Wharton’s Undine

     “Undine.” The reader is given pause at the very first word of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. The name of the leading lady seems unlikely indeed for the child of vulgar Kansas parents, though throughout the nineteenth century the legendary Undine had been the subject of numerous paintings and poems, particularly popular among the pre-Raphaelites. [1]
     Despite links to ancient water nymphs such as naiads and nereids and the Latin name from unda (wave), the figure of Undine is not ancient, but is original with Paracelsus. He posited “spiritual” beings associated with each of the four elements invisible to the ordinary observer. Water is the realm of the undine who can acquire a soul only by attracting a human lover. Thus she is associated with promiscuous self-interested sexual activity and sometimes conflated with malicious seductresses such as sirens.
     Wharton identifies her character Undine Spragg, as “a variation on the eternal feminine.” The obvious application of this universally distributed negative archetype of woman to Undine arises from her willingness to use her extraordinary beauty cynically in pursuit of her own selfish ends, thus ruining her husband Ralph, battering her next husband, and failing to satisfy Elmer who was her first and last.
     Undine is entirely unredeemed by the book’s end. When reminded of his one-time step-father in France Paul bursts into uncontrollable sobs, and Elmer consoles him by saying, “Is it because your mother hadn’t time for you? Well, she’s like that, you know, and you and I just have to lump it.” Though his arms are “firm and friendly,” Elmer cannot help thinking in terms of money. He thoughtlessly refers to the Marquis’ poverty which had allowed him to buy the family tapestries and then comforts the crying child by assuring him “you’ll be the richest boy in America.”
     In comfort and security, Undine remains unsatisfied. “She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, as though there were other things she might want if she knew about them.” By the novel’s last lines, the vague discontent has coalesced about the wish to be the wife of an ambassador. She is a classic addict, who always lusts for more.
     If the nouveaux riches of her day seemed conscienceless and impossibly vulgar, one can only imagine what she would make of today’s America, led by Donald Trump, an utterly tasteless and ignorant buffoon whose idea of beauty is a golden toilet when it is not his own face. In the novel the descent from a version of higher culture to the mass commodified version is signified by the explanation of Undine’s out-of-the-way name – it is the brand of hair product marketed by her father, the foundation of the family fortune. The reader imagines her seeking through marriage to rid herself of her surname, so abrupt and unmusical.
     Thus Undine is, like many modern versions of myths, bathetic, an epigone, ironic in its suggestions of true art, beauty, and intellectual pursuits. Virtually all the characters are narrowly self-interested, without real values. The artist Popple is no less commercially focused than the Wall Street speculators; Mrs. Heeny is a mere appendage of her wealthy clients. Even de Chelles, the genuine aristocrat possessing the attitudes of his class by birthright, who is tender with his unfortunate stepson, seems hidebound, as much out of step with humane considerations as the others if less venal. And he, too, is broken by the modern age, forced at last to sell his Louis XV tapestries.
     The closest approach to an exception is Ralph Marvell, who regularly tries to act with integrity, but who is, in spite of America’s youth, as much an etiolated representative of an order whose time has passed as the marquis. His utter unfitness for work, complicated by vague aesthetic tendencies, may seem attractive enough, especially because he has such a generous heart, but his suicide indicates his crippling neuroses. It is as though wholesome decency has itself rotted.
     Still, Undine is in some respects, no less charged with powerful energy than the sirens who sang to Odysseus. Her sexual allure is all but irresistible. The men she selects she gets, no less than if she had been Circe. The results of her machinations are as severe as if they had been divine visitations: Ralph’s suicide and Paul’s depression foremost. Wharton seems to insist on the seriousness of her characters’ affairs in spite of their short and narrow sight. Aphrodite, or Kama, or whoever among the myriad goddesses is indeed manifested in Undine Spragg of Apex, Kansas.
     Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country strikes me as Gustave Flaubert in the process of becoming Henry James, though Wharton lacked the stylistic mastery of either. While Flaubert set about to transform, as though alchemically, the banality of Emma Bovary into the pure gold of fine art, and James in the end anticipated Proust in his detailing the velleities of highly self-conscious characters, Wharton renders Undine Spragg as simultaneously powerful and unconscious, mired in her commonness. While she shares Emma Bovary’s ambitious restlessness as well as her shallow selfishness -- Flaubert described his characters as “completely commonplace” mediocrities -- he then rendered this consideration irrelevant by his ascent to an ideal of form and the perfection of le mot juste. [2] Lacking that lofty refuge Wharton‘s novel retains its satiric focus on the monstrous development of American capitalism, a process which, despite being slowed by the New Deal and the civil rights struggle, has since continued apace.
     Yet Wharton was anything but a radical. A true reactionary in her harking back to an imagined earlier era, she resembles Trollope in her implied belief in the righteousness of an order of nobility whose time has passed. She sees not only the faults of the new and tasteless ruling class; she sees as well the faults of Mrs. Astor’s New York 400 and the European nobility. In the morass of competing egotisms she suggests that life is livable with a certain unthinking observation of the rules ornamented with a sheen of art. It may be a makeshift strategy, but it represents one way of coping with the predicament of retaining some humanity in a society governed by cash in which water spirits have become gold-diggers.


