Part 13 (2/2)
When I reread her history I was reminded of the princess in the allegory of Ephraim Mikhael, called The Captive. She was the cold princess held captive in the hall with the wall of bra.s.s. Wherever she turns or walks she sees a welcome visitor: it is always her own insolent image in the mirrors on the walls. These mirrors make of herself her own eternal jailer. When she gazes from the window of her prison tower she sees no one. No conquering lover comes to deliver her from the bondage of self. In the slave who offers rare fruits and precious wines in cups of emerald she sees only a mockery of herself, the words of consolation remind her of her own voice. ”And that is why the sorrowful Princess drives away the beautiful loving slave, more cruel even than the mirrors.” Egotist to the end, both Mildred and the Princess see naught in the universe save the magnified image of themselves.
III
UNDINE
Perhaps there is more than a nuance of caricature in the choice of such a name as ”Undine Spragg” for the heroine of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. Throughout that book, with its brilliant enamel-like surfaces, there is a tendency to make sport of our national weakness for resounding names. Undine Spragg--hideous collocation--is not the only offence. There is Indiana Frusk of Apex City, and Millard Binch, a combination in which the d.i.c.kens of American Notes would have found amus.e.m.e.nt. Hotels with t.i.tles like The Stentorian are not exaggerated. Miss Spragg's ancestor had invented ”a hair waver”; hence the name Undine: ”from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping,” as the simple-hearted mother of the girl explained to a suitor. Mrs. Wharton has been cruel, with a glacial cruelty, to her countrywomen of the Spragg type. But they abound. They come from the North, East, South, West to conquer New York, and thanks to untiring energy, a handsome exterior, and much money, they ”arrive”
sooner or later. With all her overaccentuated traits and the metallic quality of technique in the handling of her portrait, Undine Spragg is both a type and an individual--she is the newest variation of Daisy Miller--and compared with her brazen charmlessness the figures of Hedda Gabler and Mildred Lawson seem melting with tenderness, aglow with subtle charm and m.u.f.fled exaltation. Undine--shades of La Motte Fouque--is quite the most disagreeable girl in our fiction. She has been put under a gla.s.s and subjected to the air-pump pressure of Mrs.
Wharton's art. She is a much more viable creature than the author's earlier Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth. At least Undine is not sloppy or sentimental, and that is a distinct claim on the suffrages of the intelligent reader. Furthermore, the clear hard atmosphere of the book is tempered by a tragic and humorous irony, a welcome astringent for the mental palate.
In Apex City Undine made up her mind to have her own way. She elopes and marries a vulgar ”hustler,” but is speedily divorced. She is very beautiful when she reaches New York. No emotional experience would leave a blur on her radiant youth, because love for her is a sensation, not a sentiment. By indirect and c.u.mulative touches the novelist evokes for us her image. Truly a lovely apparition, almost mindless, with great sympathetic eyes and a sweet mouth. She exists, does Undine. She is not the barren fruit of a satirical pen.
Foreigners, both men and women, puzzle over her freedom, chilliness, and commercial horse-sense. She doesn't long intrigue their curiosity, her brain is poorly furnished and conversation with her is not a fine art. She is temperamental in the sense that she lives on her nerves; without the hum and glitter of the opera, fas.h.i.+onable restaurants, or dances she relapses into a sullen stupor, or rages wildly at the fate that made her poor. She, too, like Hedda and Emma, lives in the moment, a silly moth enamoured of a millionaire. Mildred Lawson is positively intellectual in comparison, for she has a ”go” at picture-making, while the only pictures Undine cares for are those produced by her own exquisitely plastic figure. No wonder Ralph Marvell fell in love with her, or, rather, in love with his poetic vision of her. He was, poor man, an idealist, and his fine porcelain was soon cracked in contact with her bra.s.sy egotism.
He is of the old Was.h.i.+ngton Square stock, as antique--and as honourable--as Methuselah. Undine soon tires of him; above all, tires of his family and their old-fas.h.i.+oned social code. For her the rowdy joys of Peter Van Degen and his set. The Odyssey of Undine is set forth for us by an accomplished artist in prose. We see her in Italy, blind to its natural beauties, blind to its art, unhappy till she gets into the ”hurrah” of St. Moritz. We follow her hence, note her trailing her petty misery--boredom because she can't spend extravagantly--through modish drawing-rooms; then a fresh hegira, Europe, a divorce, the episode with Peter Van Degen and its profound disillusionment (she has the courage to jump the main-travelled road of convention for a brief term) and her remarriage. That, too, is a failure, only because Undine so wills it. She has literally killed her second husband because she wins from him by ”legal” means their child, and in the end she again marries her divorced husband, Elmer Moffatt, now a magnate, a multimillionaire. She has at last followed the advice of Mrs. Heeny, her adviser and ma.s.seuse. ”Go steady, Undine, and you'll get anywheres.” We leave her in a blaze of rubies and glory at her French chateau, and she isn't happy, for she has just learned that, being divorced, she can never be an amba.s.sadress, and that her major detestation, the ”Jim Driscolls,” had been appointed to the English court as amba.s.sador from America. The novel ends with this coda: ”She could never be an amba.s.sador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests, she said to herself, that it was the one part she was really made for.” The truth is she was bored as a wife, and like Emma Bovary, found in adultery all the plat.i.tudes of marriage.
You ask yourself, after studying the play, and the two novels, if the new woman is necessarily disagreeable. To my way of thinking, it is princ.i.p.ally the craving for novelty in characterisation that has wrought the change in our heroines of fiction, although new freedom and responsibilities have evolved new types. Naturally the pulchritudinous weakling we shall always have with us, ugly girls with brains are a welcome relief from the eternal purring of the popular girl with the baby smile. But it would be a mistake to call Hedda, or Mildred, or Undine, new women. Mildred is the most ”advanced,” Hedda the most dangerous--she pulled the trigger far too early--and Undine the most selfish of the three. The three are disagreeable, but the trio is transitional in type. Each girl is a compromiser, Undine being the boldest; she did a lot of s.h.i.+fting and indulged in much cowardly evasion. Vulgarians all, they are yet too complex to be pinned down by a formula. Old wine in these three new bottles makes for disaster.
Undine Spragg is the worst failure of the three. She got what she wanted for she wanted only dross. Ibsen's b.u.t.ton-Moulder will meet her at the Cross-Roads when her time comes. Hedda, like Strindberg's Julia, may escape him because, coward as she was when facing harsh reality, she had the courage to rid her family of a worthless enc.u.mbrance. If she had been a robust egoist, and realised her nature to the full, she would have been a Hedda Gabler ”reversed,” in a word, the Hilda w.a.n.gel of The Master Builder. But with Mildred she lacked the strength either to renounce or to sin. And Undine Spragg hadn't the courage to become downright wicked; the game she played was so pitiful that it wasn't worth the poor little tallow-dip. What is her own is the will-to-silliness. As Princess Estradina exclaimed in her brutally frank fas.h.i.+on: ”My dear, it's what I always say when people talk to me about fast Americans: you're the only innocent women left in the world....” This is far from being a compliment. No, Undine is voluble, vulgar, and ”catty,” but she isn't wicked. It takes brains to be wicked in the grand manner. She is only disagreeable and fas.h.i.+onable; and she is as impersonal and monotonous as a self-playing pianoforte.
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