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The Custom of the Country : The Melodrama of Remarriage

2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19405103.56.2.05

1940-5103

Rex Butler,

American Literature and Culture

Something extraordinary happens towards the end of Edith Wharton's novel The Custom of the Country (1913). The beautiful and ambitious Undine Spragg, who has already courted and married two other men, plans to marry again, this time Elmer Moffatt, a successful businessman. Their paths have already crossed several times earlier. We first encounter Elmer when he approaches Undine while she is at the theatre with a group of friends. Later, as Undine is about to marry the apparent first of her husbands, the well-connected and poetically inclined Ralph Marvell, Elmer approaches Undine seeking an introduction in exchange it seems for keeping quiet about something. Still later, as Undine and Ralph's marriage ends, Elmer both helps Ralph raise the money to pay off Undine so that he can keep their child and proposes to Undine that she give up her child—to whom, in truth, she has never appeared particularly attached—in exchange for a substantial financial settlement from Ralph.Later still, when Undine is married to the French count Raymond de Chelles, who is rich in history but not particularly wealthy, Elmer appears unexpectedly at their chateau one day, brought there by an art dealer to buy the family's Boucher tapestries so that she might obtain the funds to satisfy her seemingly insatiable demand for luxury items. (Although Elmer has had his financial ups-and-downs, as the novel progresses—and thanks in part to the deal he struck with Ralph's help—he eventually becomes extraordinarily wealthy.) Raymond does not know of Undine's plan to sell the tapestries—and Undine does not know that it is Elmer to whom the dealer is intending to sell them—and this in part leads to the argument that estranges them, as Raymond realizes that Undine not only has no respect for long-running French traditions but has no desire to learn and practice them. By good fortune or coincidence Elmer comes to her door at the very moment Undine realizes she is unhappy with Raymond and seeks some means of escape.In the final scene of the novel, Undine is married to Elmer and living with him in their new home in Paris with the tapestries Elmer wanted. (Raymond eventually had to sell them to cover his brother's gambling debts.) Undine has custody of her son as well as the fortune Ralph eventually made in his attempt to keep him, now hers after he committed suicide. Immediately preceding this, when Undine sees Elmer again after he comes to her house and she decides to leave Raymond, there is a scene at the aptly named Nouveau Luxe hotel, in which each declares love for the other and indicates a willingness to marry. But the scene also has the odor of a business negotiation. Undine makes the first move: "I shouldn't care if you were here and I could see you sometimes." Elmer responds: "Look here, Undine, if I'm to have you again I don't want to have you that way."1 What is truly extraordinary about this exchange and what the reader slowly realizes is that Undine and Elmer were once already married. Although this fact is never mentioned directly until Ralph is told by Elmer as he presses him as to the disposition of his fortune—his discovery that his fate now rests in the hands of her ex-husband is in part what leads him to commit suicide—it explains much about the novel.Early on, it is undoubtedly the reason Undine pressures her parents to leave Apex City and come to New York to help her find a suitable partner. Not only is the partner Undine seeks to be found in New York and not rural Apex, but she needs to hide a dark secret in her past. Later Elmer is effectively able to blackmail Undine by not revealing to Ralph that they were once married. This is doubtless also the reason Undine's father expresses such a seemingly inexplicable disdain for the young up-and-coming businessman he occasionally runs across on his way to work. And, finally, it adds to our sense of the immorality of Elmer that he is able to advise Ralph against Undine as well as Undine against Ralph, not only pitting the two sides against each other without their knowledge but favoring Undine in her custody battle with Ralph.After their mutual confessions, Undine and Elmer are again married to each other and apparently have all they have ever wanted. Undine enjoys wealth and custody of her child. Elmer possesses a beautiful and serially-desired trophy wife. And their marriage serves as something of a retrospective justification for their bad behavior. Elmer is no longer that callow blow-in to Apex City who moves from job to job and is unable to keep Undine but now uses his "outsiderness" to look on at Old New York money in an obviously lucrative way. Undine is no longer an unknown rural innocent with unrealistic ambitions but through her relentless social climbing and succession of husbands has acquired an exalted social status.But in the conclusion to the novel, with Undine and Elmer together and their past actions apparently justified, Wharton throws in a brilliant twist. With the guests about to arrive for a dinner party, Undine proposes that Elmer consider becoming the American ambassador to England. Elmer replies that he is not prepared to step away from his business and besides it would be difficult for him to be appointed an ambassador with a divorced wife (even though it is he who has divorced and