House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [14]
Wharton emphasizes throughout that Lily is alone in the world. When Selden joins Lily at Bellomont—and she lies to, abandons, and loses Gryce—Selden thinks, after seeing her that morning in a moment of intimate disarray, “That is how she looks when she is alone!” (p. 74). The thought of her in solitude excites him and finally provokes him to propose to her in a characteristically half-hearted fashion. He has the rare ability, she later notes, to draw out her real self, which “was so little accustomed to go alone!” (p. 102). In the final chapter, when he rushes, too late, to her room in the boarding house and discovers her dead, Gerty leaves the room and Selden stands “alone with the motionless sleeper on the bed” (p. 345).
Insufficiently calculating and with no instinct for self-preservation, Lily is prevented by moral scruples from saving herself. All her choices would have been preferable to the pathetic but noble death she finally chose. She could have married any of her suitors, used the incriminating letters against Bertha, borrowed money from Rosedale, learned to live modestly like Gerty, become a milliner’s model, repudiated her extortionate debt to Trenor and kept her inheritance. But blackmailing Bertha would have betrayed Selden and made her complicit with the repulsive Mrs. Haffen. Secretly burning the letters (as Selden failed to do) was Lily’s way of proving her love for him and achieving a spiritual victory by returning good for evil. But Selden never knows about her sacrifice and, in the final irony, she gives up her life for an unworthy man. Torn between her faults and her destiny, Lily dies for a scruple in a tragedy that seems both avoidable and inevitable.
V
The weakest, most sentimental part of the novel, Lily’s late encounter with Nettie Struther, is also ironic. Some of the money she received from Gus and donated to Gerty’s charity has saved Nettie but helped ruin Lily. After being seduced, Nettie is rescued by a man who forgives and marries her; Lily remains chaste but is doomed when she fails to marry a protector. If Nettie’s baby grows up like her benefactor Lily and like her namesake Marie Antoinette, then she is also doomed.
Wharton’s description of Lily’s suicidal overdose of chloral, just after she leaves the protection of Nettie’s kitchen, draws on two of the greatest narcotic passages in English literature. Her longing to achieve oblivion, “to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit ... [and] end on this tragic yet sweet vision” (p. 340), recalls the rapturous longing for intoxicated extinction in John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk....
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Keat’s third line—“emptied some dull opiate to the drains”—is closely echoed in the last sentence of the novel, “draining their last moment to its lees.”
The other model for Lily’s death scene was Romeo and Juliet. In act 4, scene 1, Friar Laurence describes, like the druggist telling Lily about the potential danger of chloral, the effect the drug will have on Juliet:
Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humor, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease: