{"id":162156,"date":"2022-11-01T01:12:28","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T05:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162156"},"modified":"2022-11-01T15:03:39","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T19:03:39","slug":"why-do-women-want-edith-whartons-present-tense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/11\/01\/why-do-women-want-edith-whartons-present-tense\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton\u2019s Present Tense"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Edith Wharton. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cUndine Spragg\u2014how can<\/em> you?\u201d her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid \u201cbell-boy\u201d had just brought in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton\u2019s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country<\/em>, rarely appears on those \u201cbest \ufb01rst lines in literature\u201d lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton\u2019s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the \ufb01rst \ufb01ve words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable\u2014no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (\u201chow can<\/em> you?\u201d rather than the usual \u201chow could<\/em> you?\u201d).<\/p>\n

Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The<\/em> Custom of the Country<\/em>, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid \ufb01xture or a reality television star; her currency as a \ufb01gure who exempli\ufb01es the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce\u2014the main \u201cproblem\u201d in this 1913 \u201cproblem novel\u201d\u2014is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine\u2019s grasping, \ufb01nancially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is.<\/p>\n

Custom<\/em> tracks Undine\u2019s destructive rise from her life as the middle-class daughter of an upwardly-mobile businessman and his \ufb02uttering, matronly wife in the \ufb01ctional Midwestern town of Apex City to the highest echelons of New York and French society. She chews through husbands and children in search of ever more money and ever better social position, marrying and divorcing like Goldilocks trying various bowls of porridge. In her treatment of each of Undine Spragg\u2019s husbands (and their families), Wharton explores the textures of turn-of-the-century wealth: the prim Old New York dinner table (\u201cthe high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits\u201d); the musty Louis Quinze traditions of the stuffy French aristocracy; and the vulgar electric light illuminating the capitalist acquisitiveness of the American nouveau riche. As Undine moves through these various worlds of wealth, the novel highlights her comparative freshness within the contexts of their enervating gildedness, extending a sort of deep compass onto this substantially super\ufb01cial character. The combination of compassion and sharply observed frankness is typical of Wharton\u2019s \ufb01ction, which tends to love its characters without letting any of them off the hook.<\/p>\n

As Undine’s mother raises that wrinkly hand to \u201cdefend\u201d against what turns out to be the social invitation that sets her on her path, Undine swoops in and grabs the proffered note with her \u201cquick young \ufb01ngers.\u201d Undine\u2019s hand, as Hermione Lee has pointed out, is deeply symbolic\u2014always grabbing and twisting and darting. It is, as her \ufb01rst husband Ralph Marvell describes it, a \u201cmiserly hand,\u201d desiring and insistent but also cheap: she refuses to pay to get what she wants. The Custom of the Country <\/em>documents and dramatizes Undine\u2019s wants and desires, from the expected\u2014\u201cFifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!\u201d and \u201cI want to look perfectly lovely!\u201d\u2014to the comically resistant: she has \u201ca \ufb01erce desire to spend [her time] in upsetting \u2026 immemorial customs.\u201d In the end, it is the frankness of Undine\u2019s wants\u2014the quick, open willingness of her grasp\u2014that draws a reader in and cultivates our complex emotional attachment to her. It feels a little bit thrilling to see a woman ride the wave of her desires, uncut by ambivalence or ambiguity.<\/p>\n