1. Artists who represented her include Eduard Steinbrück, John William Waterhouse, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Arthur Rackham. Poets who used the Undine story include Aloysius Bertrand, Henry Van Dyke, Antoinette de Coursey Patterson, and Kenneth Slessor.

2. Letter to Louise Colet, September 19, 1852.

Nationalism

      A local guide named Milan was explaining the glories of the unfinished St. Sava Cathedral in Belgrade, telling us that it would be the largest Orthodox church in the world. Under construction since 1935 it is grand indeed, with a commanding prospect atop the Vračar Plateau, though one might wonder what the Christ who praised humility and frowned upon ostentation would have thought of it.
     Christ may not, however, be the inevitable focus for Milan when he visits St. Sava. The saint is a national patriotic icon, considered founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its original leader, and the patron of the nation. The Serbs regularly sought the magical aid of his relics and used his image on their battle flags when they opposed the Turks. In 1594 the Turks burned his remains on the present site of the St. Sava church in the course of suppressing a rebellion.
     Milan’s pride in his nation was evident and capable, I think, of refracting his judgment. His Guinness Book of Records sensibility in describing the temple had more to do with assertive patriotism than with spirituality, but St. Sava’s is not, in fact, the largest Orthodox church. While his objections to the NATO bombing of his country in 1999 are understandable from the perspective of civilian noncombatants, he never mentioned the brutal ethnic cleansing that provoked the attacks, nor the earlier atrocities of the Serbian army, most infamously the Srebrenica and Markale massacres, that had motivated an earlier wave of NATO bombing in 1995.
     Milan declared as though it were unarguable that, to be a nation, three elements are required. First of all, he said, the citizens must share a common religion. So much for the ethnic Albanians and Bosniak Serbs. To Milan Kosovo is not merely part of Serbia, it is Serbia’s essential historic center, and it is quite true that after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 it became the chief city of medieval Serbia both politically and in church organization. To Milan the Muslim separatists there, who came to dominate the population and prevailed in the UN, are of a piece with the evil Turks of the past who sought to subjugate his country. We are so accustomed to the rhetoric of multiculturalism that the candid expression of such sentiments surprise Americans.
     Secondly, Milan said a nation must all speak a common language. So he would, I suppose, be among those Americans who are irked to hear Spanish in their local supermarket. Thirdly, he said they must be aware of their history. This last is surely unexceptionable except when centuries-old conflicts are made the basis for present-day hostilities.
     Opinions such as Milan’s are widespread, in his own country and abroad. Indeed, when the brutal general Ratko Mladić, later found guilty of war crimes, was a fugitive and the United States was offering a reward of €1.3 million for his capture, a poll indicated that two thirds of Serbian respondents said they would not turn him in. When Mr. Bush the younger undertook his disastrous campaign in Iraq, those of us who objected encountered calumny and an unthinking rejection of our position, as though we were not merely politically wrong, but were in some way immoral.
     War is the great friend of the dictator, the great enemy of civil liberties and truth. Shortly before meeting Milan, I had been in Sofia, Bulgaria on the country’s Armed Forces Day and witnessed a huge military parade, with an endless succession of tanks, amphibious vehicles, and artillery trucks passing by while young and pleasant-looking men waved and fighter jets streaked overhead. How dreadful that focus on might, as though a nation is distinguished in a desirable way by such displays of potential violence. The streets were choked with people of all classes and ages in uplifted but sober holiday mood, waving flags like automatons.
     An American may remember with some pride (which is not the same as nationalism) how George Washington, a career military man, felt that such displays were out of place in a civilian-ruled republic. Just as one may, with more or less justice, feel proud about individual achievements, one may entertain similar feelings about national history or supposed national characteristics. The problem arises only when a person expects a better deal than others, when “I” or “my sort” seek precedence over others. Nationalism is pernicious the moment it becomes the excuse for tipping the scales in favor of one particular country at the expense of others. It leads directly to the atrocities for which Karadžić, Milošević, and Mladić are infamous, though their cousins may be found in every country.
     With our coy American codes imperialism and racism have been accustomed to receive kinder titles. During the Vietnam era of the attempt to impose foreign domination on a small and distant nation was described paradoxically as a “defense of freedom.” Militarism masquerades as support for servicemen, and the denial of civil rights hides under the banner of states’ rights or religious rights or the right not to be “politically correct.” Irrational chauvinism is no more reasonable when disguised (sometimes even by academics) as “American exceptionalism.”
      At certain moments in history, nationalism (like racial or ethnic pride of other sorts) does have a progressive potential. For instance in the nineteenth century revolts against the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the struggles of the Indians, Algerians, Vietnamese and others for self-determination, in the black power movement of the latter half of the sixties, nationalism provided a highly emotional temporary dynamo to motivate activism in a just cause. Yet nationalism is ultimately wrong and frequently poisonous because it is based on the inherently vicious proposition that one’s own country is to be preferred to others. While it is certainly natural for people, especially unsophisticated people, to remain committed to beliefs and practices they have known since childhood, this need not imply a denigration of other ways of being human.
     Yet patriotism is exalted around the globe as one of the highest and most moral of convictions, a significant marker of good character. I used to pass a Catholic school with the words “pro deo et patria,” a popular phrase that appears. among other places, on the Boy Scout religion merit badge, the insignia of the military chaplains, and, in English, as the title of a Dolly Parton album. The fact is that spirituality and nationalism are in an insoluble opposition. To Christ all children of God are equal, and his parables (such as the good Samaritan) regularly challenge his own community’s complacency. He was sufficiently subversive that the Roman government that had subjugated his region put him to death. Christ the pacifist would surely have mourned the use of his name by jingoists, yet this has never given pause to Christian militarists, any more than Buddhism’s compassion for all sentient beings inhibited the samurai code.
     Dangerously, the most certain routes to nationalism and support for any country’s ruling class are war and the threat of war. The most unpopular dictator can seem a beloved leader in conflict situations, making nationalism the regular resort of tyrants. At the same time, as Milan in Serbia and Trump in the USA demonstrate, nationalism customarily involves racism, xenophobia, and the suppression of minorities and civil liberties.
     The fact is that the nation-state is a relatively modern and highly artificial concept. Often boundary lines have ignored cultural and linguistic factors. The pope once divided South America, the continent of Africa was carved up by European powers at the Berlin Conference, and the English and the French Mandates covered the Middle East. Yet the residents of all these areas can be roused to patriotic fervor. “Nationalism,” as Orwell says, “is inseparable from the desire for power.” [1]
     Now in a time of renewed racism and impending fascism in the United States under the slogan “make America great again” it is important to recall the crimes committed in the name of what we are deceived to think are high ideals. The cosmopolitan Einstein was quite right when he told an interviewer “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” [2] Pride in oneself and in one’s land is appropriate as long as one wishes to be accepted as one among equals. The moment the sentiment extends to thinking one should take precedence nationalism becomes indistinguishable from racism and altogether poisonous.


