The House of Mirth: metaphors and similes

If I were like many readers, seeing the main character’s likability as a criterion of literary merit, I would dismiss The House of Mirth as worthless—Lily Bart is an idiot. Luckily, I’m not one of those readers. So I’m currently enjoying the writing, the metaphors and similes. Like this: 

“While her friend reproached her for missing the opportunity to eclipse her rivals, she was once more battling in imagination with the mounting tide of indebtedness from which she had so nearly escaped. What wind of folly had driven her out again on those dark seas?” (B.1, Ch.7) 

That’s good. 
Or: 

“She glanced at them a moment with the benign but vacant eye of the tired hostess, to whom her guests have become mere whirling spots in a kaleidoscope of fatigue; then her attention became suddenly fixed, and she seized on Miss Bart with a confidential gesture.” (B.1, Ch.8) 

The “kaleidoscope of fatigue” may be a bit showy, but that’s an interesting image nevertheless. 
Now, this is a scene after Lily Bart’s been told that her target Percy Pryce has been engaged to the rich but boring Evie van Osburgh—she is defeated: 

“The first two weeks after her return represented to Mrs. Peniston the domestic equivalent of a religious retreat. She "went through" the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of the penitent exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities. The topmost shelf of every closet was made to yield up its secret, cellar and coal-bin were probed to their darkest depths and, as a final stage in the lustral rites, the entire house was swathed in penitential white and deluged with expiatory soapsuds.” (B.1, Ch.9) 

Isn’t that so good? Edith Wharton’s metaphors aren’t as showy or self-conscious as Arundhati Roy’s in The God of Small Things. 
And then: 

“The stairs were still carpetless, and on the way up to her room she was arrested on the landing by an encroaching tide of soapsuds.” (ibid.) 

She seems to like tides, the metaphor is used quite a few times in the novel. Like: 

“… added Mrs. Trenor, whose present misery was being fed by a rapidly rising tide of reminiscence…” (B.1, Ch.4) 

And: 

“She was like a water-plant in the flux of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying her toward Lawrence Selden.” (B.1, Ch.5) 

The tides are an evocative and useful image, because Lily Bart is a practical and calculating woman who has a romantic side and sometimes yields to impulses. 

“Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but against the tide which was setting thither.” (B.1, Ch.12) 

The word “tide” appears 11 times in the book. 
A quick search on Gutenberg also suggests to me that there’s a bottle motif in The House of Mirth, but at the moment I’m not going to commit myself yet, except to share this passage: 

“Miss Bart was a keen reader of her own heart, and she saw that her sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that his presence shed a new light on her surroundings. Not that he was notably brilliant or exceptional; in his own profession he was surpassed by more than one man who had bored Lily through many a weary dinner. It was rather that he had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden's distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.” (B.1, Ch.5) 

(my emphasis) 
It’s a good passage—Edith Wharton distils to the image of cage and flies in a bottle everything readers need to know about high society, Lily’s feelings about it, and Lily’s feelings towards Lawrence Selden. 
Lily feels trapped, by society and women’s limited options, by conventions, by double standards and people’s judgment, by her own lack of money and expensive tastes. Her life feels like servitude. 

“Today, however, it renewed the sense of servitude which the previous night's review of her cheque-book had produced. […] 
Mrs. Trenor's summons, however, suddenly recalled her state of dependence, and she rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that she was usually too prudent to indulge.” (B.1, Ch.4) 

And: 

“Seated under the cheerless blaze of the drawing-room chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was "company"—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dulness to a middle age like Grace Stepney's. When she ceased to amuse Judy Trenor and her friends she would have to fall back on amusing Mrs. Peniston; whichever way she looked she saw only a future of servitude to the whims of others, never the possibility of asserting her own eager individuality.” (B.1, Ch.9) 

So far, reading The House of Mirth, I’ve not had a tingle in the spine. But it’s an enjoyable read nevertheless.