The Custom of the Country: chapter 15 and Undine Spragg

With some novels, such as Anna Karenina, War and Peace, or Lolita, you can tell from the start that you’re reading a masterpiece. Some others take longer. Take Middlemarch—it was chapter 42 that made me realise it’s a masterpiece. 
For The Custom of the Country, it’s chapter 15. 
Ralph is now disillusioned. 

“As he sat among them now the memory of that other night swept over him—the night when he had heard the "call"! Fool as he had been not to recognize its meaning then, he knew himself triply mocked in being, even now, at its mercy. The flame of love that had played about his passion for his wife had died down to its embers; all the transfiguring hopes and illusions were gone, but they had left an unquenchable ache for her nearness, her smile, her touch. His life had come to be nothing but a long effort to win these mercies by one concession after another: the sacrifice of his literary projects, the exchange of his profession for an uncongenial business, and the incessant struggle to make enough money to satisfy her increasing exactions. That was where the "call" had led him…” (Ch.15) 

Valentine’s Day is a perfect day to talk about disillusionment and heartbreak. But isn’t that such a moving and poignant passage? I feel bad about the previous blog post. 
This is the scene where Ralph’s in a car with Clare Van Degen, his cousin (and old flame):   

“For a long time now feminine nearness had come to mean to him, not this relief from tension, but the ever-renewed dread of small daily deceptions, evasions, subterfuges. The change had come gradually, marked by one disillusionment after another; but there had been one moment that formed the point beyond which there was no returning.” (ibid.) 

It’s the moment he comes across a bill for resetting pearl and diamond pendant, and resetting sapphire and diamond ring. 

“The pearl and diamond pendant was his mother's wedding present; the ring was the one he had given Undine on their engagement. That they were both family relics, kept unchanged through several generations, scarcely mattered to him at the time: he felt only the stab of his wife's deception. She had assured him in Paris that she had not had her jewels reset. […] 
Soon afterward, the birth of the boy seemed to wipe out these humiliating memories; yet Marvell found in time that they were not effaced, but only momentarily crowded out of sight. In reality, the incident had a meaning out of proportion to its apparent seriousness, for it put in his hand a clue to a new side of his wife's character. He no longer minded her having lied about the jeweller; what pained him was that she had been unconscious of the wound she inflicted in destroying the identity of the jewels. He saw that, even after their explanation, she still supposed he was angry only because she had deceived him; and the discovery that she was completely unconscious of states of feeling on which so much of his inner life depended marked a new stage in their relation.” (ibid.) 

What a fucking bitch. 
Undine Spragg is such an abhorrent character because to her, nothing is sacred. She cares about nobody but herself; if she ever feels bad for anyone’s misfortunes, it’s because they get in her way.  
Chapter 15 is magnificent because it has the best scene in the novel up to this point—the scene when Undine comes home hours after she was meant to take her son to his grandparents’ for his birthday, and meets Ralph. I will not copy the scene here, you have to read the book for yourself.   
By staying with Ralph and narrating from his point of view, Edith Wharton makes us wonder with him: what would Undine do? She forgot her son’s birthday, the boy (Paul) was crying all afternoon, Ralph’s family were waiting for hours, the cake lay uncut, Ralph got told by Clare that Undine was at Popple’s studio for the picture—what excuse could she possibly give? Wharton’s genius is seen in that scene—Undine acts like nothing was wrong, she doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t blush, there’s no sign of regret or shame on her face. 
There is no confrontation. The next day goes on as usual. 

“A stranger—that was what she had always been to him. So malleable outwardly, she had remained insensible to the touch of the heart.
[…] She was what the gods had made her—a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure.” (Ch.16) 

Undine Spragg is a vivid creation. She is ignorant, thoughtless, self-centred, insensitive to others, manipulative, scheming; she has no principle, no set of values, no understanding, only social instincts. It is perhaps not far from the truth to say that Undine is the most repellent female character I’ve encountered in fiction. Incapable of self-reflection, Undine’s master at justifying her own actions and blaming everyone else, even whilst using people and discarding them when she’s done.   
But she doesn’t seem like a caricature or two-dimensional villain. There is a charm to her as she figures out social rules and makes some blunders on her way to the top, and she appears vivid and full of life when she’s seen by others as well as when we come close to her perspective. The height of her characterisation is in that scene, in chapter 15.   
Chapter 16 has another brilliant scene, in which Undine plays games and tries to manipulate Van Degen, but fails. It is telling—to Undine, everything is a game, an act. But it can’t beat the shameless nonchalance in the other scene. 

“Ralph Marvell, pondering upon this, reflected that for him the sign had been set, more than three years earlier, in an Italian ilex-grove. That day his life had brimmed over—so he had put it at the time. He saw now that it had brimmed over indeed: brimmed to the extent of leaving the cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath the nectar. He knew now that he should never hereafter look at his wife's hand without remembering something he had read in it that day. Its surface-language had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen the warning letters.
Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need—as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead. All this came to him with aching distinctness the morning after his talk with his wife on the stairs. He had accused himself, in midnight retrospect, of having failed to press home his conclusion because he dared not face the truth.” (Ch.16) 

I love the prose. 
Edith Wharton has now joined my list of favourite writers (George Eliot isn’t a favourite, and I hesitate about Henry James).