It is almost cruelly ironic how Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship comes to an end. Out of all of here husbands and relationships, Tea Cake was the only one who really loved Janie through and through. In regards to her previous husbands, she ran away from Logan, had to basically wait patiently for Jody to die as their relationship deteriorated, but with Tea Cake, she had to commit an act of violence, though that is the last thing she wanted to do, in order to protect herself. She was actually truly happy with Tea Cake and he with her, and that can be seen in the last scene that Tea Cake is coherent and not mad from the rabies. The fact that she has to plan out a “just-in-case” plan of having the 3 empty cartridges go off before Tea Cake can actually shoot her is almost desperately sad, as she tells herself that he would not actually harm her or try to shoot her, just scare her.

How are the reader supposed to feel about Tea Cake’s death and how it happened, along with the aftermath? Janie had to kill him, and, because of that, her love for him is put into question by the town and is only redeemed by his lavish funeral procession. But she actually goes to trial and during that time the whole town questions her love for him. When the funeral does happen, she is noted to not be dressed mournfully, because “she was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief” (pg. 189). The violence involved in Tea Cake’s death, Janie’s part in it, and her trial and grief afterwards, really throws into perspective all the feelings and emotions that she and the reader experience throughout the novel. With her other husbands, Janie feels undervalued, unappreciated, and unfulfilled, but with Tea Cake, she is whole, and yet he ends up acts violently and “ferociously” (pg. 182) towards her because of his sickness and she also must be violent towards him in order to live. The sad irony is that she and Tea Cake had true passion and love for each other and it ended up manifesting into “violence”, and that is how Janie’s story ends; she “survives” the death of her first dream (Logan), the death of a husband who had “rescued” her (Jody), but has to kill the one person that really loved her and made her happy (Tea Cake actually fulfills her “dream”). It is almost as if Janie gets the opposite of a happy ending; however she is content, as she has been to the “horizon and back” (pg. 191). According to what Janie says, the reader too should feel as peace as Janie does.

In the first “A Berlin Diary”, the reader meets Isherwood’s fictitious version of himself and his initial experience of Berlin before the political changes that Nazism brings to Germany, which grows more apparent in the environment and the text itself as the story continues. One of the first characters the readers meet is Frl. Schroeder, a kind and caring landlady. She is endearing in the fact that she acts like a motherly figure to Isherwood after he moves into the boarding house.

Her dialogue with Isherwood is not only intimate and personal, but shows a bit of how she and the city have changed. She is not just a character meant to introduce the scene before Nazi Germany, but introduce the history and how things have initially started changing. However, she in no way is a negative figure or cast in a negative life; it is as if she is meant to reflect his initial view of Berlin and Germany and its peoples, that originally the citizens were just like citizens of any other learned European country. Frl. Schroeder reflects that in being a kind, caring, older feminine figure that everyone can relate to; a sort of maternal figure. The dialogue that they share, whether it be her telling him something about herself or their being a conversation together, that though culturally Germany and England are different (he tells Frl. Hippi he finds that German and English girls are “very different” (222)), the people are relatable to and are not inherently different. Frl. Schroeder, though later shows a jealous and angry side of herself, is meant to set the stage for the story and how Isherwood’s experience in Berlin shifts from “home life” to war.

In Illusion the readers meet a new woman, the very “sensible” and “gentlemanly” Miss Bruce. Miss Bruce is every inch a respectable new woman, having a British character and a part of higher middle class. In order to maintain being a proper “artist” of the Parisian Salon, as being a “woman” and also an “artist” are incompatible, she must give up her femininity; her status and mobility is always under a critical eye. The narrator, in having to go through Miss Bruce’s wardrobe, reveals that Miss Bruce has actually made “frivolous” feminine purchases, dresses, make-up, and nightgowns. Miss Bruce, while a “new woman”, still longs for beauty and some amount of femininity—and the narrator understands, “I knew. …I knew it all;…the perpetual hunger to be beautiful and the thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve, well hidden under her neat dress, more or less stifled, more or less unrecognized.”

