The Custom of the Country: first impressions

Reading 2 Edith Wharton novels together can be a bit dreary and lead to some infuriating moments, because of the shallow rich people she portrays, and because of her misanthropy. But reading The Custom of the Country right after The House of Mirth can be interesting. 
I’m currently on chapter 12—Undine’s honeymoon with Ralph Marvell. The main character is called Undine Spragg, from Apex (she is U. S. of A.), a spoilt, selfish, shallow, philistine, and mercenary young woman of unspecified age. The blurb of my copy says “Undine Spragg is the most repellent heroine we have encountered in many a long day”. A few glances here and there also tell me that Undine is a lot worse than Lily Bart, and has been compared to Kim Kardashian and called a female Trump. Fun stuff. 
The introduction, written by Stephen Orgel, mentions that in the novel, Undine will have 3 marriages. 
Reading this one right after The House of Mirth is interesting, because I’m starting to have the theory that it is a response to the earlier novel. If The House of Mirth is about women’s limited options, about how a woman (Lily Bart) is crushed by society when refusing to play its game, The Custom of the Country would be about a different kind of woman (Undine), who would play the game and use the system to her advantage, and get everything she wants. 
I also have the theory that The Custom of the Country is Edith Wharton asking, what if Lily had married all the men—Lawrence Selden, Percy Pryce, and Simon Rosedale? At the moment, I know that Ralph Marvell is not Lawrence Selden, but he also studies law, reads books, doesn’t have much money, and can’t satisfy Undine’s thirst for extravagance. I happen to know that Undine’s 3rd husband would be her ex bf, Elmer Moffatt, who is not Jewish, but he’s also a calculating, ruthless social climber like Simon Rosedale. I don’t know who the 2nd husband will be—let’s hope that he’s similar to Percy Pryce to make my theory work. 
But all that is for later. At the moment, Edith Wharton seems to come close to George Eliot in subject and theme (though not in style), as I read about the unhappy marriage between Undine and Ralph Marvell. They are incompatible. 

“He had said a moment before, without conscious exaggeration, that her presence made any place the one place; yet how willingly would he have consented to share in such a life as she was leading before their marriage? […] 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. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience. The task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous.” (Ch.11) 

Ralph marries Undine for her beauty, and thinks she’s an ideal woman, the same way Lydgate chooses to marry Rosamond Vincy. But naively, he thinks she can change. 

“[Mrs Shallum] saw at once Undine's value as a factor in her scheme, and the two formed an alliance on which Ralph refrained from shedding the cold light of depreciation. It was a point of honour with him not to seem to disdain any of Undine's amusements: the noisy interminable picnics, the hot promiscuous balls, the concerts, bridge-parties and theatricals which helped to disguise the difference between the high Alps and Paris or New York. He told himself that there is always a Narcissus-element in youth, and that what Undine really enjoyed was the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration. With her quick perceptions and adaptabilities she would soon learn to care more about the quality of the reflecting surface; and meanwhile no criticism of his should mar her pleasure.” (Ch.12) 

So mistaken. 
Ralph has a more sensitive mind. Look at this: 

“As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.” (Ch.11) 

I didn’t need to share that to demonstrate my point, but it’s so good so why not? Same with this passage: 

“… Siena grew vocal with that shrill diversity of sounds that breaks, on summer nights, from every cleft of the masonry in old Italian towns. Then the moon rose, unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and Ralph, leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle distance, felt his spirit enlarged and pacified. For the first time, as his senses thrilled to the deep touch of beauty, he asked himself if out of these floating and fugitive vibrations he might not build something concrete and stable, if even such dull common cares as now oppressed him might not become the motive power of creation. If he could only, on the spot, do something with all the accumulated spoils of the last months—something that should both put money into his pocket and harmony into the rich confusion of his spirit! "I'll write—I'll write: that must be what the whole thing means," he said to himself, with a vague clutch at some solution which should keep him a little longer hanging half-way down the steep of disenchantment.
He would have stayed on, heedless of time, to trace the ramifications of his idea in the complex beauty of the scene, but for the longing to share his mood with Undine”. (ibid.) 

Even though Ralph can’t write anything (perhaps he’s not much of a writer), it’s so much better to enter his mind after pages and pages of suffocation as we were following Undine. She’s a little philistine. She barely reads, goes to the gallery then forgets everything she has seen, then goes to the opera only to use her opera-glass to watch other people, and is also “insensible to the soft spell of the evening” (ibid.). She is vacuous. 
In the 1st marriage, Undine marries Ralph for his name and gets disappointed as he doesn’t have as much money as expected, whereas he gets disillusioned because of their incompatibility. The point, of course, is that she uses marriage to get forward and move higher in society, and that she doesn’t have the intelligence and sensitivity to understand Ralph. 
But it’s certainly nice to take a break from Undine’s empty, opportunistic mind by entering Ralph’s. Undine is unbearable.