1. In “Notes on Nationalism.”

2. December 22, 2015, The Saturday Evening Post “What Life Means to Einstein.”

An Uninformed Take on Ballet

     A few days ago I watched a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Bucharest Opera House which, though it was built in the early years of the in the communist era, might pass for a venerable Eastern European concert hall if the observer squints just a bit. Seating less than a thousand people, it is an unusually intimate venue for dance on the grand scale. We had splurged, buying the costliest tickets and sitting in the center of the third row for twenty dollars each.
     Though I am utterly unqualified to comment on ballet, having seen little and studied less of the art, I venture some impressions here. The performance was ravishing. It was an effortless three hours, just gazing in wonder at the spectacle on stage. I was dazzled by the mere athleticism of the performers in the same way that people who know little of ice skating can enjoy an Olympic competition. The spectator is struck speechless by the dancers’ beauty and grace while executing of moves of great difficulty.
     The principals are set in a rich context, coordinated with a sizable troupe sometimes amounting to seventy-five or more at a time All are costumed sumptuously, all move in such a disciplined and elegant synchronization that at times the effect slides from beauty to what might better be called spectacle.
     The plot, though, is so mythic (even if it suggests an appeal to the youngest audience -- and there were some little girls in tutus in attendance) that it maintains a certain gravitas along with its gorgeousness. The problem is that the dance movements are often generated for their own appeal and recur from one passage to another, having no necessary connection to the story being told. When many danced at once the figures were virtually always rigidly symmetrical, as regular and unimaginative as Bollywood or Busby Berkeley. This emphasis on formal perfection saps the story of its emotional and thematic potential. In this performance there was a lengthy series of individual and pas de deux dances by all the secondary dancers which interrupted the narrative providing an opportunity for each to display what was in fact a brief individual dance with little connection to the work as a whole.
     For me ballet offers the perennial pleasure of young and healthy bodies in action, a delight to audiences from ancient Greek choral odes to Broadway or Las Vegas shows. I can appreciate the difficulty of the moves performed and the years of training that underlie the skills of even the lesser dancers. Ballet is a spectacle and a spectacle of prettiness as grand and as simple as a field of roses in bloom. In my exceedingly limited experience, though, it sacrifices a large part of the human emotional and aesthetic sensibility in all-but-exclusive pursuit of these few strengths. The dancer surely must lose much in concentrating on presenting a dazzling tour de force – entrechats, for example, are standardized and judged like gymnastics without reference to the particular story of a given work. Between these highly technical values and the necessity of following the composer’s music, what is left for the dance to express?
     Ballet strikes me akin to the sort of academicism satirized as l’art pompier or, on the other hand, the constrained writing techniques of the Oulipo group. While demanding, such works have not proven to be particularly meaningful or moving. I am too ignorant to know to what extent my own strictures are similar to those of Isadora Duncan and the other pioneers of modern dance, but I am profoundly sympathetic to their enterprise in devising new forms of dance as beautiful, expressive, and free as modern art is with the visual vocabulary or modern poetry with words. I would welcome the opportunity to see another such grand ballet production, but I think the next time I would not expect to experience the sort of breadth of response stimulated by a great novel or symphony or opera.