A rose, a ghost, in Edith Wharton

Disentangling threads such as fire, flowers, mothering, innocence vs. sexuality, wave patterns, and murder, the present essay brings to light the highly programmatic behaviour of Undine Spragg, but also shows the governing hand of Elmer Moffatt as figure of the novelist. Adapting the myth of eternal spring in the Proserpine story to altered concepts of time, life and death in the technologieal era of the early twentieth century, Wharton captures the experience of ber characters by emphasizing the relation between technology (radio, telephone, gramophone, cinema, trains, planes, motors) and language (as process of the conscious and unconscious mind, and as linguistic and sociolinguistie system). Yet in faet such technological tools and language models are also her metaphors for the experience of reading language in the book. While providing a mythological "key" to how Undine Spragg's husbands are both figures of Pluto and the three brothers Jove (Marvell), Neptune (de Chelles) and Pluto (Moffatt), this study is primarily concerned with the imagery and figures specific to The Custom of the Country, in order to focus on the planetary "disaster" of the "meteor" Elmer Moffatt.

Demonstrating the systematic function of apparently fortuitous descriptive and narrative details, this close reading will appeal to students of The Custom of the Country interested in seizing its specificity as literary text and its generality as depiction of society.