A confession: there have been times when I’ve looked at my lovely, loving family and thought, “I need to get out of here.” What if I just walked out, ignoring the endless questions about whether there was more milk and what was for dinner and where were shoes, keys, notebooks?
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Even now that I’m long past the scrum of child-rearing and school runs (my “kids” are in their twenties), the question hovers. It’s the fantasy of the unencumbered self (a phrase coined by American philosopher Michael Sandel) so central to America’s national mythology, from the frontier cowboy to Huckleberry Finn all the way to Jack Reacher. It’s the freedom to step away, reinvent, move on, usually without punishment or consequence—and it is, historically, a male freedom. Women who have tried to be a Huck Finn or a Jack Reacher don’t get awarded mythic status. They’re weird, unwomanly, maybe crazy, and almost certainly unlikable.
Even now, women who opt out of their regularly scheduled lives shock us: witness the (unnamed) heroine of Miranda July’s novel, All Fours, who leaves her husband and child in California to drive to New York for business, stops for gas in Monrovia (about thirty minutes from her house) and stays. Complications, as they say, ensue, but at the heart of the novel is a statement the heroine makes early on, about her seemingly satisfying existence: “one day I really would leave this house, these people, this city, and live a completely different life.” Her desire—and the fact that she acts on her desire—link her to a rather surprising foremother: Undine Spragg, the deliciously named protagonist at the center of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton’s 1913 masterpiece.
Undine is all appetite and ambition, intent on climbing the social ladder as high as she can, using the only tool she has: her astonishing physical beauty. Working within the narrow confines of the marriage market, Undine commodifies herself in order to be claimed by the wealthiest husband she can find; every relationship is transactional. She is both wildly successful and wildly destructive, leaving a trail of shattered lives behind her as she climbs. She never relents, never apologizes, and her occasional setbacks only propel her to greater triumphs.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that in January 2024, Apple TV scuttled Sofia Coppola’s deal to adapt Wharton’s novel. Coppola said there was a series of back-and-forth discussions with Apple executives, “mostly dudes,” who decided that Undine was too “unlikeable.” Somehow, more than a century after Wharton published the novel, her heroine is still a radical threat: a woman who lays waste to men’s lives and yet flourishes? We can’t have that.
When I teach this novel, I present Undine as the first bitch of US fiction, and a precursor to the Kardashians. “Undine would slay on TikTok,” a student said sagely. The last time I put this book on the syllabus, I was in the marshy fens of menopause, constantly sweaty, exhausted by years of insomnia, and worried—especially during my insomniac nights—about the occasional titanic periods that swept through my body without warning. (“We call that flooding,” my midwife explained cheerfully. “Just stock up on menstrual products. A lot of them.”)
The novel’s ferocity matched my mood and Undine’s ability to change her circumstances seemed aspirational, rather than appalling. I marveled at Wharton’s ability to create such an anti-hero, while resisting the conventional “Bad Woman” arcs: her heroine experiences no remorse, makes no weeping plea for forgiveness, suffers no dire consequences. Undine is a bitch who gets away with being a bitch.
That’s when it clicked. Wharton started the novel when she was forty-eight and it was published when she was almost fifty-two: The Custom of the Country is a menopause novel, Wharton’s fierce salvo of independence, an indication that she would no longer be playing by anyone’s rules other than her own.
Much has been made about the changes in Wharton’s life during the five years she worked on this novel, which she’d initially promised to her publisher, Charles Scribner, in 1908. Both author and publisher would have hoped to capitalize on the success of House of Mirth (1905) and redress the tepid reception given The Fruit of the Tree (1907). During this same period, Wharton’s husband of twenty-some years, Teddy, was becoming increasingly unstable due to his “nerves” (today he’d probably be diagnosed as bipolar). She was also tangled in an affair with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist who introduced her to sexual pleasure. (Many biographers think the Wharton marriage was sexless and that the Fullerton affair was her only sexual relationship.)
At the same time as her relationships were in flux, so too was her body: at 47, she was likely entering menopause. That means hot flashes, erratic menstruation, and insomnia were happening right along with her first-ever orgasms. By 1913, when the novel was published, Wharton had divorced Teddy, ended things with Fullerton, moved permanently to Paris, and “divorced” Charles Scribner in favor of a more lucrative publishing deal with Appleton.
Illness, infidelity, divorce, a transatlantic move, and menopause.
As my students would say, that’s a lot.
