The Stentorian is the hotel in New York City where Undine Spragg stays with her family, and it represents the start of Undine’s journey to climb the social ladder. The hotel simultaneously represents the glamor of urban life while also representing something less glamorous than the even more desirable Fifth Avenue. Living in New York, in such a hotel, shows how far Undine has come from her start in Apex, but it also highlights how far she has to go if she ever wants to make it to Fifth Avenue, her ultimate goal.
In various ways, the Stentorian highlights the Spragg family’s middling wealth (compared to those who live on Fifth Avenue) and the hustle and bustle of upper-class city life. The word “stentorian” literally means loud (usually referring to a person’s voice), and this ties into both the bustle of life in the city as well as to the showy, intense lives of the people who make up New York’s upper echelon. Additionally, although the Spraggs stay in the Stentorian for quite a while, hotels suggest temporary living arrangements, and this impermanence clearly differentiates Mr. Spragg’s new wealth from the older, more established wealth of men like Mr. Dagonet or Raymond de Chelles (both of whom own property that has been in their families for a long time).
The Stentorian Quotes in The Custom of the Country
She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!
It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side. […] She had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine’s subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: “It’s better to watch than to ask questions.”
In a window of the long gallery of the chateau de Saint Desert the new Marquise de Chelles stood looking down the poplar avenue into the November rain. It had been raining heavily and persistently for a longer time than she could remember. Day after day the hills beyond the park had been curtained by motionless clouds, the gutters of the long steep roofs had gurgled with a perpetual overflow, the opaque surface of the moat been peppered by a continuous pelting of big drops.
“Sell it? Sell Saint Desert?”
The suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. Without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines.
The Stentorian Symbol Timeline in The Custom of the Country
