In the last chapters of The House of Mirth, Lily experiences a new kind of containment in the working class that parallels restriction under society’s customs, but also contrasts sharply with Lily’s conscious subjection to restraint within society. The narrator utilizes the metaphor of a “great gilt cage” to depict the abstract sense of confinement created by the set of restrictions and customs of high society (Wharton 54). Though Lily resents the restrictions placed on her in society, she consciously chooses to remain a part of society and hold onto many of the material values and aspirations of society.

On the other hand, the world of the working classes into which Lily must enter reflects a more concrete type of containment, from which it is nearly impossible for Lily to escape. The descriptions of the physical spaces Lily inhabits in this world reflect this more concrete confinement from which Lily cannot raise herself. For instance, once she is forced to earn her own living, Lily’s life plays out in a series of cell-like, enclosed spaces such as the millinery workroom (Wharton 277) and Lily’s dingy room in the boardinghouse (Wharton 282). Additionally, the structure of the paragraph in which Lily encounters Miss Silverton parallels Lily’s movement from the expansive and fashionable avenues of New York into the small, confining spaces of the world in which she must now live: “this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty’s stairs, and of the cramped blind-alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined to be mounted by dull people” (Wharton 258). The physical descriptions of spaces in the last chapters of this novel reflect this concrete stagnation and repression that sharply contrasts with the relative liberty found within the more abstract “great gilt cage” (Wharton 54). Lily feels confined and restrained in both society and in the working class; however, there is a key difference in her conscious choice to remain in society despite this resentment of her repression and the impossibility of her escape from the poverty in which she finds herself at the end of the novel.