Is, then, The Custom of the Country<\/em> a feminist text? This is a question that has accompanied the novel since its publication, even as the term \u201cfeminist\u201d as a descriptor for imaginative expression remained latent in the era. Initial reviews were split. In the New York Times<\/em>, one critic called Undine the \u201cmost repellant heroine we have encountered in many a long day.\u201d Others acknowledged the draw of her villainousness, and still others placed the character in the argument that white women\u2019s domestic and marital work is work. An anonymous 1913 reviewer in The Nation<\/em> draws a long, complicated, suggestive comparison between Undine\u2019s violent ascent and the work undertaken by \u201cpioneer women,\u201d arguing that \u201cthe rigors of pioneer life fall more painfully upon the woman than upon the man.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1986, Janet Malcolm came out with guns blazing in a New York Times <\/em>review of a new Library of America volume of Wharton\u2019s novels. Titled \u201cThe Woman Who Hated Women,\u201d the review\u2019s central piece of evidence is The Custom of the Country<\/em>. In Custom<\/em>, Malcolm asserts, Wharton \u201ctakes her cold dislike of women to a height of venomousness previously unknown in American letters.\u201d Malcolm\u2019s essay is a fun, provocative read, but as a polemic it fails to convince. After all, must one like<\/em> women to be a feminist, or even to evade the \u201cmisogyny\u201d Malcolm accuses Wharton of harboring? The literary critic Arielle Zibrak, in \u201cThe Woman Who Hated Sex,\u201d a 2016 essay whose title plays cheekily on Malcolm\u2019s, reframes both Malcolm\u2019s argument and the longer history of the \u201cIs it feminist?\u201d question about Custom<\/em>. For Zibrak, the question is a nonstarter. Wharton was not personally a feminist, and The Custom of the Country<\/em>\u2019s portrayal of Undine reveals an undeniable anger at the figure of the young woman. Yet, as Zibrak points out, in the text\u2019s forward-thinking critique of \u201cconsumerism supplanting sexual desire,\u201d Wharton extends a prescient political analysis of the experience of white womanhood that is especially relevant to the twenty-\ufb01rst century\u2019s “lean-in” and girlboss fame economies. The rollicking fun of The Custom of the Country<\/em> may lie in a reader\u2019s chance both to judge and cheer on Undine\u2019s avaricious pursuit of what she wants. But the book\u2019s deeper and lasting commentary seems to lie in its exploration of how and why, and under the pressure of what social and psychological forces, Undine has come to want what she wants at all.<\/p>\n

Wharton’s prescience is tied to what was happening in her life: during the years in which she composed Custom<\/em>, everything was collapsing around her. Her (by all accounts sexless) marriage to her husband, Teddy, had been disintegrating since the day the match was made, but it \ufb01nally crumbled in the years between 1910 and their divorce in 1913. Her tumultuous affair with the bisexual writer Morton Fullerton came to a painful end in 1909, though they continued to correspond as intimate friends. As so much change unfolded, Wharton was trying to \ufb01gure out not only what she wanted going forward\u2014Who would she spend her time with? What would \u201chome\u201d look and feel like? What would her work be?\u2014but also, tracing backward, how in the world she had ever come to want (or resign herself to) so many things that had turned out to be wrong.<\/p>\n

The Custom of the Country<\/em> puts a spin on a question that\u2019s been asked by men from Sigmund Freud to Mel Gibson: What do women want? Wharton is less interested in unpacking what<\/em> women want than which desires are even available to them. She was devoted to imagining the relationships between individual feeling and behavior and the social norms, conventions, and values that shape them. Undine Spragg is, perversely, a near-perfect character for this question, not because she is powerfully individual (like Lily Bart, Ellen Olenska, or Wharton herself) but because she has nearly no recognizable sense of authentic selfhood at all. As the critic Stephanie Foote has observed, Wharton achieves this effect by limiting her use of free indirect discourse to represent Undine\u2019s consciousness on the page. Readers are treated to Undine\u2019s speech, and a lot of omniscient narration about what Undine wants from the social world that she marauds through, but throughout the novel we encounter very little language from Undine\u2019s complex consciousness. The result, in Foote\u2019s description, is a sense that Undine has \u201cno secret self\u201d that exists apart from the conventions of the various social worlds she is devoted to imitating and echoing.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s representation of imitation is provocative, and not only as a critique. Undine is frequently shown watching, learning, and performing. In Undine\u2019s own formulation, \u201cone of the guiding principles of her career\u201d is that \u201cit\u2019s better to watch than to ask questions.\u201d At a momentous dinner party with the Old New York Marvell-Dagonet family, we discover that Undine\u2019s \u201cquickness in noting external differences had already taught her to modulate and lower her voice, and to replace \u2018The i<\/em>-dea!\u2019 and \u2018I wouldn\u2019t wonder\u2019 by more polished locutions.\u201d Late in the novel, we encounter Undine\u2019s thoughts on the \u201csuperiority\u201d that her marriage into the French aristocracy had given her over the American nouveau riche: \u201cShe had learned things they did not guess: shades of conduct, turns of speech, tricks of attitude\u2014and easy and free and enviable as she thought them, she would not for the world have been back among them at the cost of knowing no more than they.\u201d<\/p>\n

