ABSTRACT
Edith Wharton’s twenty-eight-year marriage produced no biological children, but she had a lifelong interest in the welfare of the young and created many fictional juvenile portraits. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton explores social and moral disintegration in the modern American family and voices concern that the direction parenting was taking boded ill for the nation as a whole. Wharton’s depiction of Undine Spragg reflects a larger literary and cultural trend. Wharton suffered under her yoke and eventually broke free of maternal proscriptions, establishing permanent residence in Europe around the time she wrote The Custom of the Country. Wharton’s contemporary, Charles Augustus Stoddard, Presbyterian minister, journalist and, from 1885 to 1902, the editor of the New York Observer, wrote a 1904 column, signed ‘Augustus’, in which he gives advice on the subject of the ‘Children of the Rich’.
