The Custom of the Country and the Atlantic’s Call

Abstract

The American story, as it has featured in male adventure stories and pastoral romances, posits westward expansion as the literal and figurative ideal, the manifest destiny of a nation severed from the constricting social structures of Europe. The “territory” lay waiting for colonization, luring the pioneer with limitless possibilities for freedom, money, power. When Edith Wharton and other women told the American story, their version often differed fundamentally from that of their male colleagues. Wharton’s characters seek community, not autonomy; their quest, more often than not, is to find a place in the social world, to “fit” as snugly as possible and thus secure their survival, even their success. The heroine of The Custom of the Country Undine Spragg, as a female “pioneer”, listens for and responds to “the call of the Atlantic” and the civilized as passionately as male pioneers had heard the call of the Pacific and “the wild”.