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.