The Custom of the Country

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The Custom of the Country is a 1913 novel by Edith Wharton, published when she was 51 years old. It belongs to her major period, which had began in 1905 with The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton herself called it, "a real magnum opus". The novel is divided into 5 books, which echoes the structure of a drama, if not a tragedy.

It is centered upon Undine Spragg, a social upstart who goes up the social ladder through marriage and divorce and remarriage, many times anew.

Wavering between the Romantic and the Realist canons, the novel nevertheless follows in the wake of the literary tradition of the money-novel.

1 Synopsis
2 Context
3 Literary Influences
4 Major Themes
5 External links

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Spraggs, a family of Westerners from Apex who have made money through shady financial dealings, arrive in New York in an attempt to get Undine, their daughter, married to a rich man and forget about her disastrous and shameful divorce to Elmer Moffat back home. Undine then meets Ralph Marvel, a member of the old upper-class New York society, and they get married. However, her unsatisfied greed prompts her into an affair with nouveau riche Van Degen and after having a child, Paul, with Ralph, she divorces him, and a little later marries a French man instead, Raymond De Chelle. Again, she is unable to find contentment and divorces him to marry Elmer Moffat, who by now has made a fortune. However, the last pages lead the reader to think that she is again dissatisfied with her situation.

[edit] Context

It was published at a time when she herself was going through a divorce. She had, however, started writing the novel as early as Spring 1908 when she had completed six chapters in France. Then she stopped for a couple of years, and translated her difficulty to write through Ralph Marvel's own inability to write too. It was in 1912 and 1913 that she managed to put an end to the novel, when she declared, "I have taken up again my sadly neglected "great American novel"."

It was first serialised in a literary magazine, The Scribner's Magazine, in January 1913, and then appeared in book form in October of that same year.

[edit] Literary Influences

Edith Wharton said the title of the novel came from a play by English playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, called The Custom of the Country, in which the term 'custom' referred to the money paid by a master to get a girl's maidenhead.
Another inspiration was William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham, which deals with the issue of the Western upstart who tries to come to grisp with the American society of the East. This was an inspiration mainly for Mr. Spragg's shady dealings.
Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Robert Grant's The Orchid and Unleavened Bread, and Langdon Mitchell's The New York Idea also bear striking resemblances with this novel, namely with the idea of the amoral woman who gets married for money, and of the problem-novel.
Echoes of Principles of Psychology by William James and The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen also pervade through the novel, namely in the depiction of the different types in the New York society, and in the advent of divorce.

[edit] Major Themes

Like much of Edith Wharton's work, The Custom of the Country is an obliquely feminist critique, but in this case Undine Spragg also represents the US, as the initial letters in her name suggest. It is also a social survey in so far as it deals with the phenomenom of the Marriage Mills and the business proceedings that divorce entailed at that time. There is also a confrontation between old New York and the newly rich, and between French culture and American culture. Furthermore, we may link the novel to Edith Wharton's poem Persephone, in which case Undine Spragg can be seen as a siren, marrying men in desperate (and unsuccessful) attempts to acquire a soul.