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.
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“She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.””
— Edith Wharton
“She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.””
— Edith Wharton
“Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.””
— Edith Wharton
“Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met.””
— Edith Wharton
“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. 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, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.””
— Edith Wharton
“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.””
— Edith Wharton
“The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.””
— Edith Wharton
“If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.””
— Edith Wharton
“Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.””
— Edith Wharton
