Soft Canons: American Women Writers

Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel

Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast & absorbing field for the novelist, & I wish a great master could arise to deal with it.1 “Undine Spragg,” the name of the protagonist of The Custom of the Country, glares like a neon sign amid Edith Wharton’s more traditional, natural nomenclature. As the book’s first phrase, it seems to enter the fictional room like an indiscriminately applied scent, before its owner. The disagreeable ungainliness of the syllable “Spragg” begins with an assailing consonant cluster, plosively suggesting the embouchure of spitting or of disdain, and it ends in a rhyme with “nag,” “gag,” and “slag.” But those initial consonants also recall “sprite,” the famous folkloric bearer of the name “Undine.”2 An attempted pronunciation of “sprite,” it seems, has swerved disastrously off the tongue. And when to “Spragg” is added “Undine”— hard to know how to pronounce, delicately feminine, probably foreign — we are further disconcerted . Is she “undeen,” “undı̄ne,” or “oondeen,” and on which syllable is the name accented? Her hapless mother calls her “Undie,” which may or may not be authoritative. The mystery and instability of pronunciation, the irksome yoking of the adamantine “Spragg” with the sinuous and ethereal “Undine,” are also features of the girl herself. To Ralph Marvell the name suggests the motion of waves and an improbable allusion by the Spragg parents to Montaigne;3 Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel claire preston Wharton, too, notices Undine’s irritating rippling effects and ceaseless posing. What is actually being commemorated in her christening, however, is the successful hair-waving formula invented by her father and patented in the week of her birth, a substance so-called because — as Mrs. Spragg explains —“of undoolay . . . the French for crimping.”4 The product is named not for sprites or for aqueous disturbances but for a hairdressing technique; so the daughter, who is named for the chemical. She could as well be called Marcel, or Blondine, or Clairol. By name and by nature, Undine is a product, genetic and commercial, and she roams the novel like a traveling saleswoman. A ruthless, fluctuating self-promoter and self-merchandizer, her name is an exact account of all that she is. In1907thefoundationoftheHarvardSchoolofBusinessStudies dismayed Edith Wharton: “[it] plunged me into . . . depth[s] of pessimism. . . . skyscrapers don’t symbolize a lifting of the soul. . . . Alas, alas!”5 In spite of this she herself was engaged at that moment , as were many of her contemporaries, in the creation of a money novel, a novel rich in the culture of business and skyscrapers , The Custom of the Country. The American money novel of the period 1870–1930 is, like the study of business, primarily interested in the mechanics of getting rich, which it discovers in the technicalities of finance, commerce, consumption, labor relations, and social mobility. Often it figures such themes in the career of a stratospheric entrepreneur, who might be a thinly veiled portrait of a Vanderbilt, a Morgan, a Yerkes, a Rockefeller, Frick, Belmont, Gould, or Cooke,6 embodiments of what William Dean Howells called “the American poetry of vivid purpose.”7 Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age (1873) and Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) were the first models in the genre; Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1902), charting railroad battles and wheat wars, derive their texture and surface from the ebb and flow of market transactions; Upton Sinclair was writing The Metropolis (1908) and The Money Changers (1909), muckraking satires of Wall Street; Theodore Dreiser was establishing the poetics of upward mobility in Frank Cowperwood — in the so-called “Trilogy of Desire,” The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (posthumous, 1947). Later, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922; dedicated to Wharton) satirized boosterism and salesmanship; Booth Tarkington’s The Plutocrat (1927) showed the business titan at play; wharton and dreiser : 185 and John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy (including The Big Money [1936]) was built around high finance and heroic industrial development . Near the end of this era, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926) evoked the potential tragedy of the self-made man. Both Harvard and the money novelists, in other words, were giving their imprimatur to...