Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country

A Reassessment

Laura Rattray, Laura Rattray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317316473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together leading Wharton scholars from Europe, and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Edith Wharton's 1913 tour de force, The Custom of the Country.

1 The Custom of the Country: Edith Wharton's Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly

Susan Goodman

DOI: 10.4324/9781315653570-2

In 1907, the Atlantic Monthly celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an issue devoted to assuring its own place in literary history. Appreciations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and its first editor, James Russell Lowell, recalled the glory days when an unknown editor named Francis Underwood began soliciting contributors for a Boston-based magazine that would be both literary and anti-slavery. It only remained for Oliver Wendell Holmes to name it.

Although Philadelphia boasted Graham's, Godey's and Sartain's and New York Putnam's, Harper's New Monthly and the old Knickerbocker, Boston had no strictly ‘literary’ magazine of its own. The closest it came was the North American Review, modelled after the British quarterlies and catering to a highly literate audience. With most popular magazines of the day providing, in the words of one of the Atlantic's founders, ‘thrice-diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and sketches’, Underwood and his cohorts saw an untapped market in the middle class and middle brow.¹ No one could fully realize what the Atlantic would mean to culture-starved householders in small western towns like its third editor, William Dean Howells, or for that matter to the girl who would become Edith Wharton.

The year of the Atlantic's fiftieth anniversary, Edith Wharton rented the George Vanderbilts’ apartment in Paris, where she began a friendship with the professional charmer and journalist, William Morton Fullerton. She entered into the heart of French life both professionally and personally, entertaining members of the French Academy and conducting a clandestine affair with Fullerton that preserved the forms of her marriage to Teddy Wharton. She would know love as she imagined only happy women knew it – to borrow a phrase from The Reef (1912) – and she would also know heartache and betrayal, though the last from a husband she thought could never surprise her and did. As Wharton found a home and herself, her husband spiralled out of control. His behaviour grew erratic; he embezzled money from her accounts; and he experienced his own Indian summer, travelling with a companion who signed hotel registers ‘Mrs Wharton’. The real Mrs Wharton, who began lobbying friends to support her subsequent divorce, did what she did every day: she wrote. From 1907 to 1913, the date her twenty-eight-year marriage ended by decree, she published Madame de Treymes, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome and The Reef, two collections of short stories (The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Tales of Men and Ghosts), a travel book (A Motor-Flight through France) and a volume of poetry (Artemis to Actaeon). This list does not include the occasional poem (‘Life’, ‘Ogrin the Hermit’ and ‘The Comrade’) or story (‘The Long Run’) for the Atlantic Monthly, her revision of three Atlantic essays, and the writing of an additional last section for A Motor-Flight through France. Nor does it include the work she did on an ungovernable novel that would become The Custom of the Country (1913).

Although Scribner's was her usual outlet, Wharton's history with the Atlantic went back to the time that her mother sent a handful of her poems to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who showed them to his editor, W. D. Howells. The father of a gifted daughter with literary aspirations, Howells printed one. In 1880, the last year of his editorship, he published five more. The idea of Lucretia Jones acting as her daughter's agent both belies and reinforces Wharton's portrait of her mother as an aloof, hypercritical snob who insisted at all times on the best, which in literature the Atlantic represented. More than one author turned down immediate publication with better-paying magazines to make a debut there. Rebecca Harding Davis, for instance, considered ‘being read by the Atlantic audience part of the pay’.² Her choice, and that of others, had everything to do with prestige or, to quote another contributor, ‘the company I should keep’.³

More than twenty years after her first appearance in the Atlantic, Wharton echoed this sentiment when, fresh from the success of her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), she wondered, ‘Why have you never asked me for a story for the Atlantic? I am tired of waiting’. True, the illustrated magazines usually paid her $500 for a short story; she would, however, be satisfied with the Atlantic's going rate, ‘first because I have always thought it an honour to appear in the Atlantic and second because I believe it is always advantageous to a writer to get a fresh audience’.⁴ Much in magazine publishing had changed between Davis's generation and Wharton's, even after the onslaught of the illustrated magazines and the Atlantic's early decision to eschew the costly new technology. Apart from rising manufacturing costs, the Atlantic had to compete with other print outlets, such as newspapers and subscription libraries, for readers who had an ever-increasing array of choices and authors, who typically had more wares than one source could handle. In 1865, for instance, there were 700 American magazines; by 1870 that figure had risen to 2,400. The trend continued to the turn of the twentieth century with the number of available magazines increasing 686 per cent between 1868 and 1900.⁵ Writers could now support themselves by serial publication. By the 1890s, unknown authors could command $5–6 for 1,000 words and the most popular author as much as $150. As Howells explains in ‘The Man of Letters as a Man of Business’ (1893), post-Civil War magazines created a whole class of authors not dependent upon book sales. ‘[T]he best literature’, he argues,