These insights into Undine\u2019s character are underpinned by Wharton\u2019s formal use of repetition. Over and over, the reader encounters a word, idea, or phrase in one chapter only to \ufb01nd it popping up soon after. Without a \u201csecret self\u201d it seems Undine has nothing but empty space into which she can \ufb01t an endless amount of knowledge and information about the world. Yet this knowledge never changes her, never causes her to pause and rethink; it never, really, knocks her off course. We learn that as a girl in Apex City, she had \ufb02irted with a dentist, thinking him high-status. At the Marvell-Dagonets\u2019 dinner party, she listens closely to casual talk and quickly absorbs, through their offhandedly hierarchical assessments of social status, that not only is a dentist a middling sort but so is a Wall Street broker. Two chapters later, Undine scoffs to herself about her father\u2019s desires for her. \u201cDid he want to \u2026 have her marry a dentist and live in a West Side \ufb02at?\u201d The Custom of the Country<\/em> is full of repetitions and echoes like these: a shocking new idea gets introduced to Undine in one chapter only to show up later fully integrated into her worldview and sense of self. There is both nothing Undine can\u2019t learn and nothing, having been learned by her, that can change her.<\/p>\n

The intense stagnation of Undine\u2019s character is always balanced against her climb of social ascent. She rides a \u201ctrain of thought\u201d that transports her from one place to another but never changes her in substance or appearance. Her beauty persists\u2014her rose-gold hair continues to shine; her complexion glows whether under the soft \ufb01relight of her French country home or the blazing electric glare of hotel lighting; her cycle of desire, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, desire repeats. The critic Jennifer Fleissner has\u00a0 commented that many naturalist plots from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries featuring young women are \u201cmarked by neither the steep arc of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion\u2014back and forth, around and around, on and on\u2014that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place.\u201d These women, like Undine, tend to \u201coscillate\u201d and \u201cdrift\u201d through life rather than achieve or self-actualize as they might in a traditional bildungsroman. Yet of these women, Fleissner \ufb02oats a provocative claim: their stuckness and resistance to change represents \u201ca serious form of seeking, to which an older ideal of feminine ful\ufb01llment can no longer offer an adequate response.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does Undine want? The answer is a lot, and also very little. Her most obvious wants are so conventional (to make a good marriage, to be rich, to be famous, to be admired) that it\u2019s easy to miss some of her more unexpected desires. These more perverse cravings often crop up in her relations with the indelible Elmer Moffatt, a loutish man with whom Undine has a secret and complex history. In a scene that takes place early in the novel, Undine nervously agrees to meet Moffatt at a public park, a risky move that she undertakes while wearing a veil so as to remain unseen on the streets. \u201cAll I want,\u201d she tells him during this emotional assignation, \u201cis that nothing shall be known.\u201d What is the relationship between Undine\u2019s more expected desires\u2014the spectacular, super\ufb01cial ones that are easy to mock or judge\u2014and this stranger one, which I do believe she seriously seeks: the request for an aspect of her life to remain unknown? After the meeting, she returns to her \ufb01anc\u00e9, the Old New York moneyed Ralph Marvell. He comes close, feeling romantic, and demands of her, \u201cTake off your veil.\u201d As pliable and willing to debase herself as Undine tends to be, this request sets her unusually on edge: \u201cA quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her hands.\u201d But Ralph peels her veil back anyway, and what Undine doesn\u2019t say here to the man she will marry and then destroy is that no matter how many veils he peels back, he\u2019ll never be able to know her, because relationships are impossible when one party is as cool, slippery, and ungraspable as water.<\/p>\n

Like many novels, The Custom of the Country<\/em>\u2019s spine is its heroine\u2019s relationships with a series of men. The narrative cycles through multiple marriage plots, from courtship to marriage to courtship to marriage to courtship to marriage. That\u2019s the story the reader loops through, alongside Undine. But the plot of the book is really about what happens between women. A moment toward the end of the novel helps illuminate this tricky aspect of Wharton\u2019s narration. Now serially married, Undine proposes to one of her many men that they become lovers. Balking at the suggestion of in\ufb01delity (and desirous to publicly, not illicitly, acquire her), he refuses to cheat with her, declaring that \u201cThere are things a man doesn\u2019t do.\u201d It\u2019s a dramatic and unexpected moment, not least because implied by his remark is an insight that can sometimes be difficult to see through the fog of patriarchy, which is that if there are some things a man doesn\u2019t do, there is almost nothing a woman won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Maybe this is the aspect of The Custom of the Country<\/em> that most felt like misogyny to Janet Malcolm: Wharton\u2019s insistence in the novel\u2014also present, though with a softer touch, in The House of Mirth<\/em>\u2014that under a scarcity of options for ful\ufb01llment, women often behave very badly, and in particular very badly to one another. Undine\u2019s marriages are generally made not only because she wants money and status but because she desires\u2014maybe above all?\u2014to dominate over other women, and to demonstrate her dominance in public. The novel\u2019s complexity reveals something deeper than the surface-level con\ufb02icts between the individual and family, and even between conventions and their violation. Rather, what Wharton captures is the misery of the feminine continuous present, which sets women inside social systems that allow for no synthesis, no way to make something new out of the insipid materials the world provides them, no light around which to gather.<\/p>\n

