ABSTRACT
In The Custom of the Country Edith Wharton chooses as her theme the levels of incomprehension that surround her characters, and the ways in which the world they live in can no longer be understood fully but only vaguely and in fragments. After all, the scene of translation between Undine Spragg and Elmer Moffatt is emblematic of then arrative dynamics of Wharton’s entire novel. Wharton on the other hand employs an opposite strategy – obscuring the central financial plot of the novel and allowing us only glimpses of it. Wharton continues to think about Ralph’s reading of Moffatt’s story, emphasizing repeatedly the impossibility of arriving at an authoritative version of the story or the truth. Wharton emphasizes the reading process, the way in which Ralph Marvell is trying to get information. Wharton delineates the development in Undine’s mind from separating her world from finance to becoming engrossed in it.
