For a century, the deeper meaning of
the heroine’s strange name “Undine Spragg” has intrigued readers of Edith
Wharton’s 1913 late masterpiece The
Custom of the Country (as to which, by the way, the first and eagerly anticipated
film adaptation, to star Scarlett Johansson, has been in development since late
2014). That curiosity was surely first sparked by the following salient and
suggestive passage early (in Chapter 6) in Custom,
in which Undine’s mother explains the origin of her daughter’s odd name:
“Mrs. Spragg, once reconciled-or at least resigned-to
the mysterious necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of
Undine's, had yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity.
She had not seen Mrs. Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the
gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could
tell him things that Mrs. Heeny already knew, and Mrs. Spragg liked to repeat
her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the
shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward
accident of Undine's absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after
her, saying: "It's a wonderful find—how could you tell it would be such a
fit?"-it came to her quite easily to answer: "Why, we called her
after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born—" and
then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "It's from UNdoolay,
you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take.
He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I
remember the time he invented his Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the
Bible to get the name…“
As an prelude
to my own explanation of Wharton’s choice of the name “Undine Spragg”, which I’ve
hinted at in my Subject Line, and which I’ll reveal, below, here are three insightful
explanations of Wharton’s choice, which collectively pick up on several of
Wharton’s subtle literary hints:
“An
Undine by Any Other Name?” by Kevin Nelson
“According
to the Wikipedia entry on The
Custom of the Country, some have called Undine Spragg’s
name “the worst character name [ever] conceived...It’s an ugly, dreadful
name. But that doesn’t subtract from its consummate perfection.
Undine’s parents, however, aren’t likely to agree with me. [The above
‘greatest knack’ quotation] This is a stroke of genius by Wharton. The name
Undine, then, stands as much for a product with a market value as it
does the elegant curl or wave that a fashion-conscious social diva might impart
to her hair. Not to mention a preoccupation for all things French.
Now
interestingly, Undine’s second husband, Ralph Marvell, a
shy, reserved, and intelligent man with a deeply poetic cast of mind, sees
something slightly different than the Spragg’s in Undine’s name. He and his
wife are on their honeymoon in Italy, and the fact that they’re a terrific
mismatch hasn’t occurred to Ralph yet:
“He
spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression of his
tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last glance the
glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through which Undine’s figure
wavered nereid-like above him. “You never looked your name more than you do
now,” he said, kneeling at her side and putting his arm about her. She smiled
back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let
it drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated her
curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things.”
In
Greek legend, a nereid is a sea nymph, and even more pertinently in European
mythology, an ondine (or undine) is a water spirit that becomes ensouled
through marriage and child birth. So we have the wavering insubstantiality of a
beautiful nereid who has so little depth that she’s not even shallow, as
Nietzsche might say. And we have Undine’s quest to become something significant
and worthwhile through serial monogamist marriages. Undine Spragg may be an
ugly guttural choke of a name. But it’s perfectly conceived.” END QUOTE FROM
NELSON
“Review
of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the
Country” 9/26/12
by blogger Katherine ___
“…I was intrigued by the author's choice of the
name Undine for her protagonist. An undine is a water spirit, said to gain a
soul by marrying and having a child. So you might easily see the connection
between the mythological creature and Undine Spragg and the hope that Wharton
might have had for her main character as she created her. There's also the
German folktale of Ondine, in which a woman curses her unfaithful husband to
cease breathing. Shoe-on-the-other-foot syndrome, maybe? You get the sense that
Edith Wharton was not only fascinated with the monster she created, but
repelled by her actions at the same time. As such, the reader doesn’t quite
know whether to dislike Undine or laugh at her, because half the time her
antics are really quite ridiculous. At the end of the day, though, the reader
has to wonder: what’s all of this social striving for? To what end? That’s why
this novel is sometimes tinged with a hint of sadness.” END QUOTE FROM KATHERINE
“The
greatest knack for finding names”
by Sarah Emsley 7/18/13
“In a wonderful conversation between Undine Spragg’s future
husband Ralph Marvell and her mother, Mrs. Spragg, Ralph learns the source of Undine’s
beautiful first name. He has been thinking of her as a water-spirit, hearing
“echoes of divers et ondoyant in
his brain” (the quotation is from Montaigne’s
Essays, and in the 19th Century the story of Undine the
water-spirit was retold in a book by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and later in
two operas, with music by E.T.A. Hoffman & Albert Lortzing). But when he
says the name is “‘a wonderful find’” and asks, “‘how could you tell it would
be such a fit?’” Mrs. Spragg disappoints him with her explanation: “‘Why, we
called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born.’”