remarried the same woman). Undine then wonders whether she might become an ambassador's wife by leaving Elmer and marrying the current ambassador. She would finally realize the last of her ambitions with a divorce settlement from Elmer and a higher social status. In an internal monologue Undine ponders whether she has come to the end of her sequence of marriages and contemplates her next step: But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for. (335)What exactly is the meaning of this final turn in the narrative? The remarriage of Undine and Elmer had seemed some kind of a resolution after an unexpected plot twist. What does it mean that Undine is already considering an exodus? Will the couple divorce again or will they find some way to stay together? Elmer might retire from business dealings and apply for an ambassadorship or Undine might decide that she is unsuited to be an ambassador's wife. Certainly, the critics are evenly split over this final twist. William Cloonan speaks of the way Undine's unrealized ambitions are likely to alienate them: "If Elmer proves not to be 'man' enough for her goal, then she will surely find someone else."2 On the other hand, Simona Milotová notes the traits binding them: "Of all the suitors, it is only Elmer Moffatt who 'spoke her language, who knew her meanings, who understood instinctively all the deep-seated wants for which her acquired vocabulary has no terms.'"3 Laura Rattray, for her part, noting the open-ended conclusion, suggests that we will never know what happens: "Of all Wharton's novels, The Custom of the Country is the work for which one most readily imagines a sequel."4There are essays, of course, on what Wharton is saying more generally about marriage in Custom of the Country and how she is responding to the fact that divorce was becoming more common when she wrote the book, with a certain empowering of women in their ability to leave unhappy relationships. Typical of this is Ticien Marie Sassoubre, who speaks of how "'women to gain independence from oppressive marriages' began to talk about divorce in terms of a 'concern for marital happiness and the right of either partner—but especially the woman—to free herself from an unsatisfying union.'"5 And there are a number of essays that propose that Wharton was drawing on her own experience of divorce and, indeed, an unhappy relationship in writing the novel. (Wharton finally divorced her husband after a long separation the year the novel was published.) Representative of this biographical impulse, even implying that Wharton was in some way envious of the serial monogamist Undine in her ability to find at least momentarily suitable men—Wharton famously had an affair in the latter stages of her marriage, but never again married—is Ferdâ Asya, who writes: "Edith Wharton's art was an opportunity for her to actualize her desires, which were denied satisfaction in reality by guilt feelings."6 And, finally, in one of the few essays that observes that what we have at the conclusion of the novel is not simply a marriage but a remarriage, Kimberley Freeman writes of the updating of social conventions and the fact that what is being dramatized is the lack of shame in marrying someone who has been divorced: "Thus Wharton reverses the marriage we expect at the comedic ending of most novels of manners, mocking the heroine's wedding by making it dependent upon divorce. In doing so, Wharton makes divorce central to her American novel of manners, emphasizing just how protean, and thus empty, American manners actually are."7At this point we might turn to another more obvious aspect of the novel: the irony that runs through it and is the very "custom of the country" (23) it is named after. Irony, of course, was first put on the map after Wharton's friend Henry James' summary of her method in "The New Novel" (1914): "Mrs. Wharton's reaction in presence of the aspects of life hitherto, it would seem, exposed to her is for the most part ironic."8 But irony has remained a constant topic of discussion in Wharton, both throughout her work in general and The Custom of the Country in particular. However, there is also a distinction often made with regard to how irony arises in the novel and whom it involves or implicates. In the first understanding, it involves equally all the figures in the novel and is an irony implied or brought about by Wharton's own authorial voice. All of the figures in the novel are subject to an ironic distancing from the reader, as Wharton is not presenting them directly or their behavior is not to be identified with her, but she is holding them up to a kind of critical judgement. Typical of this attitude is Phillip Barrish, who speaks of Wharton's practice of "free-indirect citation" opening up a space for judgment by the reader without explicitly proposing moral values on the author's own behalf, as though there is some unspoken distance between what we read and that place from where it is narrated. As Barrish proposes, "While iterability is necessary to writing—indeed, without iterability there could be no language at all—iterability's identity-hollowing effects make it always a threat to stable meaning and significances."9To take a more specific instance, there are numerous discussions of The Custom of the Country's relationship to social modernity and its operations of publicity, advertising, and marketing. Undine and her seemingly shameless and unapologetic social ambitions and desire for advancement seem to epitomize this new world of the copy, the fake, and