modernist literature is all too well known. ‘It is clear from letters and her critical writings that Wharton objected to the modernist movement’, writes Haytock (p. 13). For Haytock’s summary of critical work on Wharton and modernism, see pp. 13–15. ‘Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project’ Andreas Huyssen wrote in After the Great Divide (quoted in R. K. Simon, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture’, American Literary History, 13:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 343–53, on p. 347). For a good summary of critical work on the connection between modernism and mass culture, see ibid., esp. pp. 346–8. Lawson, Frenzied Finance, p. 197. M. Norris, ‘The Voice and the Void: Hugh Kenner’s Joyce’, in ‘Reading Modernism, after Hugh Kenner (1923–2003)’, Modernism/Modernity, 12:3 (September 2005), pp. 483– 6, on p. 484.

INDEX

Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbreviations used in the index are CC for The Custom of the Country; EW for Edith Wharton.

Adams, Brooks, 23 Alter, Robert, 115, 117, 118 American Art News, 73 American Magazine of Art, 179–80 Ammons, Elizabeth, 3, 5, 116 Antin, Mary, 27 Archipenko, 178 Ariès, Phillipe, 69 Armory Show see International Exhibition of Modern Art art, 9–10, 72–85, 100, 139, 177, 178, 179–80, 190, 191 in CC, 10, 67, 68–9, 77, 80, 81, 83, 85 depictions of women, 73, 75–85, 180–1 International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), 9–10, 71–85, 177–8 tapestries, 156 Ashfield, Massachusetts, 17 Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), 71, 77 Athenaeum, 118 Atlantic Monthly, 3, 4, 8, 15–24, 26–8 Austin, Mary, 27 Bade, Patrick, 81 Barrès, Maurice, 23 Barthes, R., 157, 162 beauty, 92–3, 100, 123, 132–3, 135, 136, 149, 153 Bender, Bert, 46 Benert, Annette, 183 Benjamin, Walter, 180

Benstock, Shari, 5, 43 Bentley, Nancy, 156 Berenson, Bernard, 2, 72 Bergson, Henri, 98–9, 182 Berry, Walter, 23, 177 Bigelow, John J., Jr, 23 Blair, Amy, 95 Blazek, William, ix, 12 Bohn, Willard, 181 books, 56, 67–8, 155, 166 see also novels; reading Bourget, Paul, 140 Boynton, Henry W., 115, 118 Brown, Edward K., 116 Brown, M. W., 177, 178, 179 Brownell, William, 92 Browning, Robert, ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s’, 29–30 Bruegel, Pieter, 115 Bruni, J., 190 Burne-Jones, Edward, 75 The Golden Stairs, 83 The Rock of Doom, 76 Burns, Karin Garlepp, 121 Bushnell, Candace, 73, 85 Butler, Samuel, 62–3 Buttall, Jonathan, 68 Carlisle, Janice, 105 Carnegie, Andrew, 33 Carroll, Lewis, 60

– 193 –

194

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Cather, Willa, 27 ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’, 128–9, 141 My Ántonia, 135 ‘Old Mrs. Harris’, 140 The Song of the Lark, 11–12, 127–41 Preface, 139 Cézanne, Paul, 72, 177, 178 Chanda, A. K., 186 Chandler, Frank Wadleigh, 118 Chicago Tribune, 73 children, 9, 21, 59–60, 62–70, 118, 130, 132, 169, 190 in CC, 22, 39–40, 56, 66–8, 69, 165–6, 167 Chopin, Kate, 104 circulating libraries, 29, 32–5 Clark, Kenneth, 72, 177, 182 Clubbe, John, 148 Colby, F. M., 118 Cole, Thomas, 74 Connolly, James, 33 Conrad, Joseph, 54 Cooper, Frederick Taber, 118 Cortissoz, Royal, 72 Coveney, Peter, 62, 63 Crary, Jonathan, 97, 98–9 Custom of the Country, The (EW) advertising, 8, 40 Apex Water Company, 161, 162 Ararat Trust, 147, 163, 165 art in, 10, 67, 68–9, 77, 80, 81, 83, 85 Charles Bowen, 3, 21, 26, 122, 144, 158 business and finance, 12–13, 53, 56, 68, 88–90, 99, 145–7, 150–1, 157–67 critical studies of, 5–8 ‘the custom of the country’, 51–2, 69, 70, 115, 119, 158 Raymond de Chelles, 122–4, 144 energy, 52, 121 Mrs Heeny, 39–40, 61, 63, 68, 159, 166–7 Paul Marvell, 22, 39–40, 56, 66–8, 69, 165–6, 167 Ralph Marvell, 37–9, 47, 65–7, 74–5, 77, 79, 93–4, 98–9, 110, 111, 112– 13, 119–22, 148–52, 153, 162–4 childhood, 152 death, 67, 98, 113, 152, 164

