Giddy Up. Horses in Custom of the Country?
Edith Wharton plays with horse details in Custom of the Country. But why?
I buddy read Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton with my friend + fellow Substacker/Stacks Packer
this month. While we read, I meticulously annotated every mention of horses in the story, a goal of mine on this reread. All accumulated, there’s 20 horsey moment across 442 pages. (That’s quite a lot of horse content!)I’ve been staring at those annotations for days, trying parse out why there’s so much horse stuff. I don’t fully get it yet, but here are my findings.
The facts
All of Undine’s men have at least one horse moment (see below).
Undine’s most alluring features are equine: her long mane of hair and her neck.
Undine has a farrier. Well, really, she’s a manicurist and stylist, but casting Mrs. Heaney’s hair and nail ministrations as farrier-work in this conversation feels right. Mrs. Heeny also wonders if Paris is just “one-horse after New York.”1
Good breeding. Strong lineage. Important things for horse trading, no? Also very important to the husband trade, which Undine is deeply invested in.
I need to thank
for this one: This story takes place at a time when cars and carriages coexist, so the story has this faint background tension between actual horses and the manmade horse power of engines.
Next, we need to talk about the boys and their horses.
Millard Binch
Undines’ first fiancé was a dud without a horse. He lost Undine in a horse-related way. Moffatt stole his seat next to Undine on a stage coach ride in Apex, and the rest was history.2
The Aaronson Episode, NYC
A “handsome Austrian riding-master” nearly swept Undine off her feet in Central Park when she first got to the city.3 The incident is known in her family as the “Aaronson episode.” Since that episode, Undine’s mom kind of freaks out every time Undine wants to “go for a ride,” fearing she’ll get engaged with another handsome horseman on a whim.4
Ralph’s Imaginary Steeds
Ralph has a whole Perseus/Pegasus/Andromeda daydream on his honeymoon with Undine in Italy. In the same daydream, he also likens himself to Don Quixote riding Rosinante. His idealistic head is in the clouds when it comes to Undine.
“…he seemed to see her like a lovely rockbound Andromeda, with the devouring monster Society careering up to make a mouthful of her; and himself whirling down on his winged horse—just Pegasus turned Rosinante for the nonce—to cut her bonds, snatch her up, and whirl her back into the blue…”
Book I, Chapter VI, p 66
Paul’s French Pony Makes Everything OK?!
Undine’s son goes through a lot after Ralph dies, but Undine seems to think everything’s ok once Paul gets a pony.
“But once released from Paris, and blessed with rabbits, a poney and the freedom of the fields, he became again all that a charming child should be, and for a time it amused her to share in his romps and rambles.”
Book V, Chapter XXXVIII, p 366
Raymond’s Draft Horses vs. Raymond’s Brother’s Horse Money
Raymond’s truest calling is “to faire valoir” (farm) his family land. It makes perfect sense that he owns draft horses to do the plowing. His brother Hubert, on the other hand, is a bit of a wastrel who bets on polo games and horse racing.5
In fact, Hubert’s horse betting is why Undine has a no-good-horrible-very-bad summer. There’s no money for her to travel to the riviera. Raymond has to pay off his brother’s gambling debts. As a result, she has to settle for the summer entertainment of riding draft horses occasionally into town.6
Peter Van Degan’s Horse Hobby
He’s into racehorses.7
Mr. Spragg
Undine had some horse-themed thoughts about her dad.
“Couldn’t her father understand that nice girls, in New York, didn’t regard getting married like going on a buggy-ride?”
Book I, Chapter X, p 96
I guffawed at her audacity, given her history with Moffatt (which you’ll see below involves buggies and horse).
Elmer Moffatt: Takes the Reins
Wharton peppers Moffatt’s plot appearances with horse details.
My favorite example is in the middle of the book in Undine’s Paris apartment. Elmer is there looking out the window at the “green domes” of a horse chestnut tree. (This detail feels conspicuous. Of all the trees and things to look at out a Paris window…a horse chestnut, eh?) In the same scene, Moffatt treats his chair like a horse: “grasping a lyre-backed chair by its gilt cords, and sitting down astride of it.”8 Later when he gets up, he returns to “to his equestrian seat on the lyre-backed chair” (p 312).
Paris isn’t the only place and time where Moffatt has taken the reins.
Elmer wooed Undine back in their Apex days with horses. First, he was able to steal her away from Millard Finch by sitting next to her on a stage coach ride. A short while later, he whisked her away on a “buggy and a fast colt.”9 In their early courtship, he sealed the deal with this super smooth horsey line:
“Oh, shucks!” he sneered. “What do I care, in a one-horse place like this? If it hadn’t been for you I’d have got a move on long ago.”
Book V, Chapter XLIII, p 413
At the end of the book, when Undine and Elmer make plans to remarry (which involves divorcing Raymond de Chelle), he brings up an Apex memory: how he used to wait for Undine with a horse and buggy outside church in Apex.10
There’s one more “horse + Moffatt” moment: In NYC, after years of not seeing each other, Undine and Moffatt have an inauspicious run-in at the opera, on the exact same day her engagement to Ralph is made public. A few days later, Undine agrees to meet Moffatt in secret in Central Park to talk. Now get this: they rendezvous in the exact same spot where Undine got engaged to the riding-master Aaronson! She mildly reflects on that coincidence just before spotting her ex-husband Moffatt on the path. What a mess!
Soooooo, what do you think?
All this horse stuff is a lot, right? Now that I’ve laid it all out, I’m still trying to figure out the deeper meaning of the motif. Curious if you have an interpretation!
Book V, Chapter XXXVII, p 362
Book V, Chapter XLIII, p 409
Book 1, Chapter II, p 23:
“Even since they had come to New York she had been on the verge of one or two perilous adventures, and there had been a moment during their first winter when she had actually engaged herself to the handsome Austrian riding-master who accompanied her in the Park.”
Book 1, Chapter IV, p 37
“Oh, Undine!” fluttered Mrs. Spragg. She always had palpitations when Undine rode, and since the Aaronson episode her fears were not confined to what the horse might do.
Book V, Chapter XXXIX, p 448
“Only Hubert and his wife were absent. They had taken a villa at Deauville, and in the morning papers Undine followed the chronicle of Hubert’s polo scores and of the Countess Hubert’s racing toilets.”
Book V, Chapter XXXVIII, page 367 (Draft Horses)
“To faire valoir the family acres had always, it appeared, been Raymond’s deepest-seated purpose, and all his frivolities dropped from him with the prospect of putting his hand to the plough.”
Book 1, Chapter IV, p 40
“who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell’s cousin, the hero of “Sunday Supplements,” the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning racehorses and “crack” sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column?”
Book 1, Chapter IX, p 85
“Could it be that the hand now adorned with Ralph’s engagement ring had once, in this very spot, surrendered itself to the riding-master’s pressure? At the thought a wave of physical disgust passed over her, blotting out another memory as distasteful but more remote.”
Book V, Chapter XLV, p 428
“Why, you were born a Baptist, weren’t you? That’s where you used to attend church when I waited round the corner, Sunday mornings, with one of old Hober’s buggies.”
Book III, Chapter XXX, p 308
I will definitely be thinking about this!!