Undine is named for a product, a brand. Ralph is “struck and silent.” No
literary reference is intended, though Mrs. Spragg claims her husband is
“‘quite a scholar’”—the name is “‘from undoolay, you know, the French
for crimping,’” she adds.
What Mrs. Spragg says of her husband is true of Edith Wharton as
well: both have “‘the greatest knack for finding names.’” I love the name
Wharton chose for the heroine of this novel: “Undine Spragg” is such a great
combination of beautiful and harsh sounds (much like “Lily Bart” in The House of Mirth).
It’s no coincidence that her initials, U.S., also stand for “United States.”
Neither is it a coincidence that she’s from a place called Apex, which makes
her “U.S. of A.”…For further reading: Undine, or, the Water Spirit;
and Sintram and his Companions, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué,
trans. Thomas Tracy (1855). (There are also excerpts from Undine, or, the Water Spirit in the appendices in my Broadview edition of The
Custom of the Country).”
END QUOTE FROM EMSLEY
I was led to retrieve from the
Internet the above three explanations by my realization yesterday, while
delving into Wharton’s Custom for
another reason entirely, that there was something very suspicious in that peculiar name “Undine Spragg”, something
smacking of a word code. I’m particularly sensitive to coded wordplay in
character names, because of over a decade of experience decoding Jane Austen’s and
Shakespeare’s shadow stories.
In 2005 I recognized that LUCY FERRARS--being
Lucy Steele’s married name which comes into being when she marries Robert
Ferrars at the very end of Austen’s Sense
& Sensibility --- was Austen’s coded reference to the LUCIFEResque
aspects of Lucy’s character, in particular Lucy’s Satanic ability to manipulate
others into unwittingly doing her bidding – in S&S, to allow Lucy to become
the de facto power behind the throne
in the wealthy Ferrars family. I’ve also blogged numerous times about the
anagram-acrostics that Shakespeare scattered everywhere throughout his plays,
including perhaps most notably the disturbing perfect “SATAN” acrostic in Friar
Laurence’s speech to Juliet about the safety of her drinking the sleeping
potion.
So, my approach to decoding the meaning of “Undine
Spragg” was to suspect Wharton of the same kind of anagrammatical wordplay that
I already knew was part and parcel of the subtext of both Shakespeare and Jane
Austen. It took me less than two minutes to come up with a working hypothesis
of the two-word phrase which Wharton expected her knowing readers to figure out,
and then an enjoyable day of additional research, in order to make sense of
Wharton’s meaning in that two-word code, which turned out to be spot-on, in
ways I had no idea about before I found it, as I will explain below.
If you’re not anagrammatically inclined, the
following is the link to the online anagram generator into which I fed “undinespragg”.
Can you scroll through the “hits” and find the two-word phrase that caught my
eye? I’ll give my answer a little further down: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=UndineSpragg&t=1000&a=n
(scroll down)
(scroll down)
(scroll down)
My answer is:
GASPING UNDER
Finding that answer was when my real literary-sleuthing
fun began, as it took me an enjoyable two hours of browsing in the online text
of The Custom of the Country directed
by strategic word searching, in order to verify that this was actually the
two-word phrase which Edith Wharton was winking at so strongly –and indeed,
Edith Wharton, speaking ventriloquistically through her fictional puppet Mrs.
Spragg, had a very great knack for finding a name that would go to the heart of
the deepest themes of The Custom of the
Country.
First I
suggest to you that, in furtherance of Sarah Emsley’s wonderful 2012 article
about the influence of Jane Austen’s fiction on Edith Wharton, [Persuasions
Online #33/1 “Nothing against her, but her husband & her Conscience: JA’s
Lady Susan in Edith Wharton’s Old New York” ] that Wharton, in Mrs. Spragg’s
claim of her husband’s “knack”, also intended to produce a distinct echo of the
following, equally winking speech in Mansfield
Park:
“To good reading, however, she had been long
used: her uncle read well, her cousins all, Edmund very well, but in Mr.
