1. Before their last tea ceremony (act 4), Lily seems tempted to deploy the one weapon she has against Selden by using the incriminating letters to expose him. However, if she cannot enact an acceptable love scene, she is at least determined to demand another kind of standard theatrical moment, the recognition scene. So instead of presenting herself as an aesthetic display, she tells Selden of her ethically motivated decision to leave Mrs. Hatch’s employment. By this point Lily has made her most strenuous effort to escape the standard scenario, having internalized his injunctions and integrated them into her behavior. However, Selden still cannot acknowledge Lily’s real, albeit imperfect, efforts at moral self-reclamation －can- not respond to this actualizing of his abstract moral pronouncements---a failure Wharton stresses by creating a coup de theatre that fails to take place, the novel’s least understood remnant of turn-of-the-century drama, that is, the moment when Lily burns the letter between Selden and Bertha Dorset. ( 81)

2. “Perhaps Lily’s deepest need is to enact the closure of some recognizable theatrical scenario. Thus, as the novel concludes, just before she dies, she falls into the activity that has most characterized her life. Obsessively her imagination recollects and recombines the events of her existence---searching for a narrative that will confirm “Lily Bart” with finality. “She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible: her whole past was renacting itself at a hundred different points of consciousnesses” (520). It is not simply that Lily chooses to die. In nineteenth-century theater, heroines did die. If they had been virtuous, they died tragically; if they were no more than fallen women, they died trivially. In either case death was a suitable ending, and Wharton’s theatrical heroine had nowhere else to go. ( 83)”