Novel: The Custom of the Country

Overview
Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913) is a piercing social satire that follows Undine Spragg, a strikingly beautiful young woman from the American Midwest who arrives in New York determined to remake herself and claim the life she desires. Armed with a merciless eye for status, fashion, and influence, Undine treats marriage and relationships as instruments for social mobility, discarding partners when they cease to be useful. Wharton exposes the hollowness of acquisitive society and the moral compromises that accompany the pursuit of class and celebrity.

Plot
Undine marries into old New York society, aligning herself with an understated, cultured husband whose background and temperament contrast sharply with her mercenary impulses. Her restless appetite for refinement and recognition soon leads her to reject the modest life she has entered and to seek greater prominence through wealth and conspicuous consumption. She moves between continents and circles of taste, using charm, calculated cruelty, and opportunism to secure more illustrious connections. Along the way she leaves behind lovers and husbands as easily as she changes wardrobes, always in pursuit of the next stage of social elevation.

Characters and relationships
Undine is the novel's relentless center: beautiful, unreflective, and driven by an almost clinical sense of self-advancement. Her first husband represents the cultivated, intellectual world she finds suffocating; he is emblematic of "old" American restraint and moral seriousness. Around Undine whirl a cast of figures who serve as foils and enablers, socialites who tolerate or admire her audacity, businessmen attracted by her glamour, and European aristocrats tempted by American money and novelty. Family ties, marriage bonds, and friendships are all filtered through transactions of status and desire, revealing how social institutions can be manipulated and hollowed out by selfish ambition.

Major themes
The novel probes the corrosive effects of materialism and the commodification of human relations. Marriage is portrayed less as a union of souls than as a step in a career of self-fashioning, with Undine treating spouses as means rather than partners. Wharton explores the clash between new money and old aristocracy, charting how American dynamism and acquisitiveness collide with inherited restraint and taste. The narrative also interrogates gender expectations: Undine exploits the limited avenues available to women in her era, simultaneously accusing and embodying feminine agency in a social world that commodifies beauty and charm.

Style and legacy
Wharton's prose is elegant, ironic, and sharply observant, blending detailed social description with psychological insight and satirical bite. Her tone alternates between cool appraisal and moral indignation, allowing readers to see both the surface glamour and the emotional vacancies it conceals. The Custom of the Country remains a key work in Wharton's oeuvre and in American letters for its unsparing depiction of modernity's discontents. Its exploration of ambition, identity, and the price of social success continues to resonate, offering a lasting portrait of a society in which appearances increasingly govern value.