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When Mephistopheles is tempting the young, innocent Margaret to take a lover, he prompts her use of the phrase "country's custom." This is the interchange:
"If not a husband, then a beau for you!
It is to the greatest heavenly blessing,
To have a dear thing for one's caressing."!
And Margaret replies, "The country's custom is not so." Mephistopheles' retort, "Custom, or not! It happens, though." With her characteristic irony, Wharton takes Margaret's suitably innocent defense (that unmarried women do not take lovers) and turns that maxim into its very opposite: Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country takes lovers, even if not always married to them, as a means of improving her social and financial stature, not because - as in Margaret's case later in Faust, Part I - she thinks she loves them. Mephistopheles' use of the adjective "heavenly" is also twisted: Undine's husbands and lovers think of her as ideal, but much of the process of the novel is her disillusioning them. And while Margaret did not want to go against the custom of the country, Undine delighted in re-defining that custom, always to her own advantage.
A stronger similarity between Faust and Wharton's fiction occurs in The Age of Innocence. If we take Newland Archer as a Faust figure - hungry for knowledge, superior to his peers, set on changing his existence and country - then all the early passages in Wharton's novel, as Newland both scrutinizes his culture and...