the absence of proper values. One of the first critics to propose this idea was Edmund Wilson, who once memorably wrote: "Undine Spragg, the social-climbing divorcée, though a good deal less humanly credible than Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, is quite a successful caricature of a type who was to go even farther. She is the prototype in fiction of the 'gold-digger,' of the international cocktail bitch."10 But there has been more recently a number of essays that more explicitly see the novel as a precursor to our own contemporary condition with Undine resembling such pop-cultural icons as Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian.11 However, if they can all be seen as emblematic of an uncritical capitalist publicity-machine that exploits women's "feminine" qualities, perhaps Wharton does not straightforwardly endorse this notion but in the figure of Undine ironizes it. That is, if Undine appears uncritically to follow the values of her surrounding society, this is not directly to be attributed to the author, who critically distances both herself and her reader from them. This is Elizabeth Ammons, who sees the difficulties for Wharton in her glamorization of Undine: "Undine's 'ruthless and exploitative' nature must be seen as a reflection of 'the culture she mirrors.'"12 And this is David Holbrook, who recognizes an evident irony in Wharton's depiction of the apparent attractiveness and desirability of Undine: "Elmer is too ruthless and philistine—and Undine, well, she is insufferably and sufferingly egocentric. The only centre is the author's own sensitivity and intelligence."13The other understanding of the way irony works in the novel is that it is not so much Wharton who is ironic—although, of course, this must still be the case—as is Undine. Through her position as a woman Undine cannot simply be identified with her surrounding society, no matter how much she appears to belong to it. It is therefore not Wharton as authorial voice who offers us an outside perspective but Undine insofar as she is a woman. Interpretations along these lines frequently cite the mid-century French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who starts from the premise that women are definitionally excluded from a male-dominated society and in some ways are unknown or unrecognized even to themselves. Here, for example, is Arielle Zibrak making this connection: "One of the central problems of female identity, for Beauvoir, is that it has an empty centre. Since female identity is created in response to male desire, 'in her heart [woman] is indefinable for herself: a sphinx.'"14 (Luce Irigaray is also sometimes invoked to make the same point.15) And on this wider philosophical basis, commentators have outlined in more detail the situation of women in America at the turn of the twentieth century and how they were the targets of systematic discrimination and how Wharton's own situation, for all her apparent social privilege, also embodied this. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace outlines how Undine is effectively disempowered by having to marry men in order to fulfil societal expectations and attain what she desires with no capacity for independent action on her own behalf: "That way of thinking is yet another aspect of that same domestic ideology first articulated in the eighteenth century, and it demands that, as a woman, Undine be primarily shaped by—and responsive to—the needs of others."16More specifically, commentators on the novel look for instances where, whether she is conscious of it or not, Undine seems to maintain a certain distance from the surrounding social customs or even is excluded from them. They occur regularly throughout the novel, first in the moment at a dinner party where she first meets Ralph's family and speaks too frankly and inappropriately for a young woman before being politely shut down by Ralph's grandfather: "If I were only sure of knowing what you expect!" [Ralph] caught up her joke, tossing it back at her across the fascinated silence of their listeners."Why, everything!" she announced—and Mr Dagonet, turning, laid an intricately-veined old hand on hers, and said, with a change of tone that relaxed the tension of the listeners: "My child, if you look like that you'll get it." (57)Later, in the aristocratic society of France and in an arguably even less accommodating context, Undine is both implicitly left out of the domestic rituals around Raymond's mother and explicitly excluded from discussions regarding family matters because they are seen to be "unintelligible" to her. This is the conversation (or monologue) that Raymond has with Undine when she suggests selling their country estate, which he interprets simply as her inability to understand what is at stake, when it is always possible that, consciously or not, it is a refusal on her part to play her designated role: "Sell it. Sell Saint Désert?"The suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. . . . "I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you'd rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather's armchairs."The colour slowly came back into his face, but it hardened into lines she had never seen. He looked at her as though the place where she stood were empty. "You don't understand," he said again. (297)Here we might turn again to that extraordinary scene at the end of the novel in which, soon after Undine and Elmer exchange their intimate thoughts and marry, Undine is caught seemingly plotting her next