In today’s world, if you’re a woman in your late forties or beyond, your social media feeds are probably cluttered with menopause-related information, whether it’s A-list celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts monetizing their menopausal experiences, or references to books like Dr. Jen Gunter’s The Menopause Bible, Jancee Dunn’s Hot and Bothered: What No One Tells You About Menopause and How to Feel Like Yourself Again, or the more scholarly Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine and Menopause in Modern America, by Judith Houck. For these writers—and for my purposes here—“menopause” covers the entire experience, from the perimenopausal onset of night sweats all the way through to the cessation of menstruation. July’s All Fours is the most recent entry to the public conversation about menopause, which is emerging from the shadows of taboo and becoming, to make the inevitable pun, a hot topic. All Fours was a New York Times best-seller, and shortlisted for the National Book Award: the novel’s heroine may be unlikable, but her story resonated with millions of (presumably mostly female) readers.
In 1908, however, even for an erudite woman like Wharton, information about menopause would have been sparse at best and potentially deadly, at worst. Wharton would never have confided such personal details to anyone, and even if she’d been close enough to her notoriously chilly mother to ask such intimate questions, her mother had died in 1901. If Wharton turned to science, she might have found Emmanuel Régis’s Précis de psychiatrie, which stayed in print until 1923, and posited that the “climacteric” was a cause of madness.
An earlier book, by Dr. Andrew Currier, The Menopause: A Consideration of the Phenomena Which Occur to Women at the Close of their Child-bearing Period, advocated using tampons soaked in glycerin and silver nitrate to alleviate symptoms. Other experts recommended belladonna tinctures to cure hot flashes, perhaps a purge of mercury for constipation. A French researcher, Théodore Willette, claimed that all menopausal women were in need of neurological or psychiatric treatment.
Madness, disease, diminishment: that’s been the story around menopause for more than a century, a story we’re only now beginning to change. I think about Wharton, that most disciplined of writers, suddenly confronted by forces outside her control, both emotional and physical. The journal she kept about the Fullerton affair, and the fragment of erotica discovered in the stack of notebooks she’d labelled “for my biographer,” reveal a woman delighting in the pleasures of the flesh but terrified by the vulnerability of love. She didn’t write about her symptoms, but if I extrapolate from my own menopausal astonishment, she might have been stunned by the antics of her physical body.
It stands to reason, then, that Undine, of all Wharton’s characters, would be the most aware of her own body and its value. Unlike Lily Bart, in The House of Mirth, whose ability to capitalize on her beauty is hampered by her sense of ethics, Undine sails forward, untrammeled by anything resembling a conscience. Undine’s transformation is marked by the list of names she accrues through her marriages, from her first (secret) marriage to Elmer Moffatt, at that point a nobody from Apex City, to impoverished old-money scion Ralph Marvell, to the Marquis de Chelles, and then again to Elmer, now fantastically wealthy.
The gossip pages chart Undine’s incarnations: “The Marquise de Chelles, of Paris, France, formerly Mrs. Undine Spragg Marvell, of Apex City and New York, got a decree of divorce at a special session of the Court last night, and was remarried fifteen minutes later to Mr. Elmer Moffatt, the billionaire Railroad King, who was the Marquise’s first husband.” From Apex City to a marquis to a (railroad) king: a full circle to the apex of wealth she sought all along.
pullquote]Custom announces Wharton’s refusal to fade gently into retirement. Re-reading the novel during my own menopausal years, it seemed as if in creating Undine, Wharton gave herself permission for reinvention.[/pullquote]
We may disdain Undine’s churning trajectory on the marriage market, but her work ethic and singleness of purpose seem to me almost admirable. When she was a girl, Undine’s “chief delight was to dress up in her mother’s Sunday skirt and ‘play lady’ before the wardrobe mirror” and she never swerves from that ambition. She succeeds, in part, because her aspirations fit socially appropriate boundaries: become a lady who wears fancy clothes.
For a woman with literary ambitions, however, what was the path? Does Wharton follow the model of the Georges, Eliot and Sand, and hide under a male pseudonym? Should she stick close to home, like Jane Austen, or imagine tumultuous Gothic romances, like the Brontës? Colette and Gertrude Stein were each a decade younger than Wharton, and although they all lived in Paris at the same time, Wharton’s shyness (and unease about being “older”) kept her from mixing in those more Bohemian circles. Consistently compared to her dear friend Henry James in reviews (usually to her disadvantage), and chastised occasionally for straying out of her lane, as happened when she tackled the question of euthanasia in The Fruit of the Tree, where does Wharton’s ambition go?
It folds in on itself, compressed like a collapsing star. As she struggled with Custom, and as her life grew more chaotic, Wharton wrote small, as if that’s all her fragmented attention could sustain: short stories, poems, travel essays; the novella Ethan Frome (1911), and in the immediate aftermath of her breakup with Fullerton, The Reef (1912), a tightly focused novel about the failure of romance. And then, in 1913, The Custom of the Country explodes, with its sprawling plot, ferocious satire, and voracious heroine.
