The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

And he had to acknowledge that their months of desultory wandering from one Italian hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and dinners would have been to him.  An imagination like his, peopled with such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife's spirit fluttered.  Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it.

(The second in my totally coincidental "C______ __ the Country" series.)

"Poor Undine!" Ralph Marvell thinks of his wife, "She was what the gods had made her--a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure."  Formerly Undine Spragg, she appears on the New York social scene as a teenager fresh from the Midwestern town of Apex City, having cajoled her parents into relocating, desperate to climb her way into the ranks of the elite.  She marries Ralph, a socialite and poet, but soon realizes that his social status doesn't coincide with wealth, and that he's unable to keep her in the style she requires, or keep up their social calendar.

Undine's need to be in the right "set" obliterates everything else: compassion, decency, Ralph himself.  She melts down when she finds out she's pregnant, wailing the loss of "a whole year out of life!"  She abandons Ralph and her son Paul, absconding to Europe as the mistress of a richer and more well-connected man, but he abandons her.  She divorces Ralph, but later blackmails him for custody of Paul so that she might pay off the pope, have their marriage annulled, and marry a French count.  But the French count is in much the same position as Ralph, and the needs of his estate prevent exactly the same kind of social life that Undine's marries in an attempt to secure.  This section of the novel is a Jamesian comparison of American and European social mores, and Undine's French husband savages her for her crass American social-climbing:

'And you're all alike,' he exclaimed, 'every one of you.  You come among us from a country we don't know, and can't imagine, a country you care for so little that before you've been a day in ours you've forgotten the very house you were born in--if it wasn't torn down before you knew it!  You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about--you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have--and we're fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honourable for us!'

Undine is a terrific character, one of Wharton's best.  But she is a difficult character to love.  Ralph isn't wrong about the narrowness of her mental life, and her expanding capacity for cruelty is buttressed by a willful blindness toward her own actions.  The dissolution of her marriage with Ralph is thanks only to "dark machinations," and she feels no need to consider the pain and labor involved in the creation of the money she consumes because it is only what she feels she deserves.  In other books, Wharton provides characters who feel trapped by the cloisters of the upper class even as they crave moneyed society, like Newland Archer and Lily Bart.  Undine doesn't have those kind of compunctions.

But consider: What kind of sympathy is owed to Ralph, the poet who is tortured because he has to go into business to support his wife's profligacy?  There are poets everywhere who do much duller work.  And isn't Undine a prime example of the way that capitalism intertwines with patriarchy, rewarding women for being beautiful, idle, and well-married?  We want Undine to be a better person, but the kind of person Undine wants to be is the kind of person newspapers tell her she ought to want to be every day.

In the end, Undine returns to her first husband: an American from Apex named Elmer Moffatt.  Their marriage is a secret to almost every one, even after he turns up in New York to use his cunning as a financier to strike it rich.  Years ago, Undine gave up Elmer because he was a no one from a nowhere place, the embodiment of the provinciality of the Midwest.  By the book's end, he's one of the wealthiest men in America.  His money intelligence does it for him, but also his utter disregard for the complex systems of politesse that govern society.  When he's amassed enough money, he floats above them.  Undine has believed that money is incidental to social standing--that's the kind of lie your Marxist friends might call a false consciousness--but the truth it, when you have enough of it, you can buy all the standing you want.  Elmer becomes a collector of the kind of European treasures that the French count Chelles hoards, and he re-collects Undine along with the Count's ancient tapestries.

Do we want Undine to win, in the end?  America certainly wins; all of Europe's history and society and manners crumble before the good old American dollar.  But Undine is only on the precipice of understanding what so many characters in American fiction have to learn: money will buy you everything you want, and in the end, you discover the things you want don't scratch whatever primal itch is there inside you.