Chapters 10, 11, and 12 of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth take a deep look into
the rapid pace at which Lily’s life is unraveling before her eyes, and I was
able to gain a lot of understanding and insight into the events and characters
of the novel that I had never obtained before in reading the book. What struck
me most in reading these chapters was my sadness, sympathy, and pity for Lily.
I had sympathized for her very little previously in the book, for even if the
events in her life were incredibly unfair and unfortunate, I felt that she had,
in a way, brought them upon herself through her pride, desire for luxury, and
unwillingness to take Selden’s advice and leave her society behind. However,
after Lily leaves Mrs. Hatch, obtains a job at a millinery and then loses it,
rents a room at a boarding house, and even resorts to a prescription for a
dangerous drug that used to be Mrs. Hatch’s (by the way, I’m afraid this might
be foreshadowing), I feel nothing but absolute sadness for Lily. She may not be
a perfect person, but no one, no matter what, deserves what she has been
through and what she is now experiencing. Honestly, it was heartbreaking and
even a little scary for me to see Lily go from beautiful, desired, happy, and
social to sallow, utterly alone, miserable, and purposeless. Of all the
interesting events that took place in these chapters, however, her desperate
visit to Selden at the Benedick was, in my opinion, the most critical and
poignant scene in the entire novel.
I
responded very strongly to this seemingly final conversation between Lily and
Selden from pages 247 to 252. To begin with, I have wanted so badly for Selden
and Lily to end up together since the very first chapter of the book when they
conversed in Selden’s study, so to see in this conversation that they would
never be able to end up marrying each other honestly broke my heart; however, I
also responded to several other important things that I discovered while
reading this conversation. To begin with, when thinking to herself, Lily refers
to Selden as being “the only spring her heart had ever known” (Wharton, 247),
and this confirmed to me that she truly loved Selden, and he had been her
ultimate happiness in life. Until reading this phrase, I honestly was never
sure of whether or not Lily truly loved Selden. Most importantly, I found this conversation
to be the most pivotal and critical scene in the book because, FINALLY, Lily
lets her guard down, swallows her fatal pride, succumbs to spontaneity, and
speaks freely from her heart. The entire novel Lily has seemed to build a wall
between herself and most everyone else, resisting the love she received from
even those most dedicated to her, such as Selden and Gerty; furthermore, she
found spontaneity to be sinful in the society in which she thrived, and so
impulses of the heart were nonexistent in Lily’s world. Lily’s pride proved to
be one of her most persistent obstacles throughout the novel, so for Lily to
pour her heart out to Selden in her speech from pages 250 to 251 was not only
unprecedented, but a remarkable transformation for her character. I literally
wanted to clap for her when she finally, for once in her life, wore her heart
on her sleeve and told Selden that he had been her happiness and that she was
truly sorry for everything she had done to spoil that love. I found one of the
most poignant and important quotes in the entire novel to be when Lily
confesses, “Once- twice- you have given me the chance to escape from my life,
and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my
mistake- I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before”
(Wharton, 250). This statement alone was so powerful to me because it reveals a
number of things: her humility, her maturity for owning her mistakes and faulty
choices, her surrender of her pride, and her final admittance that her life in
high society had not been the path to true happiness for her. Although I now
finally understand why she and Selden will never be together, I am
indescribably glad that they were able to share in this conversation, and I
found the things that were shared in this conversation to have comprised the
most important passage in The House of
Mirth altogether.
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