Elmer Moffatt, 36, 68, 99, 111, 136–7, 140, 146, 147–8, 150–1, 155–6, 157–8, 163–4, 189, 190, 191 nationalism and race, 23–6 narrative voice, 30–1, 162, 167 parenting, 59–70, 130–1 period, 5, 74 reading in, 29–41, 63, 164 reviews, 3 serialization, 2, 3, 37, 39 smell, 101, 102–5, 108–13 Abner Spragg, 147, 161, 162, 164–5 Leota Spragg, 26, 162, 164 Undine Spragg, 1, 3–4, 9, 10, 18–19, 52, 71, 77, 79, 83, 85, 110–11, 122–5, 153–6 and family, 59–66, 70, 130–1 and finance, 157–8, 160, 164–5 as girl from the provinces, 127–8, 130–41 marriages, 18, 90 as mother, 66–70, 155 as picaroon, 11, 19–20, 115–19 as reader, 29–31, 32–7, 41, 62, 164 and visual culture, 87–100 Clare Van Degen, 36–7, 119–20 Peter Van Degen, 80, 153–4, 165, 180 Nettie Wincher, 133, 135–6 writing of, 1–2 Dadaism, 81, 83 Davies, Arthur B., 73, 178 Sleep Lies Perfect in Them, 77, 79 de Kooning, Willem, Woman 1, 81 Debs, Eugene, 23 Denvir, Bernard, 81 divorce, 3, 4, 5, 20, 56–7, 72, 140–1, 176 and children, 69–70 in CC, 69–70, 140–1, 150, 151 EW’s, 2, 16, 72, 119, 140–1 Dix, Dr Morgan, 159 Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 31–2 Dreiser, Theodore, 161 The Financier, 159–60, 163, 167, 191–2 Drobnick, Jim, 102, 108 Du Bois, W. E. B., 24

Index Duchamp, Marcel, 80, 180 Bride Stripped Bare, 83 Nude Descending a Staircase, 71, 73, 83, 177, 178 Dwight, Eleanor, 72, 177, 181, 191 Ellis, Havelock, 23 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 74, 149 Emsley, Sarah, 179 Ewing, Quincy, 24 Faulkner, William, 158, 166, 190 Felsenstein, Frank, 33 feminism, 116, 128 finance and business, 12, 51–2, 53, 138, 144–56, 157–65, 167 in CC, 12–13, 53, 56, 68, 88–90, 99, 145–7, 150–1, 157–67 women and, 51–2, 145–7, 157–9, 160–7 First World War, 22, 23, 27–8, 143, 178, 191 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 22, 28 Fleissner, Jennifer, 88, 89 Fletcher, John, The Custom of the Country (play), 19 Flint, Kate, 37 Forum, 118 Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte, Undine, 38 Fracasso, Evelyn E., 45, 47, 50 France, 23–4, 27, 140, 141–2, 143–4, 177 in CC, 25, 136, 145, 156 see also Paris Francke, Kuno, 27 Frost, Robert, 53 Fullerton, William Morton, 15, 23, 43, 106, 119 EW’s letters to, 1–2, 43, 50 Fullerton Gerould, Katharine, 27 Gainsborough, Thomas, Blue Boy, 68–9 Galuppi, Baldassare, 30 gender relations, 12, 143–56 Germany, 25–6, 27 ghost stories, 50–6 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 144–5 Godey’s, 15 Goodman, Susan, ix, 3, 4, 8 Gosse, Edmund, 62, 63 Graham’s, 15

195

Grant, Robert, 9, 57 Griswold, Rufus, 116 Hall, G. Stanley, 64 Harding Davis, Rebecca, 8, 16 Harper’s Bazar, 21 Harper’s New Monthly, 15 Haytock, Jennifer, 166, 178, 192 Heller, Joseph, 27 Henri, Robert, 180 Hoeller, Hildegard, ix, 6, 12–13 Honey, Maureen, 183 Howe, Irving, 116 Howells, William Dean, 15, 16, 17, 18, 27, 161 Hume, Beverly, 149 Huneker, James, 23, 118 Huysman, Joris-Karl, 108 Huyssen, Andreas, 192 Icarus, 115, 125 International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), 9–10, 71–86, 177–8 James, Henry, 2, 17, 18, 21, 24, 44, 54, 102, 140, 183 The American, 38 ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, 122 The Golden Bowl, 140 The Portrait of a Lady, 46, 122 The Princess Casamassima, 127, 141 Washington Square, 44, 46 James, William, 99 Janet, Pierre, 88 Japan, 26–7 John, Augustus, 178–9 Jones, Lucretia, 16, 60, 63–4 Joyce, James, 72 Ulysses, 167 Kazin, Alfred, 160 Keller, Helen, 107 Kenner, Hugh, 167 Kenneth, John H., 101 Killoran, Helen, 72 Kipling, Rudyard, 101 Knapp, Arthur M., 26–7 Knickerbocker, 15 Knights, Pamela, ix–x, 10–11

