ABSTRACT
In the closing pages of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, the heroine, Lily Bart, “accidentally” takes an overdose of chloral and slips into her eternal sleep. Almost thoughtlessly, certainly carelessly, Lily inscribes the closing punctuation mark on her life. Her “suicide” is reminiscent of the death of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening; both Lily and Edna do not so much choose death as they are denied the chance to choose life. Lily dies because she has failed in the conventional female quest to find her life in marriage, because she has tried, as she believed she should, to translate her beauty into fortune by marrying “well,” to trade her looks for the security of coverture as a worthy man’s wife.
