Wharton’s Wild West: Undine Spragg and the Dakota Divorce

Abstract:In Wharton’s fiction, the West is sometimes a space of freedom for women, particularly in relation to issues of divorce. In The Custom of the Country (1913), Undine Spragg’s journey from the Midwest town of Apex to New York and then France evokes comparisons between the wild West and cosmopolitan East, and her journeys west to obtain divorces in Dakota Territory and Reno emphasize the relationship between unregulated western US spaces and women’s increased cultural freedom. At the same time, Wharton complicates such freedom through her representation of Undine’s uneasy relationship to western sensibilities and her dissatisfaction with divorce. This depiction of divorce as simultaneously empowering and dissatisfying for women depends on the western contexts of Undine’s divorce drama. Wharton’s examination of divorce reveals her critique of the notion of freedom for women in the US West specifically and the connections between geography and empowerment more generally in her work.