now first sees the light in the magazines and most of the second-best appears first in book form. The old-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not reading magazine fiction or magazine poetry make a great mistake and simply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best.⁶

Howells could not overestimate the service he and his colleagues provided towards the training of discerning readers. Wharton was less romantic about magazine publishing, refusing to appear in a Hearst publication, for example, until the offer became too good to refuse. The Atlantic staked its life on quality – or if not that, the kind of cultural snobbery that scoffed at Hearst publications – and it worked. Despite the ephemeral nature of any accepted value; despite shifting editors with their different weighting of the magazine towards literature, as in Howells's time (1871–81), or contemporary issues and politics in Bliss Perry's (1899–1909), the Atlantic managed to retain its reputation for excellence and high culture.

Wharton shared certain assumptions about culture with the magazine's founding fathers and the dynasty of editors who defined their mission as educating the populace. Many of them were Harvard professors, including James Russell Lowell and his close friend and subsequent co-editor at the North American Review Charles Eliot Norton, a man Wharton called her great ‘awakener’.⁷ These men believed that culture functioned like a river: originating on Mount Olympus – or from Boston, the Atlantic's home city – it sent forth its fertilizing waters to dry lands south and west. Norton summered in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where every year he invited the country's leading intellectuals and artists to address the townspeople in the village hall as the major fundraising event for the local academy.⁸ Wharton regularly motored to Ashfield to see Norton's youngest daughter Sally and to borrow books she could raid for details about life in eighteenth-century Italy, the setting of The Valley of Decision. Its collection of minutiae about the breeding of lapdogs and the sexual assignations of nuns led Henry James to throw up his hands and plead in capitals: ‘DO NEW YORK’.⁹

The Custom of the Country might be read as a sequel to her first New York novel, but unlike The House of Mirth (1905), which concentrates exclusively on old New York, it roams as restlessly as its peripatetic heroine, Undine Spragg, from Apex City, Arizona, to Washington Square and then to Paris. With every move, Undine acquires and sheds a husband, becoming in turn Mrs Elmer Moffatt, Mrs Ralph Marvell, the Countess Raymond de Chelles and, coming full circle as the novel closes, her own successor: the second Mrs Moffatt. She goes, in other words, everywhere and gets nowhere, which allows Wharton the leisure to cast a critical eye at a range of cultures and topics central to the novel's interconnected themes of marriage and commerce.

With apologies to Henry James, the Atlantic Monthly might be seen as Wharton's house of fiction to the extent that it offered views into contemporary American culture through different apertures, including fiction, reviews and essays on the arts, science, religion, politics and literature. After the turn of the twentieth century and during the years that Wharton struggled with the manuscript of The Custom of the Country, 1907 to 1913, it carried, apart from articles on contemporary women focusing on marriage and motherhood, a series of looks at France from Laura Spencer Porter's memoir, ‘My French School Days’ (1909), to Stoddard Dewey's examination of the Roman Catholic Church's role in a newly secularized nation, ‘Year in France’ (1911). Wharton's views from the back seat of her swish Panhard-Levassor ran serially as ‘A Second Motor-Flight through France’ from January through April 1908.

