the most appalling ‘heroine’ you ever did read

Might I interest you in a self-absorbed, selfish, vain, marriage hopping, mercenary & manipulative protagonist? No? Stay with me for a second and hear me out. Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country is breath-taking in her sheer audacity … and I am here for it.

Set in the upper-echelons of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century, The Custom of the Country lists in great detail the efforts of Undine Spragg who can never, and will never be satisfied. She like the GDP of a country; always having to increase. She is also utterly unoriginal, save for her drive.

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met (p. 13)

You know that scene in the Jungle Book where Kaa the snake hypnotises Mowgli? That’s how I felt reading this novel. I couldn’t look away. It’s awful. It’s brilliant. It’s satire. It’s irony.

Undine Spragg has dragged her parents from place to place, in the pursuit of the lofty heights of social success. She’s like an Apple devotee – every time a new model comes out, she discards the old one to get the next shiny one – which is always better, more superior, and infinitely more divine than the last.

… just replace ‘Apple product’ with ‘realm of society’.

The novel opens with Undine having brought her parents to New York City where finally – finally! – if only she’d break into those hallowed circles, she’d be content.

(Reader, she will not be content.)

You’ll get to read how Undine uses marriages like stepping stones to get from one place to the next place. The first we see is with the sensitive, and utterly not-ready-for-this-new-world-of-commerce old money family Ralph Marvell. He marries her because she’s beautiful and could inspire him to write and he wants to save her from the big bad wolves of society. Oh! And he also wants to write poetry. And live off it.

She marries him because she assumes he’s wealthy (he’s not) and he’s her ticket into the forbidden social circle that she’s raring to break into (she gets into it. BUT WAIT! IS THERE ANOTHER HALLOWED CIRCLE AROUND THE NEXT CORNER?). She doesn’t read poetry; she reads gossip magazines. She requires money, and expects it to appear. BAM! Money. Just like that.

It’s a spectacularly bad match.

And it isn’t the last one …

Undine simply cannot – cannot! – tolerate the idea of not being either a) the centre of attention or b) in the Room Where It Happens (to quote Hamilton) (though it’s not politics she craves. It’s where all the best people go to shop and party, obviously. Her actual desires are, to put it bluntly, as shallow as a flattened teaspoon.)

To know that others were indifferent to what she had thought important was to cheapen all present pleasure and turn the whole force of her desires in a new direction (p. 180)

There is not one redeeming quality in Undine; she’s the victim of her society (women are constrained by social rules) and of herself (she does not know how to be content; she only knows how to want) and her vanity and self-importance. The moment she catches sight of a new toy, all her previous ones become foolish and idiotic and why on earth did she ever like them in the first place? Like, how lame. How passé .

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 (p. 370)

Listen, she’s awful. Utterly awful. The world does not revolve around the sun, it revolves around Undine Spragg.

It never occurred to her that other people’s lives went on when they were out of her range of vision (p. 259)

However? I recommend this novel. Be swept up in Undine’s adventures. Be awestruck at how utterly unself-aware she is. See the tragedy she unleashes, oblivious to all but her own needs. (They are, after all, the most important.) You pity her, in a way, and perhaps fear what she represents – the worst, the most farcical of human vanity, presented in all purity and outrageous selfish ambition in Undine Spragg.

Edith Wharton? Most excellent author. Bravo.

Have you read The Custom of the Country? What do you think?