Divorce In Edith Wharton's The Custom Of The Country

In Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, we meet another well-educated and affluent male who suffers immensely when faced with a divorce. Ralph Marvell, like Howell’s Ben Halleck, is a marginal character. He is of the elite aristocrats in New York. Much like Halleck, he is depicted as fragile and ineffectual, as decomposing from the heaviness of the moral conflict that divorce intensifies and shoves in his face. However, unlike Halleck, Ralph actually experiences a divorce first hand, in which he is forced into against his will by a dominant woman. He also holds a prominent importance in society’s most desirable crowd, a social status that the crippled Halleck never quite attains. When divorce influences him to face the values he inherited, these values fail him, resulting with him taking his own life, making it “all right” for Undine in the end (Wharton, Custom 376). With his passing, the audience sees Undine’s rise, and Wharton creates a critique of both the old manner, represented by Ralph, and the present manner, represented by Undine, thematically studying their marriage and the

Wharton illustrates that divorce gives Undine the opportunity to remarry and start over. Previously restricted to her, these marriages give her entry into arenas, moreover, enabling her to move up the social ladder. However, with each advancement, she evens the field and is compelled to continue to strive for something better—previously unattainable—leaving behind a trail of refuse most vividly represented here by Ralph. This is a family that is based on matrimony in order to maintain an elite limited commonality that characteristically separates them from others. Divorce functions as a restraint in his circle, not a beneficial opportunity. It fosters a progressively shifting scene that disrupts a prior way of life and eventually bringing ruin to