ABSTRACT
Both Edith Wharton and Willa Cather illustrate, moreover, the rapid, sometimes confusing education of Undine Spragg and Thea Kronborg in a range of matters for which their provincial up bringing could not have prepared them; they are, like Lionel Trilling’s young man, ‘confronted by situations whose meanings are dark to them’. Yet in many ways, Trilling’s delineation of the subgenre describes not only the novels he mentions, but also Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Although there is no biological mystery behind Eden Bower, Cather and Wharton portray the gulf that separates these young women from their provincial families, as well as the vast differences that lie between these girls’ provincial upbringing and their adult successes in a wider and more sophisticated world. Wharton seems to want to distance herself from Undine even more than from Elmer Moffatt, through whom, she sketches the story of the successful young man from the provinces.