196

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Knox, Loren H. B., 26 Kowalski-Wallace, Beth, 3 Krause, David, 166 Laurence, Margaret, The Diviners, 141 Lawson, Thomas W., Frenzied Finance, 157, 167 Lee, Hermione, 6, 7, 40, 67, 72, 103, 160–1, 162, 163, 177 Leeds Mercury, 3 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 178 Lenox, Massachusetts, 26 letters, 48–50, 61, 112, 154–5 Lewis, R. W. B., 5, 125, 128 Locke, John, 63 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 16 Loos, Anita, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 13 Lowell, James Russell, 17 Lubbock, Percy, 6, 116 MacComb, Debra Ann, 5, 156 McDowell, Margaret, 116 McKenzie, Dan, 103 Macmillan, Frederick, 3, 40 McMullen, Bonnie, Shannon, x, 9 magazines, 16–17, 39 see also titles Malcolm, Janet, 145 manners, 116, 120–4 Manolo, 178 Mantel, Hilary, 102 Marks, Amber, 102 Marvell, Andrew, 121, 149 Massinger, Philip, The Custom of the Country (play), 19 men’s work, 12, 51–2, 138, 144–56, 157–65, 167 Miller, Kelly, 24–5 Miller, Stuart, 116 modernism, 6, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 72–3, 83, 121, 158, 163, 166–7, 178, 179, 192 modernity, 77, 83, 85, 156, 177 Monroe, Harriet, 26 Montgomery, Maureen, 95, 183 mothers, 22, 60–1, 63, 66 Mucha, Alphonse, Evening Contemplation, 77, 78 Mulholland Drive, 141

Munch, Edvard Madonna, 81 Nude with Red Hair, 178 Vampire, 81, 178 Vampyr II, 82 Muncie Public Library, Indiana, 33 Murray, Margaret P., x, 6, 11 Mussey, H. R., 23 Myers, Jerome, 73 Nation, 64, 118 National Academy of Design, 73, 179 nationalism, 23–4 Nevius, Blake, 11, 115–16 New Woman, 80–1, 85 New York, 17, 21, 24, 25, 30, 32, 61, 71, 72, 85, 95, 98, 117, 119, 121, 139–40, 178 New York Herald, 3 New York Observer, 64–5 New York Sun, 118 New York Times Review of Books, 6, 118 newspapers, 35, 39–40, 41, 68 Nobel Prize, 98, 182 Norris, Frank, 161 Norris, Margot, 167 North American Review, 15, 17, 118 Norton, Charles Eliot, 17 Norton, Sara, 1, 13, 17, 43 novels, 31–2, 33–4, 37, 41, 118 of families, 59, 62–3 of manners, 59, 116, 120 picaresque, 11, 115–19, 125 Olin-Ammentorp, Julie, x–xi, 11–12 Orgel, Stephen, 160, 189 Orlando, Emily J., xi, 5, 9–10, 183 Orne Jewett, Sarah, 27 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 38 parenting, 9, 21, 59–70, 130–1 Paris, 15, 24, 72, 141 Pater, Walter, 108 Patterson, Martha H., 183 Pawley, Christine, 33 Pease, Allison, 95 Peel, Robin, 5, 6, 7, 178 Perry, Bliss, 17, 27 Pettegrew, John, 148

Index Picabia, Francis, 83, 180–1 Udnie, 83, 84 picaresque genre, 11, 115–19, 125 Picasso, Pablo, 83, 178 Piesse, Charles Henry, 103–4, 105, 110, 111 Piesse, Septimus, 108 Poe, Edgar Allan, 149 Preston, Claire, 38, 160, 161, 162, 163, 191 Proust, Marcel, 107, 178, 184 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 81 Puritanism, 124, 143, 186 Putnam’s, 15 Quinn, John, 73 race, 24–5 Rattray, Laura, xi readers, writerly, 158, 160–4, 166–7 reading, 8–9, 29–41, 63, 163–4, 165–6, 167 Redon, Odilon, 72, 177–8 Renoir, Auguste, 72, 177 reviews, 2–3 Rindisbacher, Hans J., 102 Rogers, Anna A., 4, 20–2 Roosevelt, Theodore, 23, 71 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 179 Blessed Damozel, 80 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63 Ruskin, John, 97 Ryder, M. R., 187 Sage Library, Osage, Iowa, 33 Sapora, Carol Baker, 154 Sartain’s, 15 Sassoubre, Ticien Marie, 5, 121, 150, 191 Saturday Review, 3, 118, 119 Sawelson-Gorse, Naomi, 81, 83 Schubert McCarthy, Jessica, x, 9, 10 Scribner’s Magazine, 2, 3, 16, 31, 37, 39 short stories, 9, 16, 43–58, 59 Showalter, Elaine, 29, 31, 145 Simmel, Georg, 105 Singley, Carol J., xi, 5, 9 smell, 10–11, 101–13 Stallybrass, Peter, 96 Stoddard, Charles Augustus, 64–5 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 81 Sun, 73