move. For corresponding to the two ways of reading how irony works in the novel are the two ways of reading that last scene: one in which they stay together and another in which Undine goes on alone. What is properly at stake in the fact that this is not a marriage but a remarriage between Undine and Elmer? We have previously spoken of the way Wharton opens an ironic perspective onto the world she depicts, a distance between what the characters think they are doing and what they are actually doing. In a world of shallow pretentions and aspirations, the novel allows us to look behind appearances at disingenuous people lying to one another. And undoubtedly Wharton's spokesperson in all of this is the elderly socialite Charles Bowen, who at various points sends dispatches concerning the social life of Paris back to correspondents across the Atlantic. Here he wonders at his own description of the dining room of the Nouveau Luxe Hotel, in words we cannot but read as Wharton's own: "And who but Mrs Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested?" (156).If we read Bowen's reflection closely, however, we see that, while its tone is ironic, it connotes a double irony: not so much an irony that opens up a depth beneath the surface, but an ironic cancelling of irony to produce an effect of seeming solidity. And this is a common and amusing device used throughout The Custom of the Country. To take a small but revealing instance towards the beginning of the novel: Undine decides what stationary to use to reply to Ralph's sister's invitation to dinner, and in her naïve, rustic manner, having not yet learnt the social rules of New York, she thinks first that ornate, ostentatious stationary is best. Then proving that she can intuit the "correct" rules of behavior if she so wishes, she notices that the invitation is written on plain albeit expensive paper: "What if white paper were really newer than pigeon-blood? It might be more stylish, anyhow" (14). Similarly, Undine expects in the conventional understanding of Old New York money that the dinner will be held in a grand interior with luxurious furnishings and is surprised by how modest and ordinary it appears, which she then realizes is the most effete and refined of all: "The house, to begin with, was small and shabby. There was no gilding, no lavish diffusion of light; the room they sat in after dinner, with its green-shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness, and its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded Undine of the old circulating library at Apex" (21). Finally, after Undine and Ralph marry, he notes that her apparent intimacy is actually a way of hiding from him: "He soon saw that she regarded intimacy as a pretext for escaping from such forms into a total absence of expression" (88). In all of these cases, the irony is seen not in the distance between appearance and reality but in the fact that there is no distance. And this is to say that things as they are, including tradition and social status, can only be understood as the effect of a certain overcoming of irony—that is, ironically.17Similarly, the apparent match between Undine and Elmer, in which they speak of shared hopes and desires, is only the effect of a certain double irony. We cannot preclude the possibility that each of them, even if only unconsciously, says what s/he says for the effect it has on the other. Both Undine and Elmer are used to manipulating others, telling people only what will advantage them, so that they are ultimately empty of any higher purpose and it is impossible for them to tell the truth or, more importantly, to know if they are telling it. But they also know this about each other and factor it into their calculations. Indeed, it is exactly this amorality and ruthlessness, the way that each has had to overcome their unprepossessing beginnings, that each admires about the other. Like that ironizing of irony that produces the plain white envelope, the modest dining room, and indifferent intimacy, the fact that each of them dissembles produces a momentary coming together and mutual understanding. This is why it is profound that it is a remarriage and not a marriage—not a innocent first union but the conscious overcoming of past failures and knowledge of the other's shortcomings.However—and here is the second way irony operates in the novel—in the moment after they declare their mutual love we learn that any genuine union or overcoming of irony is only temporary and may never occur. In other words, if with their marriage it appears that Elmer (and we) understand Undine, her actions afterwards demonstrate that he (and we) do not and perhaps never will. She as a woman in our society is necessarily ironic, outside, unknowable. And even if this "otherness" expresses itself as an insatiable ambition and may even involve the mistreatment of other women, her true motivations can never be properly explained. Neither her parents, her two previous husbands, her one or two close friends, and none of the others she encounters in the novel truly understand her. Even Elmer's first, apparently ironic, inference that she has no underlying values falls short. Undine is simply not part of the world of The Custom of the Country, whether ironized by the author or self-ironizing. Instead, she offers an ironic perspective, even if not an entirely self-conscious one, on both the world of the novel and the novelist with the result that even this remarriage marriage is liable to fail.The "ordinary language" philosopher Stanley