This is by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), and it was published in 1913.

I've become quite a fan of Wharton's, having now worked my way through The Touchstone; The Glimpses of the Moon; Summer; and The Children. So I was happy to learn that Haley Larsen was organizing a group read of another one.

Bottom line: It's a brilliant story. Entertaining, infuriating, saddening, and thought-provoking, all in one fast-moving package.

Our unlikely heroine is Undine Spragg. The name is wonderfully indicative, because Undine and her parents (Abner E. Spragg and Leota B. Spragg) are parvenus; they are rich people (not reliably, nonchalantly rich, but up-and-down, effortfully rich), who are trying to access a layer of society that they really don't understand. Actually Mr and Mrs are not trying to access it for themselves: They're all about their daughter. They've effectively given up their own lives so that "Undine should have what she wanted".

The parents, who hail from a fictional Midwestern place called Apex City, are plain folks, really. Referring to her daughter's name (she's called Undie for short...), Mrs Spragg explains: "We called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born... It's from UNdoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take." Undine Spragg of Apex... The initials are unlikely to be coincidental...

Abner and Leota are afraid of Undine, frankly. If she decides she wants something, she gets it. When we first meet them, they're all living in New York in the "gilded void" of the Hotel Stentorian's "Looey suite" (the names are fabulous). And why? Because Undine has decided it's more fashionable to live in a hotel. But they have no idea how to break into the upper echelons they long to access. They don't even know who's "swell" and who isn't. When Undine does finally bag an entry into a superior stratum, she feels as though she's "astray in a new labyrinth of social distinctions".

Haley pointed us to Mrs Caroline Astor's "List of 400"... The supreme social gatekeeper of the 1890s, this woman created, along with fellow "social arbiter" Ward McAllister, a list of New York's upper crust. McAllister's criteria for inclusion show clearly how folk like Undine are really up against it: "There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or make other people not at ease... these people have not the poise, the aptitude for polite conversation, the polished and deferential manner, the infinite capacity of good humor and ability to entertain or be entertained that society demands."

That's the sort of thing that would make me run a mile... But the feeling of being excluded is like acid to Undine's soul. She HAS to break in.


Caroline Astor

Luckily, our heroine is beautiful... That's her most important attribute. But she's also ambitious, and she's serpentine (she's constantly described in language that implies turning, twisting, doubling back -- undulating, in fact). And, as we will find, she is utterly, utterly ruthless.

So she gets her breakthrough. She succeeds in marrying Ralph. But Ralph is not some thrusting money-maker who will spend his life supporting Undine's ambition. He writes. He plays at the law. To New York's engines of prosperity, then, he's inexplicable: "Mr Spragg mused: 'Wasn't he ever TAUGHT to work?'... A son-in-law who expected to be pensioned like a Grand Army veteran was a phenomenon new to his experience; but if that was what Undine wanted she should have it."

Charles Bowen, an older member of Ralph's circle who often gets the wisest lines, recognizes that Ralph is a man born out of his time: "It had so long been clear to him that poor Ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces."

And sure enough, he doesn't measure up... The writing is on the wall for Ralph&Undine before the honeymoon is even over. The poor guy is helped into some commercial position that ends up wearing him down, but it's never going to be enough for Undine.

They have a child, Paul, in whom Undine shows absolutely no interest until he's useful as a bargaining chip.

And Undine takes up with Peter Van Degen, a notorious womanizer.

She makes a misstep here, though. She gets her divorce from Ralph (for "desertion" -- the irony) BEFORE making sure of Peter. Rooky mistake... Her friend from home upbraids her: "Out at Apex you'd have acted different. You never NEVER would have given way to your feelings before you'd got your divorce."

This is a low moment for Undine. She's shut out of her New York circle. And Peter will never return -- the key reason, ironically, is that he found out how cruel she was to Ralph (when she refused to go home on learning he was ill...) So she's adrift at this point: "Her one desire was to get back an equivalent of the precise value she had lost in ceasing to be Ralph Marvell's wife."

But she's not down and out for long. While she's languishing in Europe, she's rehabilitated by two former acquaintances.


"Undine was sure the trip to Nice would be delightful. Their previous expeditions had shown her the Princess's faculty for organizing such adventures..."

They're slightly louche, these two women, but they know important people -- including Raymond de Chelles, a French marquis, who becomes Undine's next objective. There's a problem here, though. He's a Catholic, and she's divorced. So what she needs is for the Pope to annul her previous marriage. For that, though, she needs money -- which she attempts to extort from Ralph by threatening to take custody of Paul (as she is legally entitled to do). Ralph tries to raise the money, invests unwisely, and kills himself -- thereby solving Undine's problem. She's now not a divorcee, but rather a widow.

Now is probably a good time to summarize Undine's romantic relationships. There was an engagement back in Apex City (broken off). And there was a marriage back then, too... To one Elmer Moffatt, a somewhat mysterious arriviste with a boom-and-bust reputation, and magnetic powers of attraction. That's all hushed up. Not a word is breathed to Ralph about the divorce until Elmer's disclosures help to push him down the road to suicide. Before Ralph, there was another indiscreet engagement to a "handsome Austrian riding-master" who turned out to be a fraud. I don't think anyone found out about him.

Then there was poor Ralph. But now he is no more (and that part of the book is very moving -- the reader's heart goes out to this well-meaning and generous man, who feels he is "stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour", and who has had the misfortune to be yoked to force-of-nature Undine).

So Undine is free to marry Raymond. She's happy -- for a short time: "The three months since her marriage had been more nearly like what she had dreamed of than any of her previous experiments in happiness." But the rot quickly sets in here too. She feels stifled by his family, and by months on end of life in the French countryside; there's not enough money; and he's possessive...

Raymond is bewildered by her American heritage: "You're all alike," he exclaims, "every one of you. You come among us from a country we don't know, and can't imagine, 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! 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; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about -- you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have -- 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 honourable for us!"

It's a cultural chasm...


A young Edith Wharton

Undine ends up going back to Elmer. He's thrusting and ambitious -- just like her. He tells her: "I mean to have the best, you know... It was what you were always after, wasn't it?"

He's curiously old-fashioned too, though. If she wants him back, he tells her, it has to be as her husband. He wants none of the hole-and-corner games of the French aristocracy... So that's what happens. She divorces Raymond. She marries Elmer. Raymond's fortunes are on the decline, and Elmer -- an enthusiastic art collector -- buys the tapestries from his ancestral home... Ouch...

We close with the new menage preparing for a big party -- against the background of those newly acquired wall-coverings. Paul is there, but Undine is way too busy to deal with him. He's missing Raymond, with whom he'd formed a good relationship. (Many years later, Wharton goes on to further examine the plight of such offspring in The Children.)

And Undine? Well, she's pleased with her social success. "Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them. And there had been moments lately when she had had to confess to herself that Moffatt did not fit into the picture... Now and then she caught herself thinking that his two predecessors -- who were gradually becoming merged in her 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..."

We're not fancying Elmer's long-term chances, then...

When she learns that an acquaintance has been appointed Ambassador to England, she realizes how much she'd like to be an Ambassador's wife... Elmer tells her that they won't have divorced Ambassadresses, a circumstance she finds totally "insulting".

She thinks back on her social successes, but now there's something amiss: "Under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for."

Which is how the book ends.

It's a brilliant ending. On the one hand. you think this is Undine's comeuppance -- people who are constantly hankering after the next thing will never, ever be happy -- but on the other hand, you're remembering that this is a woman who doesn't take no for an answer, and you're wondering how she's going to pull it off, and who will be trampled underfoot this time...

As Haley points out: "The customs of the country -- of Old New York at the start of the novel, of the Vatican and all of French aristocracy in the second half of the novel -- continually threaten to derail Undine. Yet she continues, annoyingly and terribly, to get her own way." Why, then, should she not end up as the wife to some unfortunate ambassador...?


Undine's early stays in France suit her better than her entombment on her husband's estate: "The doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the Riviera, not too near the sea..."

***

It's a bold move on Wharton's part to give us such an unlikeable heroine.

According to Jonathan Franzen, there were a couple of elements at play. While Wharton was working on this novel, she was getting ready to definitively leave the United States, and the novel's "grotesquely negative cartoon of the country... reads like a selective marshalling of evidence to support her case. The country that can produce and celebrate a creature like Undine Spragg is not, Wharton seems to be arguing to herself, a country she can live in."

Wharton was also aware that divorce would be inevitable for her too, so she steeps the whole work in a divorce dynamic: "It's what the book is relentlessly about."

Deborah Williams describes it as a "menopause novel": "[It's] Wharton’s fierce salvo of independence, an indication that she would no longer be playing by anyone’s rules other than her own... Propelled by fury and an utter disdain for conventional representations of female heroines, the novel demonstrates Wharton’s power and the importance of finding that true third self."

But what Wharton mostly seems to be skewering is the "system". It's the perspicacious Bowen who describes Undine as "a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph". Jia Tolentino summarizes it like this: "Undine gets the essentials: that to be beautiful, for a woman, is to be seen, which is to be wanted, which is to be handed the ability to exploit an economic system."

While it's not great for women to have so few options, Tolentino continues, what this novel shows very cogently is that this situation is not fantastic for men either... They're laid wide open to being shafted.

The "weak point" of American marriages, according to the wise Charles Bowen, is "the fact that the average American looks down on his wife." It's normal for a man to work hard for a woman, he argues. The trouble is he doesn't tell her that -- doesn't, presumably, regard her as intelligent enough to understand the nitty-gritty of acquisition.

Ralph's sister points out that Undine would be bored by such conversation. "Just so," says Charles, "she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against 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... 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!... [In America] money and motors and clothes are simply the big bribe she's paid for keeping out of some man's way!"



So acquisition is what it's all about. This is what draws Undine back to Elmer: "To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence, and as she listened to him the vision of the things he could have unrolled itself before her like the long triumph of an Asiatic conqueror... Undine's estimate of people had always been based on their apparent power of getting what they wanted -- provided it came under the category of things she understood wanting... [Moffatt] used life exactly as she would have used it in his place."

It's the logic of capitalism. You want. You fight to obtain. You always want more.

If this powerful driver hadn't been pushing new America to ruthlessly and constantly aim for more; if women had been given more options in society, and had been enabled to be less dependent on men; if they had been given a better education, so that they developed desires and values that went beyond THINGS -- would Undine have been different? Ah, that's the 64,000-dollar question... Nature or nurture? Will there always be Undines regardless? Or are Undines purely a product of a skewed system that leaves them few other pathways?


Ralph would probably have been interested in this, but not Undine...

***

There's so much to think about in this novel...

1. Darwin

Wharton was a great student of the science of the day, and had a huge collection of scientific texts. Darwinism, with its ideas of natural selection, was very much in the air at the time. And it is definitely possible to see poor Ralph and his ilk as inexorably on their way out. He's visibly passe -- too effete to survive contact with a powerhouse like Undine. But while Wharton was influenced by Darwin, she was also influenced by "his adherents, colleagues, disciples, and antagonists". She was a conservative -- but also a satirist. So the whole picture she presents is a bit more nuanced.

Ralph had welcomed the winds of change at one point, too: "Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the 'Reservation,' and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." But the more he sees of the relentless tides of commerce and modernity, the more he starts to change his mind: "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."

2. Undine as the original influencer

As Tolentino argues, this is still an incredibly relevant book: "More than a century after The Custom of the Country was published, Undine’s habits, given a superficial makeover, could be rebranded not just as aspirational but feminist. Today, she would learn how to defend her life story as that of a woman going after what she wants and getting it -- and what could be more progressive than that? This pitch would be bullshit, but plenty of people would believe it. Our twenty-first-century Undine would have a million followers on Instagram. She’d be a Page Six legend. We would give her what Wharton understood that a woman like Undine wants, above everything: the satisfaction of knowing that others are watching her every move."

3. Undine as a female Trump

Victoria Patterson argues quite convincingly that Undine, "ruthless, repugnant, and vacuous, [is] a fictional female equivalent of Donald Trump... A liar and a cheat, Undine is incurious, unintelligent, and recklessly extravagant. She loves gauche glittery displays of wealth, like a crow enraptured by shiny objects, accumulating them, wanting more; and her greatest passion is her ego, which craves constant amusement." She'd have done over the White House, for sure...

4. Undine as weight-aware

This is one of the more human qualities of our heroine: She's prone to putting on weight, in an era that already frowned on stoutness.

Undine worries several times about her weight during the course of the narrative, spurred on, no doubt, by the ubiquity of images that vaunted a slender (ridiculously slender...) profile:


The Crush, by Charles Dana Gibson, after whom this ideal is named

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the embodiment of femininity was the "Gibson Girl". Gibson's sketches popularized "an iconic body shape that combined elements of fragility and voluptuousness... very curvy, but still tall and slender... sexy and curvaceous without being lewd".


What you wanted was an S-silhouette...

Perhaps this will prove to be Undine's most inexorable opponent...

***

All in all, this is my favourite Wharton so far. It's so packed with detail that it would absolutely repay a reread. And it's a great incentive to read more of this gimlet-eyed and witty woman.