Wharton's The Custom of the Country and the Interior Decoration

Abstract

The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton's book of interior decoration, helps us to understand her controversial novel, The Custom of the Country, in which the interior decoration of rooms and houses also plays a crucial part. On the one hand, Wharton fully understands how the powerful new rich like to fill their houses with extravagant fittings, and describes effectively the social ascent of the protagonist, Undine Spragg, through the continual change of the interior of the houses she lives in. But in the end Wharton remains critical of the consumer society of the gilded age in which Undine wants to be a success. Wharton's preference is clearly for the traditional order and symmetry of the aristocratic houses of old New York, such as the one occupied by the family of Undine's first husband, Ralph. On the other hand, however, Wharton treats with severe irony the weakness of the traditional people. Their inevitable defeat is symbolized by their old-fashioned, timeworn residences, as well as by the miserable death of Ralph. The decoration of houses thus provides an index of Wharton's view of the modern society, which is essentially dualistic, or ambivalently conservative.