I think maybe Lewton's Hollywood masters thought that her return to full-lit "normalcy" was supposed to do for a happy ending, but it's always seemed profoundly unsatisfying to me, as though her innocence is a cocoon no experience can penetrate, and now she's going to be stuck unchanged forever.
See, I didn't think her innocence had survived the story. At the outset she's protected by her inability to grasp the enormity and hopelessness of what she's up against (which is not the power of Satan, but the impossibility of keeping another person alive), but that same unknowingness is exactly what gets August killed: she's scared of the dark hallway in La Sagesse, but she doesn't really believe there could be something murderous as opposed to upsetting at the end of it, so she sends him into those shadows and straight onto Jaqueline's scissors. And she acknowledges responsibility for it: "He was a kind little man in his way—and I made him go down that hall into the darkness. I made him do it." Jacqueline is the one who'd stand trial, but Mary knows they killed him between them. By the end, I think she gets some of what is driving Jacqueline—Ward in their last scene together is still trying to talk about their future together, some far-off pipe dream when Jacqueline "is well again," and Mary is the one to close that conversation down. She doesn't foresee the suicide, but she understands that Jacqueline will never be what people like Gregory Ward consider "well." And she won't take anything away from her sister that might provide her with happiness. That's how we know Mary is still partly that innocent who doesn't know how to shiver, because Ward isn't happiness for Jacqueline, any more than La Sagesse or the Palladists were. But not entirely. She's left knowing what she wants: Ward, who belongs to her sister. If that kind of recognition isn't loss of innocence, what is?
(I mean, obviously the film thinks that once the news breaks of Jacqueline's death, Ward and Mary will get together like that now that their excuse for self-renunciation is gone, but I'm a lot more skeptical. Or possibly just hopeful, because I think I agree with you that marrying Ward would render her a child-in-perpetuity, no matter what ground she managed to gain since leaving Highcliffe—Ward loves that enchanting vacancy, wide-eyed, uncomplex, and he lied to her once to keep her from looking at him differently. Jason at least had the honesty to recognize that he'd make her a bad husband and never even bring it up.)
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See, I didn't think her innocence had survived the story. At the outset she's protected by her inability to grasp the enormity and hopelessness of what she's up against (which is not the power of Satan, but the impossibility of keeping another person alive), but that same unknowingness is exactly what gets August killed: she's scared of the dark hallway in La Sagesse, but she doesn't really believe there could be something murderous as opposed to upsetting at the end of it, so she sends him into those shadows and straight onto Jaqueline's scissors. And she acknowledges responsibility for it: "He was a kind little man in his way—and I made him go down that hall into the darkness. I made him do it." Jacqueline is the one who'd stand trial, but Mary knows they killed him between them. By the end, I think she gets some of what is driving Jacqueline—Ward in their last scene together is still trying to talk about their future together, some far-off pipe dream when Jacqueline "is well again," and Mary is the one to close that conversation down. She doesn't foresee the suicide, but she understands that Jacqueline will never be what people like Gregory Ward consider "well." And she won't take anything away from her sister that might provide her with happiness. That's how we know Mary is still partly that innocent who doesn't know how to shiver, because Ward isn't happiness for Jacqueline, any more than La Sagesse or the Palladists were. But not entirely. She's left knowing what she wants: Ward, who belongs to her sister. If that kind of recognition isn't loss of innocence, what is?
(I mean, obviously the film thinks that once the news breaks of Jacqueline's death, Ward and Mary will get together like that now that their excuse for self-renunciation is gone, but I'm a lot more skeptical. Or possibly just hopeful, because I think I agree with you that marrying Ward would render her a child-in-perpetuity, no matter what ground she managed to gain since leaving Highcliffe—Ward loves that enchanting vacancy, wide-eyed, uncomplex, and he lied to her once to keep her from looking at him differently. Jason at least had the honesty to recognize that he'd make her a bad husband and never even bring it up.)
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