Many unhappy returns: Wharton's fiction

Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country picks up some steam as she shifts her focus, after the opera scene, to the guy who's "courting" Undine, Marvell: it wasn't clear until she let us into his consciousness, but he's another distinct Wharton type - the socially privileged who chafes at the conventions and the expectations, dreams of some higher form of purpose or self-expression, but is caught by his own privileges, unable, at least easily, to give them up and follow another course in life. The male protag in Age of Innocence was similar - a successful lawyer who didn't have to work very hard, and would prefer to spend and evening reading his books rather than chatting at endless soirees. Marvell is even more ambitious - he wishes he could be an artist or a writer, but is even a step below dilettante, he can't complete anything. But he's very aware of what a limited life he is leading, and will lead - yet before he can make any sort of break from this stunted life in society, he falls in love (at first sight?) with Undine. They are completely different. She's a social outsider with incredibly firm snobbish convictions about the kind of life she wants and the marriage she will make. Her mother is coarse and opportunistic, and her father is a not only a nonentity but perhaps, it's hinted, a crook who attained his wealth through some shady dealings back in Apex (somewhere in the Midwest) - but Marvell cannot discern this, or he doesn't care. Suddenly, they're engaged, and planning an elaborate wedding - although maybe they'll skip the big ceremony and get married quickly and head off to Europe. We know that no good end is in sight for either of them - Marvell's depths and Undine's shallows will never even out. But the question is: who will change? who will break first? How will this marriage come to ruin? It seems clear that Undine's beauty will serve her ill in the long run - many men are flirting with her, including married men (and they're all cousins of some sort) in Marvell's set: the oily Peter van Degen esp. Wharton was a little slow in setting up these oppositions, but she now has the story in motion - heading on a long journey that will no doubt come to an unhappy, though oddly wistful ending as Wharton's fiction tends to do.