The Custom of the Country <\/em>is arch, gossipy, shrewd, and weirdly fun, and it’s also a rigorous and challenging book that captures much about our current moment\u2019s reevaluation of damage done to and by white women. \u201cPoor Undine!\u201d Ralph Marvell thinks to himself, condescendingly. \u201cShe was what the gods had made her\u2014a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure. He had no desire to \u2018preach down\u2019 such heart as she had\u2014he felt only a stronger wish to reach it, teach it, move it to something of the pity that \ufb01lled his own.\u201d By putting the feminized language of sentiment and sympathy\u2014heart, pity, instruction, spirituality\u2014in the mind of one of her male characters, Wharton pulls off an interesting trick. Exploring his own feelings of sympathy toward Undine, Ralph goes on to describe their marriage as a form of drowning for them both. Here, somewhat benightedly, Ralph begins to articulate a political critique of marriage and of the idiocies of American gender roles under which he and Undine both suffer; yet it is so easily sublimated back into the very elements he rebukes when he sinks into the easy language of passive and idle sympathy. Poor Undine!<\/p>\n

The question occurs anew for readers of this book: What will you make of Wharton\u2019s complicated representation of a white woman behaving very badly to friends and loved ones, inside a social world that has belittled, berated, and narrowed her from the start? The theorist Lauren Berlant has written about the dilemmas posed by stories about feminized suffering, which expose yet also pleasurably dwell in the indignities of life experienced as a woman. Presenting themselves as mere re\ufb02ections of the truth of what Berlant terms the \u201cfemale complaint,\u201d these stories \u201cabout\u201d white women have come to identify white womanhood with a state of disappointment, particularly in love. Undine Spragg\u2014constantly disappointed, never satis\ufb01ed\u2014represents both the conventional white woman and the category\u2019s self-embedded critique. Such complex duality extends into the readerly experience, which \ufb01nds many readers eager to both critique and inhabit the character (Undine Spragg\u2019s initials are, after all, US).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something fascinating about reading Undine Spragg today. Trained ever more precisely by contemporary popular and social media cultures on how to \ufb01nd and appreciate deeper meaning in feminine super\ufb01ciality, readers today are probably more sympathetic to Undine than ever. Finding myself rooting for Undine\u2014loving her blank voraciousness and how capacious her unsatis\ufb01able desires come to seem\u2014can be a quick step to feeling agential and empowered by my creative reparative reading. These days, we stan a woman who DGAF. Yet I wonder about this self-soothing reading practice. As Berlant has argued, when personal feeling becomes a way to communicate with one another about the structural effects of patriarchy, practices that might more aptly be understood as survival too easily become \u201crecoded as freedom\u201d while never quite serving as freedom.<\/p>\n

The Custom of the<\/em> Country<\/em> is nothing if not a book about one white woman\u2019s survival. Yet in it Wharton remains committed to representing how wretched survival can be, even when that survival features the most luxurious of fabrics, goods, and surroundings. The book ends without resolution, lacking in synthesis. The continuous present in which it started remains. Undine\u2019s mother\u2019s exclamation echoes: \u201cUndine Spragg, how can<\/em> you?\u201d Readers are left only with a set of unanswered questions about marriage, gender, white womanhood, and social convention that remain important to consider today. Isn\u2019t it true that Undine\u2019s frank wanting is both freely felt and thrilling to encounter and also meager in kind? Is it possible to both appreciate Undine\u2019s talent for survival while also refusing to mistake it for freedom? In The Custom of the Country<\/em>, Wharton illustrated something about American white womanhood that has taken too long to name. In search of status, love, and money, white women are a force, not always for the good, to be reckoned with.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University and the author of<\/em> The Portrait\u2019s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Her criticism has appeared in<\/em> The New Yorker,<\/em> The New York Review of Books,<\/em> The New Republic,<\/em> and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Custom of the Country<\/a> by Edith Wharton, to be published by Penguin Classics in November.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIs it possible to both appreciate Undine\u2019s talent for survival while also refusing to mistake it for freedom?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2296,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68317],"tags":[7005,67827,30221,68557],"class_list":["post-162156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rereading","tag-edith-wharton","tag-featured","tag-protofeminism","tag-undine-spragg"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton\u2019s Present Tense by Sarah Blackwood<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 1, 2022 \u2013 \u201cIs it possible to both appreciate Undine\u2019s talent for survival while also refusing to mistake it for freedom?\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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