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A review by erickibler4
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
3.0
This is another dip into the Lifetime Reading Plan well.
Undine Spragg is a beautiful but spoiled little Midwestern bourgeois princess. She goads her parents into relocating to New York City, where she hopes to realize her dream of marrying well, entering "society" as she sees it, and living a life of ease and entertainment, surrounded by all the things lots and lots of money can buy.
A succession of marital adventures (each with an aristocrat of a different type) teach her nothing about living a truly fulfilling life. Undine is sort of a proto-Scarlett O'Hara. But unlike Scarlett, she never undergoes any refining hardship, and thus, never develops her character into someone the reader can truly like.
This is a didactic book, in which Wharton shows us how the prevailing definitions and behaviors of success in business create such "perfect monsters" as Undine. A perceptive mouthpiece of a character states this theme outright in the first third of the book. "The custom of the country" has created her. The remainder of the book merely hammers the lesson home over and over again. Although there are some surprises and reversals, Undine is allowed to remain the same spoiled Undine she was from the beginning.
Undine Spragg is a beautiful but spoiled little Midwestern bourgeois princess. She goads her parents into relocating to New York City, where she hopes to realize her dream of marrying well, entering "society" as she sees it, and living a life of ease and entertainment, surrounded by all the things lots and lots of money can buy.
A succession of marital adventures (each with an aristocrat of a different type) teach her nothing about living a truly fulfilling life. Undine is sort of a proto-Scarlett O'Hara. But unlike Scarlett, she never undergoes any refining hardship, and thus, never develops her character into someone the reader can truly like.
This is a didactic book, in which Wharton shows us how the prevailing definitions and behaviors of success in business create such "perfect monsters" as Undine. A perceptive mouthpiece of a character states this theme outright in the first third of the book. "The custom of the country" has created her. The remainder of the book merely hammers the lesson home over and over again. Although there are some surprises and reversals, Undine is allowed to remain the same spoiled Undine she was from the beginning.