House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [14]
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:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall,
Like death when he shuts up the day of life.
In act 5, scene 3, when Romeo discovers Juliet, apparently dead in the tomb, she seems more beautiful than ever:
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light....
Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
In the final chapter Selden, in a Poe-like scene with ghoulish overtones, confronts Lily’s corpse. Like Romeo, he discovers a tableau mort rather than a living woman. Still trying to distinguish between the real and artificial Lily, “He stood looking down on the sleeping face which seemed to be like a delicate impalpable mask over the living lineaments he had known. He felt that the real Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of helplessness” (p. 345). When he finds the check that she’d made out to Trenor and left on her table, and that freed her from an intolerable obligation, Selden finally realizes, from factual rather than circumstantial evidence, that Lily has sacrificed herself to save him from an ugly scandal. Romeo kills himself when he discovers Juliet; Selden merely feels penitential.