Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Drabble

Drabble’s sting is in how she frames physical beauty as a kind of illicit advantage that demands an alibi. The line doesn’t romanticize the body; it interrogates the cultural reflex to treat “a nice body” as something you must launder into acceptability. Notice the tight trap she sets: even the apparently progressive move - “I can serve society with it” - becomes suspect, because it turns flesh into instrument, a public resource to be justified, managed, and spent. The question “as what?” lands like a cold splash. If you redeem your body through usefulness, you risk becoming a mascot, a billboard, a commodity with a social mission statement.

The subtext is an indictment of the moral accounting women are pressured to perform. “Guilt” is doing heavy work here: it suggests that attractiveness isn’t merely admired; it’s morally destabilizing, as if beauty creates debt. Drabble also refuses the usual exits. She doesn’t offer the comforting feminist counter-slogan (“my body, my choice”) or the puritan solution (deny the body). Instead, she points to a cultural dead zone: “no moral place for flesh.” That’s not a personal neurosis; it’s a societal failure of imagination, where the body can only be read as temptation, status, or utility - never simply as self.

Coming from a novelist attuned to domestic life and women’s interior negotiations, the passage reads like social realism sharpened into philosophy: a portrait of a culture that demands women be embodied, but punishes them for being seen.