This final scene is more than an exposure of Selden's coy and dishonest treatment of Lily, however; it is also the moment when Wharton "outs" a subtle but similar aspect of her own narrative strategy. Although the novel is told for the most part through the points of view of different characters, with all of the limitations and unreliability that such perspectives bring, it is also "interrupted" frequently by an omniscient narrator who claims to know certain truths about Lily--truths that other characters, we readers, and Lily herself are not necessarily privy to. The final reference to "the word which made all clear" is the most blatant example of this: there is "a word" which will clarify the ambiguities of this novel and this character, but the narrator will not tell us what it is--and it is a clue into both the difficulties inherent in "reading" Lily, and a particular strategy for doing so.

If Selden is guilty of colonizing Lily with his own simplified and romantic view of her, the narrator is guilty of a series of narrative "hijackings" in which, as I will show, she derails the course of Lily's thoughts at crucial moments, figuratively wrapping a hand around Lily's mouth just as she seems to be on the brink of insight or breakthrough.

Both of these factors in Lily’s “framing” exacerbate the insistent and deliberate theme of captivity present in the novel to the point that it becomes appropriate to consider The House of Mirth a captivity narrative. Doing so--that is, bringing critical literature developed around and about captivity narratives to bear on Wharton's novel--not only complicates and enriches our understanding of Wharton's negotiations with the sentimental tradition she was writing out of, it also offers another way to clarify what is arguably Lily's central problem: the frustratingly invisible source of her captivity.

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