In The Custom of the Country, Wharton does more than chronicle the battle between the masses and the classes, in which the Moffatts rise triumphant if discontented with their bargains. She sets that battle for cultural authority partly in and through the filter of print media that encompasses novels with salacious titles (When the Kissing Had to Stop), Sunday supplements and gossip rags, which one Atlantic journalist blamed for the waning moral authority of the press.¹⁰ Wharton's concern about the media's ability to shape human beings’ perceptions of themselves and their societies seems prescient in the retrospect of nearly a full century. Whereas Lowell thought that he could disseminate culture by sending discounted copies of the magazine to schoolteachers and postmasters, Wharton explores the nightmarish consequences of the power Lowell rightly attributed to the printed word in a day when Abraham Lincoln believed that one favourable piece in the Atlantic would save him half a dozen battles.¹¹

Wharton was not alone in her analysis of the media. In answer to the question ‘what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at every pore with a sense of the world's demand and supply?’, Howells predicted that the ‘adman’ would become ‘the supreme artist of the twentieth century’.¹² Wharton's answer is Undine, a woman who feels most alive when reading about herself in Town Talk – so much so that she might wonder at her own existence were she not the subject of columns. When Undine first meets Peter Van Degen, for instance, she thinks:

who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of ‘Sunday Supplements’, the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and ‘crack’ sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? (pp. 49–50)

In this world, the sign is more real than the thing itself.

‘Was everything that the dime necromancers told us melodrama?’ an Atlantic author asked in 1907.

Much of it unquestionably was. But an age which has seen a nation [Panama] rise from Balboa's isthmus at the wave of a Prospero wand from Washington; which has recently looked on while a people in the Caribbean committed suicide [an uprising in Cuba led to American intervention]; which is watching Nome's Argonauts, up under the Pole Star, rival the glories of the Comstock … and which held its breath in November, 1906 [when William Randolph Hearst ran for governor of New York], while Roosevelt … rushed to rescue the nation from a New York editor who had built up an army in a night, has no right to object to melodrama in fiction.¹³

The dynamic that Wharton established between the press and her characters, or – to poach Howells's title and dignify Undine's taste – between literature and life, mirrors her own dialogue with the Atlantic through the pages of The Custom of the Country.

Wharton's novel is about dialogue and the collaborative making of reality. Fittingly it begins by illustrating how dialogues become embedded in cultures. Hers opens with the seventeenth-century playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, from whom she lifted her title. The 1619 play The Custom of the Country has a little of everything and all of it bawdy. One hero is sold to a witch for his sexual services and another flees with his wife to escape ‘droit de seigneur’ (the custom of the country Wharton might have renamed ‘droit de dame’). All's well that ends well, however, for Fletcher and Massinger somehow manage to end their titillating romp (and avoid censorship) with an endorsement of chastity and marriage. Wharton concludes similarly, though more cynically, with the remarriage of the Moffatts. Ironically, each has been trained through their avariciousness to a different standard. Wharton hints at the day when Moffatt, having evolved aesthetically and ethically through his acts of collecting, will realize the bad bargain he made for Undine. Equally poignant are the times when Undine finds her husband's ‘misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends’, jarring

on perceptions that had developed in her unawares. Now and then she caught herself thinking that his two predecessors – who were gradually becoming merged in her memory – would have said this or that differently, behaved otherwise in such and such a case. And the comparison was almost always to Moffatt's disadvantage. (p. 591)

A passage like this one illustrates a principle at the heart of Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), which argues that the elite's insistence on quality improves the general aesthetic quality of American life by prodding the manufacture of affordable reproductions.

In The Custom of the Country, Wharton complicates Undine's picaresque adventures in several ways: first by giving her only veiled insights into her own character; and, more devastatingly, by the havoc she wreaks on the men who stoop to love her – including her son, Paul Marvell – and on the cultures and concepts they represent. These are defined by Wharton in French Ways and their Meaning (1919) as a sense of proportion, scale and fitness (taste); a wish to preserve communal values (reverence); the fearless examination of one's world (intellectual honesty); and a codified system of manners that allows the maintenance of social discipline in the teeth of aggression (continuity).¹⁴ The note of pathos Wharton lends to the Moffatts’ dual dilemma results from their parallel educations (hers sentimental and his getting and spending) that have changed the ‘relative’ values of others and more significantly themselves. They are not the same people who met and married once upon a time in Apex, but creatures of the mighty world – to echo William Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – half creating what they half perceive.

While Wharton's title sets up an implicit comparison between centuries with their different mores if not between different genres, her subject matter very much concerned the present. She hoped to capitalize and comment on the increasing number of American divorces and the publicity they excited in both the popular and highbrow presses. In 1907, for example, the Atlantic published Anna A. Rogers's article, ‘Why American Marriages Fai...