Divorce, the American Custom, in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1933), Wharton acknowledges that she “had a great admiration for ‘A Modern Instance,’ and ‘Silas Lapham,’ and should have liked to talk with their author about the art in which he stood so nearly among the first.”1 She writes, “Howells was the first to tell the tragic potentialities of life in the drab American small town; but the incurable moral timidity which again and again checked him on the verge of a masterpiece drew him back even from the logical conclusion of ‘A Modern Instance,’ and left Robert Grant the first in the field which he was eventually to share with Lewis and Dreiser.”2 Figuring prominently in both A Modern Instance (1881) and Grant’s Unleavened Bread (1900), divorce appears to be a common feature of the “drab American small town.”