The Custom of the Country
Madame Bovary….the reading of which years ago, triggered thoughts of rebellion in the young me, encouraged you to move away from convention, pushed you to invest in certain things in life which you would not have otherwise indulged yourself in, did not allow you to settle for the small-town life but prodded you to dream beyond……
Marriage was no longer the only aspiration of life and this thought challenged the notions of an ideal woman that society defined for young women like me. The spirit of the fierce woman pervaded through every aspect of life as the young me, read through the pages of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, drew comparison of Emma Bovary with other identical heroines like Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and the likes of Catherine from ‘Wuthering Heights’ . Powerful thoughts and feelings consumed the mind of the young woman.
Years later, I was dragged back to that world of the Anti-Heroine as I read through the pages of Edith Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country” chugging through the initial pages, but gaining momentum as the pages engulfed the personality of a not so common name and personality like that of Undine Spragg….a female spirit or nymph imagined as inhabiting water. An Anti-heroine, Undine is the very opposite of what a perfect heroine would otherwise appeal to us. True to her name, Wharton’s Undine is a fierce woman, is unpredictable and does not differentiate between good and evil. She has no qualms about hurting the sentiments or the feelings of the men in her life and feels no pressure to conform to the conventions of the society that she lives in.
As an intriguing personality, she derives pleasure in spending money on things that are beautiful and does not hesitate to become deceitful to her husband or her family. She has no time or interest in married life or in child-rearing. Her passions surpass even the affordability of her parents or her husband. Undine abandons her husband which eventually leads to him killing himself and within no time, she married another man and then another thus disregarding the institution of marriage and embracing divorce as a part of her life.
Headstrong, Undine is beautiful, is aware of how to play her charms to her will and is unstoppable and irresistible to the reader. She leaves us with spells of shock, swiping your life at this age, getting you to reject patriarchy, triggering your thoughts once again to get more out of life than what one would otherwise settle down for and most of all leaving you with bravery, strength and a strong sense of differentiation between what s ethical and what is unethical…….following our desires…that is what womanhood is all about…