It is through the scene when the narrator is going through Miss Bruce’s wardrobe that it is suggested that being a new woman is not really good social development. Being a new woman is not just about denying femininity, but rejecting the female identity entirely by being “sensible” and “gentlemanly”. It is setting up a new class of women but it is not a positive growth, at least the way Rhys presents it; the new woman is a woman acting as a man, not actually independent or any freer from societal standards and norms than the usual woman. The new woman has to adhere to acting more like a gentleman, and has to reject what is perceived as feminine frivolity, like beauty. If the “new woman” truly meant that women had more social mobility and freedom, there would not be requirements, but the new woman would be able to do as she chooses, whether she chooses to marry, live alone, be beautiful, be sexually free, and the list goes on. Rhys is showing in Illusion that it is not just Miss Bruce living an illusion, but that the “new woman” is a social illusion.

When the readers finally meet Miss Kilman, though Mrs. Dalloway is afraid that her daughter, Elizabeth, is in love with her, surprisingly, it turns out Elizabeth loathes and pities her. Elizabeth’s relationship with Miss Kilman is somewhat convoluted and strange. When the reader is looking through Elizabeth’s perspective, we sees that Elizabeth is intrigued by Miss Kilman, pondering what the woman could be thinking, though also put off by her. It seems like Elizabeth is interested, really, not in Miss Kilman herself, but how Miss Kilman functions and thinks. On the other hand, Miss Kilman is obsessed with Elizabeth, seeing her as “beauty” and “youth”. During the meeting we see not only the current dialogue between them, but past dialogue and internal thoughts of each other.

Elizabeth seems to be friends with Miss Kilman because, although she seems to despise her, Miss Kilman represents the opposite of what Mrs. Dalloway seems to be to Elizabeth, “what interested Miss Kilman bored her mother… Miss Kilman was frightfully clever.” (131) Not only that, but Miss Kilman represents what Elizabeth may be ignorant of or look over: “Elizabeth never thought about the poor.” (131) Miss Kilman is so intriguing to Elizabeth because Elizabeth does not understand her and provides a very different view of the world and society—Elizabeth is almost using her as a pessimistic foil to herself to see her world differently. As Miss Kilman see Elizabeth as the epitome of beauty and youth, Miss Kilman could be seen as the epitome of ugliness and wasting away, always so pessimistic and being possessive of beauty and youth, latching on to it.

In Chapter 14, the last and closing chapter of The House of Mirth, the narration is once again in Selden’s point of view, like in the opening pages of book one and two. However, instead of looking at Miss Bart alive in the midst of the society and viewing her as society dictates, he is viewing her with more truth and emotion. Before, when the reader entered his mind at the beginnings of book one and two, his gaze was objectifying, analytical, and misogynistic, with him being composed or trying to be composed around Lily; but in the last chapter we see more raw and explicit emotions from him and his grappling with the truth. When he looks at Lily’s check book, the receipts, and, finally, the check to Trenor, it is almost as if he has lost all of that composure he has shown before, sinking into the chair next to the desk. It is said his “troubled vision cleared” and he is able to thinking about the truth and solve the mystery of the rumors that surrounded Lily and Trenor. It is in these final moments, “this fleeting victory over themselves”, that Lily is free of the societal shackles and rumors that had ruined her life and Selden is free to acknowledge the truth.

In the closing scene, there is a mixture of naturalist and modernist elements: should she had lived, Lily may have been far too poor to really be a part of society, but she nonetheless managed to keep her morality in a society that demanded she play a certain part and be immoral, and she also played that part to a certain extent. She is an anomaly, being neither the Stranger nor Other, though she becomes somewhat othered with her fall from grace because of Mrs. Dorset and not using the letters, but her burning the letters becomes her redemption as goes against what naturalism and society deems to what she should do and how she could have saved herself. She saves herself in a different way, and Selden is bearing witness to that; his emotions that the reader sees in the end, his wanting to confirm his love for Lily, and his trying to understand the truth of the rumors surrounding Lily really cements his position as the Stranger even though he claims to “had loved her” and has more emotions shown this time. There will always be some degree of objectiveness in his analysis of society and Lily, even when mourning in “this moment of love” he is thinking about the stakes of their could-have-been relationship and what the future may have held for them.

(note: sorry if this is hard to understand… I’m not the best at translating thoughts onto words on a page!)