Motherhood Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sheridan lands the joke with the quiet brutality of a salon aside: motherhood, supposedly the engine of virtue, turns out to be an engine of reputation management. The line pivots on a delicious contradiction. A mother wants her daughter to inherit her looks, her manners, her social footing - but not her fluency. Not the one trait that would expose how the whole system actually runs: talk, insinuation, and the lethal skill of saying things that can never be proven.

As a playwright of the Restoration-comedy afterlife (The School for Scandal is the obvious neighborhood), Sheridan knows that in polite society speech is both currency and contraband. "A fluent tongue" reads as compliment and accusation at once: wit, charisma, verbal power - but also gossip, flirtation, and the kind of female agency that makes patriarchal order nervous. The mother is confessing, without confessing, that her own eloquence has been socially costly. She has learned the hard rule that women can be charming, but not too sharp; visible, but not too legible.

The grammar of the line sharpens the class edge. "Don't like" gives it a vernacular snap, as if the truth is slipping out despite the speaker's self-control. Sheridan's specific intent isn't to preach against hypocrisy; it's to stage hypocrisy as entertainment, letting the audience laugh while recognizing the trap: women are punished for the very social skills that society demands they perform.