She is an artist, a creator. She possesses the ability to create real gold, to transform people and to give them hope. In fact, Esther is like nature herself: “that one deathless flower of a face that bloomed among so many millions of the dead.” Like a fertility goddess, she offers hope in the wasteland of modern society.

In these chapters, Wolfe satirizes capitalistic waste and greed, tellingly representative of both the privileged class and their poorer counterparts. Both patron and servant are alike, the only difference being the degree of wealth and power each possesses. Above all else, the goal is to win, and corruption trickles down through the hive, the honeycomb. This corruption is represented, respectively, by the relationship between Esther and her maid and between Frederick and his chauffeur. In words reminiscent of a song of the period and used in The Great Gatsby, “the rich get rich and the poor get children.” Within the Jacks’ household, privilege and dishonesty are paralleled within the city at large.

Wolfe develops a universal theme of blindness and despair in which the false values and self-interest of society at large preshadow, much like the tremor below the earth, the coming apocalypse that Frederick and his united family will experience. The narrator foresees that when financial calamity strikes, Frederick’s “gaudy bubble” will explode “overnight before his eye.” For all his plumpness, ruddiness, and assurance, he will “shrink and wither visibly in three days’ time into withered and palsied senility.”

Yet another representative of the falsehood and sterility worshiped in this hollow and anchorless society is Piggy Logan. He is contrasted to Esther, Wolfe’s symbol of the “true” artist. His attire and demeanor are artificial, and he is described as being almost inhuman. His round and heavy face smudged darkly with the shaven grain of a thick beard, he seems like the brutal, ignorant characters in the earlier dream sequence. His forehead is “corrugated” and his close-cropped hair is composed of “stiff black bristles, mounting to a little brush-like pompadour” like the lifeless wire dolls he creates. In this upside-down world the real is perceived as artificial and the trivial superb, so that great writers, like Dickens and Balzac, have been found to be “largely composed of straw wadding” by both critics and readers at large. The partygoers, like the people of the wasteland, are indeed people living in a damned world, bored with all of the elements of life. They are bored with love and hate and life and death, but not with Piggy Logan and his wire dolls, at least not so long as his wire circus remains fashionable.

Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Esther has within her an ability to bring people together into a magical confluence, a “wonderful harmony.” Indeed, the party seems to take on its own separate life, creating a world of enchantment in which all assembled seem like creatures from a land where only wealth, joy, and beauty reside. Esther’s heart and soul infuse her world with splendor: “the warm heart and the wise, the subtle childlike spirit that was Mrs. Jack.” She is able to do what few others in her world—or any—are able to do: to create unity out of chaos. The characters in this dramatic sequence—for the party scene is dramatic in form—are introduced almost as through a receiving line, like the characters in a play. It is her very humanity that saves Esther from the death-in-life surrounding her in this Wolfean version of wasteland. She possesses “the common heart of life” and thus can associate easily with the wealthy and celebrated as well as with her servants and co-workers. She escapes the sterile and limited lives of her family and guests by unifying all classes, all time. She remembers the sorrow of her youth, and her recollections enrich her. Yet, she is still part of this world and is corrupted by it, so that she is unable to reject the hollowness at its core.

It remains for her lover, George Webber, to view the party and the behavior of her guests from the perspective of an observer. He can see what she will not, or cannot, see. George moves in and out of the activities of the party, but ultimately he is more clearly a Proustian onlooker than a participant. He penetrates the surface glitter of this wealthy, sophisticated gathering and sees Esther’s guests as they really are. His growing awareness of the guests’ corruption—and of his own potential for being swept down into their moral cesspool—enables him, finally, to leave this illusory world, even though he must sacrifice his love for Esther in going his own way. He now perceives that he faces the disillusionment of youth and the aching knocks of experience: “To see the starred face of the night with a high soul of exaltation and of noble aspiration, to dream great dreams, to think great thoughts. And in that instant have the selfless grandeur turn to dust, and to see great night itself, a reptile coiled and waiting in the nocturnal blood of life.” In lifting the veil and seeing the ugliness and inherent danger of this world, George catches more than a glimpse of the serpent in Esther’s paradise of love and chooses to cast himself out while he still has the will to do so.

George’s keen vision helps readers see each character with penetrating awareness: The beautiful and seductive Lily Mandell is “corrupt and immodest.” Stephen Hook, damned and tormented, assumes a mask of disdain and boredom and is too self-conscious to allow himself to respond honestly to Esther’s delight and gratitude at his generous gift of a book of Brueghel’s drawings.