“Undine Spragg – how can you?” are the opening words of The Custom of the Country. They reflect Mrs. Spragg's exasperated sense of wonder and confusion concerning her daughter's comportment. These sentiments are often shared by the reader as well. Who is this undereducated, small-town girl who claws her way to the top of the American expatriate world and becomes a leading figure in Parisian society? Why does she act the way she does? What complicates the response to these questions is that the story initially appears to supply a very straightforward answer, but which, upon examination, proves to be dissatisfying.

This novel, published in 1913, might easily be read as the story of a woman deeply frustrated by her economic marginalization in a man's world. A character in The Custom of the Country, Charles Bowen, gives a certain credence to this approach when he describes the infantilization of society women in the Gilded Age. According to Bowen, these women are loved and admired by husbands who nevertheless do not take them seriously:

Bowen's point is that the American socialite is frustrated because she is permitted to play no role other than a decorative one in her husband's accumulation and enhancement of wealth. She is kept away from his financial affairs and confined, as it were, to a gilded pedestal. This is, Bowen argues, a source of resentment and frustration among women and helps account in part for the burgeoning divorce rate. As a description of the social position of the well-off woman at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, this portrait may well have merit, although it has been contested. Yet it is hardly applicable to Undine, who both embraces and exploits the limits of her social position.