Social Conflict Europe Triumphant -- Term Paper

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"(Wharton, Chapter 1) Undine, unlike Ralph, cannot decompose or fade in intensity for her vision is as clear and black and white. Until she marries Ralph Marvell, Undine is always judging others by social status, sizing up clothing, furniture, and appearance as coolly as the aristocrats of the American, but with a different, superficial, monetary standard of worth rather than a cultural standard of worth. Her values are just as shallow as those of Claire's family, although Undine is impressed by gold, rather than name.

When Undine marries into American society by wedding Ralph Marvell, on their honeymoon, it becomes clear that Ralph's values do not mesh with that of his wife -- Ralph prizes refinement over prizes. "Mr. Spragg's astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated maintaining a household on the earnings of his Muse was still matter for pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humors of their first weeks together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives which Ralph was to trap for his epic."(Chapter 10) Ralph envisions himself as creating a European epic, and transcending his American origins, but the true monuments of Europe dwarf his American social cache.

In Undine's quest, Ralph's fine family is represented merely as one step to even greater social glory -- the Platonic form of Old Europe. However, this proves a fruitless victory for Undine when overcoming the will of French husband and his prejudices against Americans prove to be far more challenging than those of her first husband.

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Undine was able to triumph against the rule of the Massachusetts elites in the American social playing ground, but French aristocrats prove more formidable. Rather than the amusement she craves, Undine finds stillness, torpor, and a kind of social death amongst the French, like the death Newman finds. The French attitude is thus: "What could be the possible object of leaving one's family, one's habits, one's friends? It was natural that the Americans, who had no homes, who were born and died in hotels, should have contracted nomadic habits: but the new Marquise de Chelles was no longer an American, and she had Saint Desert and the Hotel de Chelles to live in, as generations of ladies of her name had done before her. Thus Undine beheld her future laid out for her, not directly and in blunt words, but obliquely and affably, in the allusions, the assumptions, the insinuations of the amiable women among whom her days were spent." (Wharton, Chapter 32)

In the end, Undine, when she thinks she has won the ultimate social prize, has really lost everything. She cannot dominate the French anymore than Christopher Newman. The customs of Europe crush her, although her American commercial enthusiasm and aspirations proved no match for the pale imitation of aristocracy of the New England Marvell. Both Europe and America are incomplete societies, but Europe takes what it wants from America, and discards the rest, leaving America forever longing for what it can never attain, because it is too young a nation, and because class cannot be bought with commerce.

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