I started college early at sixteen. At my graduation from Bard College at Simon’s Rock (an experimental early college program), I was surprised to receive an award for excellence in Languages and Literature. The award came with a certificate, a handshake, and a very nice hardcover copy of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.
When I began reading the novel that very long summer, I was immediately insulted. The Custom of the Country, it turned out, was about the spoiled, unlikeable heroine Undine Spragg, lovingly called by the feminist scholar Deborah Williams “the first bitch of US fiction.” Undine moves from the countryside to New York City in hopes of finding a wealthy man to marry, but soon discovers that her quest for wealth and love is insatiable: Wharton writes that for Undine, things “always are wrong.”
I would later find that the chronically dissatisfied American girl is a common trope for Wharton. It is also the central tension of her works The House of Mirth, The Buccaneers, The Age of Innocence, and countless more frustrating stories of women to come, most notably Isabel Archer in her Gilded Age peer Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. The dilemma of Undine was also, alarmingly, not-too-far-off from my own. I, too, was moving away from the countryside of Massachusetts back to New York City, and felt insatiable.
Perhaps in tandem with their perpetual dissatisfaction, many of Wharton’s heroines are immune to—and equally disapproving of—aging. Years pass, but many of her girls never lose their beauty, flirtatiousness, or naïveté.
In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart starts the novel at twenty-nine, a shocking age for a promising unmarried woman in the Gilded Age. The novel works because of the unacknowledged time bomb ticking just beneath the surface, which Wharton builds with every casual marker of another high society season passing. A scathing early New York Times review complained that Lily “reminds me of the thoroughbred race horse which, after winning the Derby, dies in the shafts of a knacker’s cart.” Wharton relies on the bet that her readership has pre-existing prejudices about aging women in the marriage market, and it pays off.
This bet has not been lost with today’s readers. But when will Lily be considered too old? I always found myself asking, incredulously flipping back through all the split velvet skirts and Engadin cigarettes just to double-check Lily’s age in chapter one.
The genius of The House of Mirth is that the bomb Wharton carefully sets never goes off. Completely unprompted and well into the novel, Lily thinks to herself how good it is “to be young, to be radiant, to glow with the sense of slenderness, strength and elasticity!” After a time lapse, Mrs. Fisher tells Lily’s long-time admirer Lawrence Selden, “Lord Hubert tells me Lily is thought even handsomer than when he knew her at Aix ten years ago.” It all feels like an elaborate joke Wharton is playing on us. As Lily descends into poverty, Wharton ceases to mention her age whatsoever. The novel ends with her heroine killing herself by overdosing on sleeping medication. As praised again and again in Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance, “the savour of youth” is forever.
Wharton uses this device of suspending youth again and again. In The Custom of the Country, Undine is remarried three times, moves continents, and has a child with astonishing frequency. Throughout, her beauty and youthfulness remain vampiric. Wharton writes that, in the wake of her first failed marriage, Undine “found a poignant pleasure, at this stage of her career, in the question: ‘What does a young girl know of life?’” Because of Wharton’s subversive use of free indirect discourse, it isn’t clear whether it is just Undine who still thinks of herself as a young girl or her society, but the ambiguity suggests it is both.
In Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers, Nan St. George, the youngest of its five protagonists, is thrust imprudently into marriage at seventeen. Despite marrying a Duke, Nan is considered the least beautiful of all the girls, better understood as the most educated and pensive. At my graduation from Simon’s Rock, I was the same age as Nan. Compared to my peers who had a traditional high school experience, I felt perceived in a similar way. For Wharton, youthfulness is not literal–it is molded and shaped, a narrative device for only certain (un)worthy characters. Going to college early, it was youthfulness I did not have.
In A Backward Glance, Wharton argues that youth is a choice. Real aging comes from “the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia.” If aging isn’t just biological, it can be avoided through rigorous—some may say unlikeable— spontaneity. This drama is heightened in the relationship between Nan and her governess, Miss Testvalley, in The Buccaneers:
At Nan St. George’s age, Miss Testvalley, though already burdened with the care and responsibilities of middle life, had longed with Nan’s longing to wear white tulle and be invited to a ball. She had never been invited to a ball, had never worn white tulle, and now, at nearly forty, and scarred by hardships and disappointments, she still felt that early pang.
Because Nan and Miss Testvalley are not separated by the traditional border of mother and daughter, their margins, as Elena Ferrante would write, dissolve: youth, with its white tulle skirts, remains a failure for them both.
It is the sympathetic Guy Thwarte who finally tells Nan, “I rather think growing up’s a question of climate—of sunshine…Perhaps our moral climate’s too chilly for you young creatures from across the globe.” When Nan decides not to leave her marriage, she is deciding to refuse to leave Europe, and, in a way, refusing to grow up. It’s appropriate, then, that when Wharton began The Buccaneers she had lived in France for most of her life and would die at age 75 in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt that following August, before the book could be completed.
Feminist critics are fond of pointing out that Wharton’s depiction of aging was a testament to her criticism of the social restrictions in her era, which made middle age a death sentence for unmarried women. Paradoxically, Wharton is often at her most unreadable when she attempts to be overtly political—probably because you can’t be feminist when you are so enraptured by wealth and racism. In The Buccaneers, for example, Wharton makes a clumsy argument for divorced women to be allowed to remarry (a freedom Wharton herself never took), with Miss Testvalley despairing to Nan that “divorce… is intended to punish [the woman], not make her life pleasanter.” Alarmingly pointed but largely unrelated to the main story, this point lands as a desperate dud. Wharton returns more insistently to her political ideas about divorce in The Age of Innocence, the novel which earned her a Pulitzer, but it too feels out of place.
In The House of Mirth, Wharton’s narrative suspension of age is something much stronger, stranger, and more inexplicable than these asides, and likely more bound in her own fanatical conservatism. By never allowing that aging to happen on the page, Wharton indefinitely suspends youth with a touch of surrealism and Don Quixote-like determination. In A Backward Glance, Wharton wrote that “when I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate.” For Wharton to face a reality where youth fades is to strip her already highly realistic novels from the riches she knows she can supplement, the texture and color she knows she can add, and the magical aberrations caused by her savour of youth.
It is only in her most talked-about short story, “The Looking Glass,” published two years before her death in 1937, that Wharton finally gives in to reality. Mrs. Clingsland, described through the pitying gaze of her granddaughter, is just as insatiable as Undine or Lily, but her youth has begun to fade. It is a feeling, her granddaughter observes, “like being pushed out of an illuminated ballroom, all flowers and chandeliers, into the winter night and the snow.”
Two months ago I graduated again, this time at nineteen after transferring to Wesleyan. Thinking back to my gift of The Custom of the Country at my last graduation, I wonder now if the Bard faculty was landing one final dig by saying I reminded them of Undine, the All-American bitch. Perhaps (though probably only in addition), they were giving me this strange gift of finally refusing to grow up too fast–if not in life, then certainly in fiction.