In the novel’s last scene, Undine watches out the window as her glittering dinner guests arrive, while Elmer reads from the newspaper about an old friend of theirs who has recently been made an ambassador. Elmer tells her she can’t be an ambassador’s wife because she’s a divorcee, which Undine hears as a challenge: “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.” There is no doubt in my mind that if there were a sequel to this novel, Undine would find a way around this archaic rule: how could divorce be an obstacle for a modern woman?
The New York Times Book Review branded her a “monster,” but went on to say that while Undine’s “utterly selfish” character was nothing new, “rarely has [a character] been developed in a manner so skillful, so delicate, and so completely ruthless.” Other reviews lauded the book as courageous, brilliant, Wharton’s finest achievement. The Nation’s reviewer, however, dismissed both novel and author: “the mood of satire seems to be growing upon Mrs. Wharton, a dubious sign in a writer who has passed a certain age.”
There it is. “A certain age,” that long span of years between mother and dead. The age when women are supposed to retire to the sidelines, like the gimlet-eyed matrons edging the ballroom in Wharton’s own novels. When they hit “a certain age,” women become so invisible that, as Jancee Dunn mentions in her Hot and Bothered, a 1960s medical study examined the benefits of estrogen supplements by running tests on 8341 men.
Custom announces Wharton’s refusal to fade gently into retirement. Re-reading the novel during my own menopausal years, it seemed as if in creating Undine, Wharton gave herself permission for reinvention. In Ursula Le Guin’s 1976 essay “Space Crone,” which is about “that taboo topic,” menopause, she writes that a woman entering menopause “must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth.” Wharton’s divorce—the birth of her third self—was complicated by Teddy demanding that she renounce the name Wharton. But by 1913, “Edith Wharton” was her brand, the source of her income, and she refused to grant his request. Her rebirth is a curious inversion of Undine’s, in that Undine accrues both names and husbands, while Wharton jettisons the husband and keeps the name.
In the final section of All Fours, July’s heroine sends out a message to all her women friends to ask if there were anything positive about their menopausal experiences. Responses pour in, “as if they had been waiting for someone to ask this very question.” Each response becomes a variation of what one woman tells her: “I feel like my true self.” Through her menopausal catharsis, the narrator of All Fours redefines her domestic arrangements, which, for all their unconventionality, never neglect the well-being of Sam, her nonbinary child.
Undine’s upward trajectory involves a constant redefinition of her domestic arrangements, but she has almost no interest in Paul, her son with Ralph Marvell. When Undine realizes that she’d forgotten to bring Paul to his grandparents’ house for his second birthday, she feels a pang of “compunction,” but her concern is more that her in-laws and husband will be annoyed, not that her child will be disappointed. For Ralph, this moment illustrates the disaster of his marriage; Undine, however, forges ahead.
Later, after Ralph’s illness and suicide, Paul comes to live with Undine in France, where she welcomes him as a “lovely acquisition.” He has increased in value not only because the French family she’s married into appreciates his youthful beauty but also because, through a complicated series of events, Paul has inherited a significant amount of money that pays Undine a monthly allowance, ostensibly for his upkeep. Motherhood, like all of Undine’s relationships, is purely transactional. And while Undine is no Medea, she is one of the worst mothers in modern fiction.
Wharton had no children, although for the last decade (or more) of her marriage, she functioned more as Teddy’s caregiver than as his wife, which was part of what made leaving him so difficult. She worried that divorcing him would cause a scandal: she would be blamed for abandoning her husband in his hour (read: years) of need. But it is only after relinquishing that role and prying herself loose from the trappings of domesticity, that she could find her “true self.” She remained “Edith Wharton,” but she lived alone, kept her own accounts, managed her own business details: she became, in effect, her own husband.
Far from sitting on the sidelines, after the explosion of Custom, Wharton would go on to write nine novels (including the Pulitzer-prize winning Age of Innocence, in 1920), three novellas, six short story collections, four full-length non-fiction collections, including an autobiography; a volume of poetry, and an edited volume entitled The Book of the Homeless, which featured contributions from people like Auguste Renoir, Joseph Conrad, WB Yeats, and Claude Monet, and was published as a fundraiser for Belgian refugees during World War I. For her work on behalf of the refugees, Wharton was awarded the French Legion of Honor; she was the first woman given an honorary doctorate by Yale University, and between 1920-1924 she was the highest paid writer in America.
Undine Spragg of Apex may satirize the U.S of A., but she is also the clarion call to the (peri)menopausal us, women ravening for more than we have, for scripts other than those we inherited at birth. In her rejection of domesticity and maternity, Undine embodies the possibility of reinvention; Wharton’s entire novel resonates with the energy of “fuck it, I’m fifty.” Wharton would never drop an f-bomb, but she did always say that of her novels, Custom was her favorite. Propelled by fury and an utter disdain for conventional representations of female heroines, the novel demonstrates Wharton’s power and the importance of finding that true third self. That’s why all of us—but particularly those who are “of a certain age”—should love unlikeable Undine.
