The Custom of the Country Themes

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country is a novel full of marriages and divorces. Over the course of the book, the main character, Undine Spragg, gets divorced three times and married four times, and along the way, she considers even more marriage options. While Undine is perhaps an extreme example when it comes to quick marriages and divorces (her first marriage lasted just two weeks), her character illustrates how the conventions of marriage…

On the surface, Undine Spragg, the main character of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, seems unrelentingly selfish. She has an endless appetite for buying new things, and she quickly burns through the money of any other character foolish enough to give it to her. But behind Undine’s selfishness is the insecurity that she’s never doing enough to keep up with the people around her. While Undine’s father (Mr. Spragg)…

In addition to being a time of significant social change, the early 20th century (when The Custom of the Country was published and takes place) was also a time of widespread political and business corruption, and this corruption is a constant backdrop throughout the novel. Many of the wealthy characters in the novel, particularly “new money” characters like Mr. Spragg and Elmer Moffatt (who originally come from humbler backgrounds), appear respectable on the surface…