The Custom of the Country
1913
Undine Spragg has no soul, only a hunger that cannot be filled. Arriving in New York from Apex City with her pushy mother and a fortune she must spend to belong, she is spectacularly beautiful, ruthlessly ambitious, and utterly empty. Through two marriages, one to a weak Upper East Side heir, another to a French nobleman, Wharton dissects the machinery of American social climbing with a precision that still cuts a century later. Undine's relentless pursuit of status becomes a mirror for the hollow ambitions driving the nouveau riche. Every scene gleams with satirical precision: the hotel rooms where mother and daughter plot their next move, the drawing rooms where fortunes are spoken of as character, the marriages that are contracts in all but name. It's Wharton at her most devastating, asking what happens when someone wants everything and feels nothing.
