The final chapters of The House of Mirth are deliberately ambiguous about whether Lily Bart's death is accidental or intentional, and this ambiguity is precisely the point Wharton is making about the impossibility of a clean resolution. Students often want a definitive answer and will argue confidently for one reading without acknowledging the textual evidence that complicates it. Grading these essays requires checking whether a student has engaged with the ambiguity itself as meaningful, rather than resolving it too quickly in either direction. An essay that argues Lily's death is "clearly" a suicide or "clearly" an accident, without qualification, has usually missed something important.

One frequent misreading treats Lily's decision to burn Bertha Dorset's letters as a purely selfless, redemptive act that resolves all of her earlier moral compromises. A more careful reading recognizes that this gesture is genuinely complicated, since it costs Lily her last possible means of financial and social leverage at the moment she needs it most. Students who can hold both readings in tension, seeing the act as both admirable and self-destructive, typically produce stronger essays than students who pick one interpretation and ignore the other entirely.

Another common error is treating the final scene between Lily and Selden as a straightforward romantic tragedy, framing the novel as primarily a failed love story. While their relationship matters, essays that center the ending purely on romance often overlook the novel's larger argument about economic dependency and social exile. Feedback should push students to connect the personal tragedy to the systemic one Wharton has been building across the entire book, rather than letting the romantic frame overshadow the social critique.

Grading the Ambiguity Itself

Because Wharton never resolves the question of intent behind Lily's overdose, a strong essay should explicitly acknowledge that the text supports multiple readings and then argue for the interpretation it finds most persuasive, using specific evidence. This is a more sophisticated move than simply picking a side, and it should be rewarded in grading as such. A rubric line for "handling textual ambiguity" gives teachers a clear place to distinguish between students who notice the uncertainty and students who paper over it.

• Acknowledgment that the text supports more than one reading of Lily's final choices
• A clear, defensible argument for one interpretation, grounded in specific textual evidence
• Attention to the letter-burning scene as morally complicated rather than simply noble
• Connection between the personal ending and the novel's broader critique of social and economic exclusion
• Avoidance of flat moralizing, such as reducing Lily's fate to a simple lesson about vanity

Why Students Resist Ambiguity

Many students come to literary analysis expecting a single correct interpretation, especially after years of assessments that reward finding the "right" answer. Ambiguous endings like this one can feel unsettling, which pushes students toward false certainty rather than genuine engagement with uncertainty. Explaining this pattern directly to a class, before the essay is assigned, often produces noticeably stronger drafts than leaving students to discover the ambiguity on their own halfway through drafting a confident, oversimplified argument.

Modeling one paragraph of ambiguity-aware analysis in class, showing students what it looks like to argue a position while still respecting the text's complexity, tends to be more effective than simply instructing students to "consider multiple interpretations" in an assignment prompt. Once students see the move in action, they can replicate a version of it in their own writing, which shows up clearly in the quality of the essays that come back for grading.

Grading Consistency Across a Large Class

Because the ending supports multiple defensible readings, teachers grading a full class set need a clear standard for what counts as sufficient evidence for any given interpretation, regardless of which one a student chooses. Without that standard, grading can start to feel inconsistent, rewarding confidence over quality of argument. Writing out two or three sample thesis statements in advance, one for each major reading of the ending, helps calibrate expectations before grading begins and keeps feedback fair across very different arguments.

This kind of calibration takes time upfront but saves time and reduces second-guessing during the actual grading process, especially for essays that fall into gray areas between "strong" and "adequate." Teachers who build this kind of preparation into their workflow, or who use tools that help maintain rubric consistency across dozens of essays, tend to produce feedback that students trust more, since it reads as principled rather than arbitrary from one paper to the next.

What This Teaches Beyond the Novel

Learning to write confidently about an unresolved ending is a skill that extends well past this one novel, since so much serious literature resists tidy conclusions. Students who can argue a position while acknowledging its limits are practicing a form of intellectual honesty that will serve them in far more contexts than a single literature unit. Grading that rewards this honesty, rather than punishing it for lacking false certainty, reinforces a habit of mind worth building deliberately.

For teachers managing many sections or a large enrollment course, keeping this standard consistent across every graded essay can be genuinely difficult without support. Rubrics that explicitly name ambiguity-handling as a graded skill, paired with tools that help track how consistently that standard is applied across a stack of papers, make it far more likely that every student receives feedback calibrated to the same expectations, not just the ones whose essays happen to be graded on a less tired evening.