197

tapestries, 156 Tichi, Cecelia, 5, 145, 149, 190 Tintner, Adeline, 72 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 178 Towheed, Shafquat, xi–xii, 8–9 Trapp, Frank Anderson, 74, 179 Trilling, Lionel, 11, 127, 128, 131, 134, 135, 141, 186 Turner, Elizabeth Hutton, 180 Tuttleton, James, 117, 120, 124 Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 115, 125–6 Twayne, 116 United States, 23, 64, 71, 99 vampires, 81, 178 Van Dyck, Anthony, 68–9 Voloshin, Beverly, 146 voyeurism, 10, 93–100 Waid, Candace, 5–6, 48 Washington, Booker T., 24 Wershoven, Carol, 116 Wharton, Edith composition methods, 7 critical studies of, 7–8, 116 divorce, 2, 16, 19, 72, 119, 140–1 upbringing, 63–4 ‘Afterward’, 51–2, 54, 55, 58 The Age of Innocence, 13, 140 The Arch, 4, 170 Artemis to Actaeon, 1, 16 ‘Autres Temps’, 56 A Backward Glance, 6, 93, 140 ‘The Blond Beast’, 53 ‘The Bolted Door’, 47 The Buccaneers, 13 The Children, 28, 59 ‘The Choice’, 45–6, 47 The Custom of the Country see individual entry ‘The Daunt Diana’, 48 ‘The Debt’, 44 The Decoration of Houses, 20, 24 Disintegration, 4 Ethan Frome, 1, 6, 16, 106, 117, 184 ‘The Eyes’, 50, 54–5

198

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

French Ways and Their Meaning, 143–4, 156 The Fruit of the Tree, 16, 43, 106, 184 ‘Full Circle’, 49 The Gods Arrive, 107 The Hermit and the Wild Woman, 1, 16 ‘His Father’s Son’, 48–9 The House of Mirth, 17, 24, 59–60, 65, 148 criticism, 7 Lily Bart, 1, 59–60, 87–92, 94, 95–6, 99–100, 137, 148, 158 Lawrence Selden, 92, 97–8, 148 smell, 104–6 tableaux vivants, 92 Hudson River Bracketed, 28, 107 Italian Backgrounds, 30 ‘The Legend’, 48, 50, 57 ‘The Letters’, 49–50 ‘Life and I’, 50 ‘The Long Run’, 57–8 Madame de Treymes, 16 Les Metteurs en Scène, 46 ‘The Mission of Jane’, 59 The Mother’s Recompense, 28 A Motor-Flight through France, 1, 16, 27, 43 ‘The Pretext’, 44–5, 52, 57 The Reef, 1, 6, 15, 16, 22, 106–7, 192 ‘A Second Motor-Flight through France’, 18 A Son at the Front, 192 Summer, 59, 189 Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1, 16 ‘The Temperate Zone’, 81 ‘Tendencies in Modern Fiction’, 102, 183

‘The Triumph of Night’, 52–3, 54, 55 Twilight Sleep, 28 The Valley of Decision, 16, 17 ‘Velvet Earpads’, 112 ‘The Verdict’, 46–8, 58 ‘Visibility in Fiction’, 55–6 The Writing of Fiction, 9, 57, 113 ‘Xingu’, 57 Wharton, Joseph, 190 Wharton, Teddy, 15–16 White, Allon, 96 White, Barbara A., 44, 54 Whitman, Walt, 26, 74, 120–1 Wilson, Edmund, 3, 128 Wilson, Woodrow, 23 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 5, 6, 52, 93, 119, 128, 130, 135 women depicted in works of art, 73, 75–85, 180–1 feminism, 116, 128 and finance, 51–2, 145–7, 157–9, 160–7 French, 143–4 girls from the provinces, 11–12, 127–41 mothers, 22, 60–1, 63, 55 New Woman, 80–1, 85 see also gender relations Wordsworth, William, 20, 63 World War I see First World War Worth, Aaron, 5, 52 Yeats, W. B., 50 young men from the provinces, genre, 11, 127, 128–9, 134–5, 141