Perhaps there is more than a nuance of caricature in the choice of
such a name as "Undine Spragg" for the heroine of Edith Wharton's The
Custom of the Country. Throughout that book, with its brilliant
enamel-like surfaces, there is a tendency to make sport of our
national weakness for resounding names. Undine Spragg--hideous
collocation--is not the only offence. There is Indiana Frusk of Apex
City, and Millard Binch, a combination in which the Dickens of
American Notes would have found amusement. Hotels with titles like The
Stentorian are not exaggerated. Miss Spragg's ancestor had invented "a
hair waver"; hence the name Undine: "from undoolay, you know, the
French for crimping," as the simple-hearted mother of the girl
explained to a suitor. Mrs. Wharton has been cruel, with a glacial
cruelty, to her countrywomen of the Spragg type. But they abound. They
come from the North, East, South, West to conquer New York, and thanks
to untiring energy, a handsome exterior, and much money, they "arrive"
sooner or later. With all her overaccentuated traits and the metallic
quality of technique in the handling of her portrait, Undine Spragg is
both a type and an individual--she is the newest variation of Daisy
Miller--and compared with her brazen charmlessness the figures of
Hedda Gabler and Mildred Lawson seem melting with tenderness, aglow
with subtle charm and muffled exaltation. Undine--shades of La Motte
Fouque--is quite the most disagreeable girl in our fiction. She has
been put under a glass and subjected to the air-pump pressure of Mrs.
Wharton's art. She is a much more viable creature than the author's
earlier Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth. At least Undine
is not sloppy or sentimental, and that is a distinct claim on the
suffrages of the intelligent reader. Furthermore, the clear hard
atmosphere of the book is tempered by a tragic and humorous irony, a
welcome astringent for the mental palate.
In Apex City Undine made up her mind to have her own way. She elopes
and marries a vulgar "hustler," but is speedily divorced. She is very
beautiful when she reaches New York. No emotional experience would
leave a blur on her radiant youth, because love for her is a
sensation, not a sentiment. By indirect and cumulative touches the
novelist evokes for us her image. Truly a lovely apparition, almost
mindless, with great sympathetic eyes and a sweet mouth. She exists,
does Undine. She is not the barren fruit of a satirical pen.
Foreigners, both men and women, puzzle over her freedom, chilliness,
and commercial horse-sense. She doesn't long intrigue their curiosity,
her brain is poorly furnished and conversation with her is not a fine
art. She is temperamental in the sense that she lives on her nerves;
without the hum and glitter of the opera, fashionable restaurants, or
dances she relapses into a sullen stupor, or rages wildly at the fate
that made her poor. She, too, like Hedda and Emma, lives in the
moment, a silly moth enamoured of a millionaire. Mildred Lawson is
positively intellectual in comparison, for she has a "go" at
picture-making, while the only pictures Undine cares for are those
produced by her own exquisitely plastic figure. No wonder Ralph
Marvell fell in love with her, or, rather, in love with his poetic
vision of her. He was, poor man, an idealist, and his fine porcelain
was soon cracked in contact with her brassy egotism.
He is of the old Washington Square stock, as antique--and as
honourable--as Methuselah. Undine soon tires of him; above all, tires
of his family and their old-fashioned social code. For her the rowdy
joys of Peter Van Degen and his set. The Odyssey of Undine is set
forth for us by an accomplished artist in prose. We see her in Italy,
blind to its natural beauties, blind to its art, unhappy till she gets
into the "hurrah" of St. Moritz. We follow her hence, note her
trailing her petty misery--boredom because she can't spend
extravagantly--through modish drawing-rooms; then a fresh hegira,
Europe, a divorce, the episode with Peter Van Degen and its profound
disillusionment (she has the courage to jump the main-travelled road
of convention for a brief term) and her remarriage. That, too, is a
failure, only because Undine so wills it. She has literally killed her
second husband because she wins from him by "legal" means their child,
and in the end she again marries her divorced husband, Elmer Moffatt,
now a magnate, a multimillionaire. She has at last followed the advice
of Mrs. Heeny, her adviser and masseuse. "Go steady, Undine, and
you'll get anywheres." We leave her in a blaze of rubies and glory at
her French chateau, and she isn't happy, for she has just learned
that, being divorced, she can never be an ambassadress, and that her
major detestation, the "Jim Driscolls," had been appointed to the
English court as ambassador from America. The novel ends with this
coda: "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." The truth is she was bored as a wife,
and like Emma Bovary, found in adultery all the platitudes of
marriage.
You ask yourself, after studying the play, and the two novels, if the
new woman is necessarily disagreeable. To my way of thinking, it is
principally the craving for novelty in characterisation that has
wrought the change in our heroines of fiction, although new freedom
and responsibilities have evolved new types. Naturally the
pulchritudinous weakling we shall always have with us, ugly girls with
brains are a welcome relief from the eternal purring of the popular
girl with the baby smile. But it would be a mistake to call Hedda, or
Mildred, or Undine, new women. Mildred is the most "advanced," Hedda
the most dangerous--she pulled the trigger far too early--and Undine
the most selfish of the three. The three are disagreeable, but the
trio is transitional in type. Each girl is a compromiser, Undine being
the boldest; she did a lot of shifting and indulged in much cowardly
evasion. Vulgarians all, they are yet too complex to be pinned down by
a formula. Old wine in these three new bottles makes for disaster.
Undine Spragg is the worst failure of the three. She got what she
wanted for she wanted only dross. Ibsen's Button-Moulder will meet her
at the Cross-Roads when her time comes. Hedda, like Strindberg's
Julia, may escape him because, coward as she was when facing harsh
reality, she had the courage to rid her family of a worthless
encumbrance. If she had been a robust egoist, and realised her nature
to the full, she would have been a Hedda Gabler "reversed," in a word,
the Hilda Wangel of The Master Builder. But with Mildred she lacked
the strength either to renounce or to sin. And Undine Spragg hadn't
the courage to become downright wicked; the game she played was so
pitiful that it wasn't worth the poor little tallow-dip. What is her
own is the will-to-silliness. As Princess Estradina exclaimed in her
brutally frank fashion: "My dear, it's what I always say when people
talk to me about fast Americans: you're the only innocent women left
in the world...." This is far from being a compliment. No, Undine is
voluble, vulgar, and "catty," but she isn't wicked. It takes brains to
be wicked in the grand manner. She is only disagreeable and
fashionable; and she is as impersonal and monotonous as a self-playing
pianoforte.