Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee

Author:Hermione Lee [Lee, Hermione]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55585-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Though she is incapable of writing letters, Undine is “never at a loss for the spoken word” (Ralph wonders if she has inherited a trace of a “preaching grandfather's oratory”). Her raw speech is set against the civilised talk of the startled Dagonets and Marvells, listening in “pained astonishment” as Undine (rather like Eliza Doolittle) holds forth about divorce: “He isn't in the right set, and I think Mabel realizes she'll never really get anywhere till she gets rid of him.” The clash between Ralph's fine aspirations and Undine's pragmatism is done through perfectly contrasted dialogue (“I haven't shown you Lecceto yet; and the drive back by moonlight would be glorious” … “It might be nice—but where could we get anything to eat?”). Even when Undine's rough edges have been smoothed, her singular tone persists—blithe, flat, banal and unconsciously funny: “It was dreadful that her little boy should be growing up far away from her, perhaps dressed in clothes she would have hated.”64

The book is full of loudly distinctive voices: Van Degen's masculine slang (“You ought to be painted yourself—no, I mean it, you know you ought to get old Popple to do you. He'd do your hair rippingly”), Pop-ple's phoney romantic clichés with the ladies (“The memory of her words would thereafter hallow his life”), Mrs. Spragg's “dialect” (“He was always a beautiful speaker, and after a while he sorter drifted into the ministry”), the Dagonets' genteel “vocabulary of evasion” (“All I ask is that you won't mention the subject to your grandfather …”), Elmer's forceful plain speech (“Look here, Undine, if I'm to have you again I don't want to have you that way”), and de Chelles's stylish French-in-translation, which to Undine is “a strange language.” No wonder that Wharton's transatlantic passengers in this novel sail on the Semantic.65

Speech is the most vivid way of getting at class, and Custom is all about class and snobbery. 66 Wharton draws precise distinctions between the different social groups—the old New York family descended from “signers” (of the Declaration of Independence), the getters and spenders of the new fortunes made on the stock market, the working businessmen, the continental drifters, the French aristocracy—even as she describes the merging of social demarcations. The plumber's daughter from the Midwestern town becomes a congressman's wife; the society the Dagonets wish to control cares nothing about them, and their prejudices are like “signposts warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude.”

Undine is herself a tremendous snob, expressing great resentment at de Chelles's brother marrying an American girl called Looty Arlington he met at a skating-rink (“She must be horribly common”), aware that “in the Marvell set Elmer Moffatt would have been stamped as ‘not a gentleman,’ ” and, after her stupendous remarriage to him, coming to criticise “his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants” and “his habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing room.”67 Undine is like her author in feeling that there are such things as

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