Old New York, New Women: Edith Wharton’s Revolution in Ethnography in the Custom of the Country

Abstract

From the 1850s to the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants from East Europe and Asia rushed to New York City to seek better working opportunities. American writer Edith Wharton saw the revolution in ethnography not in terms of the rising ‘ethnically diverse’ industrial working class, but rather of high society. But Wharton sees the threat to genteel society coming more from the female upstarts than their male counterparts. Thus The custom of the country discards the potential of a detailed portrayal of the struggles of its male protagonist, Elmer Moffatt, in his rise to great fortune and begins with the recent arrival of the Spragg family, who has resolved to establish their only daughter, Undine, at any cost, among the New York upper class. It ends with Undine’s breathtaking triumph in her amoral, even heartless, attainment of wealth and an established, even enviable position in society. Even though Wharton expresses the idea that the old aristocracy was fading away in a Darwinism sense, since Undine Spragg and other new women are outside the genteel circle and the results of their machinations can be swift and deadly, old New York high society underwent a revolution rather than an evolution.