Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

For sale to the highest bidder

The character of the constantly dissatisfied, beautiful, and determined young woman has been portrayed repeatedly throughout literature. Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’, Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’, Scarlett O’Hara in Mitchell’s ‘Gone With the Wind’ have all been women with strong wills who indulge in deception and heartbreak to get them closer to their respective goals. This kind of character has never been more perfectly embodied than in Undine Spragg of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, ‘The Custom of the Country’.

Undine is presumably an only, spoiled child of the Spragg’s of Apex City in the Dakota/Nebraska region where Mr. Spragg turned enough businesses into profitable ventures to be considered one of the wealthiest men in that Midwestern town. Undine has acquired this insatiable hunger for wealth and material possessions and has been blessed with the beauty and charm to find plenty of suitors in Apex. However, she deserves a much bigger arena. She persuades her parents to move to New York through social connections so that she can find more and better choices. One of her favorite habits is to always gaze at herself in the mirror to see herself as she thinks others may see her:
‘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, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.”

Her past in Apex is a mutually understood unspoken topic between Undine and her parents. There was an elopement that was a first marriage, hastily annulled by her father and never mentioned among the influential New York acquaintances, who include the Marvell’s, whose sensitive and handsome son Ralph is as smitten with Undine as she is with the Marvell fortune she thinks Ralph will inherit. They marry and have a transatlantic honeymoon where Undine’s materialistic appetites put a strain on Ralph’s finances, forcing them to return to New York before they incur any more rising debt. Added to this is the fact that Undine is pregnant and so her autonomy will be significantly curtailed.

A reminder of her misspent past appears in the form of Elmer Moffat, the husband of her annulled marriage. Elmer is a financier of mysterious origins who seems to appear specter-like in Undine’s world, sometimes in more prosperous circumstances than others but always relentless in his pursuit of a good business venture and always ready to take the risks necessary in gaining potentially large returns. No one other than Undine’s parents know of his role in Undine’s past and she wants to keep it that way. Nevertheless, Elmer offers to include her father in a new investment opportunity, which does turn a profit although not enough to substantially increase the allowance her father gives her regularly.

Along the way, Undine embarks on an affair with Ralph’s cousin’s husband who refuses to leave his wife, even though he’s always open to some amorous activity on the side, files for divorce from her husband, meets a charming French nobleman who can’t marry her because she’s divorced so she has her marriage annulled, enabling her to marry the Frenchman, Raymond de Chelles. However, life as a duchess comes with some unwanted side effects: namely, that her in-laws have very definite expectations for how she should behave and uphold the family tradition. She bristles at this enforced life and rebels against the reluctance of Raymond to finance trips to Paris, fancy balls, and all the other trappings of wealth to which Undine feels she’s entitled.

She blackmails Ralph into paying an enormous amount of money to keep their son with him or send him back. As the parent with sole custody, she’s legally entitled to have him with her. Ralph turns to Elmer Moffat (yes, him again) to lend him the amount she demands. When the business venture that Elmer was so sure about is delayed beyond the date Undine demanded he pay her before she reclaims her son, as well as the knowledge of exactly who Elmer Moffat is, Ralph kills himself.

With her son, and his inheritance with her, Undine should be satisfied. Yet Raymond is becoming as tiresome as Ralph was with his obsession with their finances. Realizing the value of all the tapestries and works of art in the household Undine thinks they would bring in enough to fund four villas, completely disregarding the fact that Raymond views them as part of the family heritage and refuses to consider parting with them.

Of course, Undine ultimately gets what she wants, until she can’t get the next thing that she wants. At the end she is back with Elmer, the man she should have stayed married to from the beginning, newly affluent from the venture that Ralph couldn’t afford to wait to benefit from. The Moffats are in now in possession of other lucrative investments as well, including some of those centuries-old tapestries from the Chelles estate that Raymond has been forced to sell in the wake of his divorce and some unfortunate losses from another formerly affluent relation.

Undine’s story is the total inverse of Lily Bart’s in Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’. Lily refused to sacrifice her moral conscience for material gain, leading to her tragic fall. Undine has no such conscience, merely a voracious appetite that sustains itself on fresh new, and often short-lived, gratification. Undine is a beautiful monster. We travel through her tale with her, and the contortions and maneuvers she forces herself to undergo are fascinating. However, she is a complete sociopath. Whenever there is remorse, as there is for Ralph’s suicide, it quickly evaporates as a new object of pleasure comes into view. Her son Paul is a lonely, confused little boy who doesn’t know which father he should miss the most as he has almost given up missing his mother.

Wharton’s gift for anatomizing and eviscerating the affluent society she knew so well is as astute as ever in ‘The Custom of the Country’. It takes a writer of immense skill and confidence to hold our attention with such an unappealing character as Undine Spragg. Even if she gets her comeuppance it won’t last for long; a new victory will always take its place.