Cavell helps explain this ambiguity in the novel. In a series of books from Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) to In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), Cavell has explored the post-Wittgensteinian problem of how we communicate with the other when the meaning of our words is never certain and it is always possible that we misunderstand them. It is what he describes as the problem of skepticism, which arises in modernity when the rules of human relationships are no longer eternal and unchanging but are constantly questioned. Communication no longer occurs directly but through a process of negotiation that is ongoing. Successful communication is not a matter of any binding commitment but is rather an undertaking for further communication, an agreement to disagree.18Cavell further develops this notion in a series of books on Hollywood cinema, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage (1981) and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodramas of the Unknown Woman (1996). In the first, he discusses a number of beloved romantic comedies of the 1930s and '40s, including It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), and The Philadelphia Story (1940), that feature not the usual story of young, inexperienced couples who marry but slightly older, more experienced couples who remarry. As with Wharton's novel, Cavell's point is that they are in part about the social liberation of women and their growing equality with men, a matter not of definitively overcoming skepticism or the failure to communicate but rather acknowledging them as ever-present possibilities. The failure or potential failure of communication, as represented by divorce, is precisely what makes the couple want to continue talking and even to marry again. Cavell's ultimate point is that marriage—indeed, every human relationship—is in effect a remarriage, a never-ending attempt to overcome a prior or at least potential misunderstanding.However, in Contesting Tears, Cavell looks at a series of acclaimed but long-underrated "female melodramas" of the late 1930s and '40s such Stella Dallas (1937), Now, Voyager (1942) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). These films, unlike the comedies of remarriage, depict not successful or ongoing relationships but portray female heroines who are alone and unmarried at the close. Their words are constantly misunderstood and any agreement to keep on working to overcome this misunderstanding is foregone so that the conversation between men and women ends. Undoubtedly, it can be argued—and this is the common reading of the relationship between the two genres—that these melodramas represent a simple fall into skepticism after its "overcoming" in the comedies. It would be as though these melodramas, largely made in the 1940s, can be understood to correspond to America's doubt and self-questioning with the second world war and subsequent Cold War after the social progressiveness and triumph of democracy. But it is undoubtedly also true—and this can be seen in Cavell—that the comedies arise in response to an already existing threat of scepticism. Altogether, the two conditions, whatever their distinct chronologies in Hollywood, are inseparable, with one always turning into or arising from the other.19We see these two possibilities balanced in The Custom of the Country, too. Wharton's first point, just as with those comedies, is that nothing in the modern world is any more direct, immediate, straightforward. Undine and Elmer fall in love again not innocently but ironically, through an ironic overcoming of irony, the overcoming of a certain prior distance or misunderstanding. Their declarations of love are not "sincere" but a kind of mutual agreement as in an auction when a price is negotiated. But for an instant, let us say at the moment of their wedding vows, an agreement is reached. Yet, as in those melodramas, there is the possibility that the couple do not properly understand each other and the marriage will fail, leaving each of them alone. For immediately after the wedding, Undine looks for something else, as though neither of them understands the other. This point corresponds to that second understanding of irony in the novel: not as applying equally to all characters, but something that is particular to women and that leaves them isolated and alone.Wharton manages to keep the two possibilities simultaneously open. Indeed, this ambiguity is their marriage until there is only one option. As we have seen, critics of the novel are divided with regard to its final outcome. This is why, in an amusing conflation of Cavell's two genres, The Custom of the Country is either a melodrama of remarriage or the remarriage of the unknown woman. It testifies to the power of art both to introduce this skepticism and overcome it by speaking about it. It is like the draft of that note Bowen sends to his correspondent speaking of those "layers on layers of unsubstantialness on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested" or that book Elmer opens in Undine's room when he is advising her how to proceed against Ralph: "He singled out a dim old brown and golden book which Chelles had given her. He examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language. 'Say-,' he began: it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and turned back" (235). Elmer does not actually read the book but he attempts henceforth to cover the ironic gap its words open, to close the space between its two covers.