Lily Bart vs. Edna Pontellier

As I completed Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, I drew more and more parallels between the protagonist Lily Bart and Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of The Awakening. While Edna is a married woman established in her social milieu and Lily is in a sense trying to obtain what Edna already has, these two female characters have a lot in common.
For one, it is notable that both have lost their mother at an early age, and in this way have had to fend for themselves, forcing them to become aware of their own role in their surroundings, and what they must do to keep afloat (no pun intended...although that's a pretty nasty one). More importantly, both heroines, members of the upper class, are portrayed to have their own thoughts and desires, and, perhaps because they are aware of the strict social norms that surround them, are both unsatisfied and feel constricted due to their womanhood, or womaness.
Indeed, these two characters are tied to stereotypical female roles associate with the home: mother, wife, and housekeeper. They cannot dream of being anything else.
Of course, what brings the two women even closer to each other is their death, or suicide. While it is never clear if Lily actually commits suicide, I think it hard to see it otherwise. Everything Edna has ever strived for, a husband, good social standing, and wealth, seem by the end of the novel completely unattainable for her.
By contrast, Edna feels as though she cannot abide to, nor survive the strict social norms she must follow, and drowning is for her her only means of escape.
In both cases, it seems as though death is to both characters a mode in which they can find their own feminine space, a space not affected by masculine doctrines and imposed social codes. This is a space they can inhabit, that they can defy, and in which they can define themselves. While Edna's death is much more symbolic in that she kills herself by drowning (the water stands as an important symbol of femininity) that fact that Lily dies by "overdose" also insinuates slumber: an escape in a world that is not this one. For both women, then, death is not an end to their life, but rather enables the commencement of a new one, a better one...a life in which they can reinvent themselves.