Crawford’s reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever
met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in
turn; for WITH THE HAPPIEST KNACK, the happiest power of jumping and guessing,
he could always alight at will on THE BEST SCENE, or THE BEST SPEECHES of each;
and whether it were dignity, or pride, or tenderness, or remorse, or whatever
were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty. It was truly dramatic.
His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his
reading brought all his acting before her again; nay, perhaps with greater
enjoyment, for it came unexpectedly, and with no such drawback as she had been
used to suffer in seeing him on the stage with Miss Bertram….”
I’ve believed for some time that the reference to
Henry Crawford’s “happiest knack” in the above passage is a giant wink by Jane
Austen that points to a much deeper and broader allusion to Shakespeare’s late
history, Henry VIII, not only in Mansfield Park, but also in Austen’s
preceding novel, Pride & Prejudice.
And similarly, I now claim that Wharton had exactly the same covert authorial
agenda.
So I was encouraged to take an even deeper dive
into the literary subtext of Custom than
the above-quoted Wharton scholars had previously attempted. I started from
Emsley’s observations (“the quotation is from Montaigne’s Essays, and in the
19th Century the story of Undine the water-spirit was retold in a book by
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and later in two operas, with music by E.T.A.
Hoffman & Albert Lortzing”) and also this one by Katherine ___ (“There's
also the German folktale of Ondine, in which a woman curses her unfaithful
husband to cease breathing”), and look where it quickly took me.
The full quotation from Montaigne, Essays, Book
1, pointed to by Mrs. Spragg’s “visitor,
with a smile, and echoes of divers et
ondoyant” is as follows:
“Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and
undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on
him.”
So, it seems, Mrs. Spragg’s learned, smiling
young visitor understood that Undine Spragg’s name marks her as a
quintessential Montaignesque character---“marvelously vain, diverse and
undulating”—inconstant and therefore almost impossible to judge accurately.
Next, I turned to Wikipedia for more detail on
Fouque’s novella:
“the story of Ondine and Hans, characters in Ondine, a 1938 play by Jean Giraudoux based on traditions
tracing back through Undine (a
novella of 1811) to earlier
European folk tales. Ondine tells her future husband Hans, whom she had just
met, that "I shall be the shoes of your feet ... I shall be the breath of
your lungs". Ondine makes a pact with her uncle the King of the Ondines
that if Hans ever deceives her he will die. After their honeymoon, Hans is reunited
with his first love Princess Bertha and Ondine leaves Hans only to be captured
by a fisherman six months later. On meeting Ondine again on the day of his
wedding to Bertha, Hans tells her that "all the things my body once did by
itself, it does now only by special order ... A single moment of inattention
and I forget to breathe". Hans and Ondine kiss, after which he dies.”
You can imagine my excitement to read that
greater detail, as I’d be hard pressed to better encapsulate the fatally
dangerous power of Fouque’s Undine than in “gasping under”, the two-word phrase
Wharton hid in plain sight in the name of her own dangerously powerful heroine Ondine
Spragg.
I.e., I claim Wharton started from the folk name “Undine”,
so as to tag her novel to Touque’s novella, and then Wharton precisely constructed
the surname “Spragg” letter-by-letter so as to be a perfect anagram of “GASPING
UNDER”, so as to bring in that concept of fatal suffocation as the hard price
of unfaithfulness.
And there I’ll end this first half of my
discussion of Wharton’s heroine’s name “Undine Spragg”. Tomorrow, I’ll return
with a detailed textual unpacking of the many ways in which Wharton
subliminally echoed the motif of suffocation from Fouque’s novella, and
brilliantly grafted the simple folk tale onto a complex feminist critique of
Wharton’s sexist world, which (as predicted by Mary Wollstonecraft) turned
women into Undine Spraggs, who would leave men gasping under water in their
wake, because their society suffocated their aspirations, and gave them no
honorable path toward self-realization.
Which all dramatically validates Emsley’s
brilliant detection of resonance between Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Wharton’s
Undine Spragg. In both, we see a woman behaving very badly, but somehow we
cannot entirely blame her, because she is in a larger sense a Nemesis sicced on
a deserving patriarchy.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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