"Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything"
About this Quote
Brookner’s line cuts with the quiet cruelty of a social X-ray: it reveals how “goodness” in women is often just obedience dressed up as virtue. The sting is in the asymmetry. Someone else is “being offensive” - an external act, a clear breach - yet the “good woman” reflexively internalizes it as her own failing. That’s not moral sensitivity; it’s conditioning. Brookner is naming a learned habit of self-surveillance, the kind that turns rudeness, harassment, or casual contempt into a personal audit: What did I do wrong? What did I invite?
The second sentence weaponizes a taboo word: “bad.” Brookner isn’t really praising the “bad woman” so much as exposing the cultural trapdoor under the “good” one. If goodness means taking responsibility for other people’s bad behavior, then “badness” starts to look like a form of psychological self-defense: the refusal to launder someone else’s ugliness through your own conscience.
As a historian, Brookner writes like a novelist of manners: she’s attentive to the invisible rules that govern who gets to feel entitled and who gets assigned guilt as a default setting. The subtext is classed and gendered, the world of drawing rooms and professional spaces where female politeness functions as social glue - and as a silencing mechanism. It works because it’s brutally legible: you can hear, in two sentences, the centuries-old bargain women are still pressured to honor - be “good,” and you’ll pay for everyone’s comfort with your own blame.
The second sentence weaponizes a taboo word: “bad.” Brookner isn’t really praising the “bad woman” so much as exposing the cultural trapdoor under the “good” one. If goodness means taking responsibility for other people’s bad behavior, then “badness” starts to look like a form of psychological self-defense: the refusal to launder someone else’s ugliness through your own conscience.
As a historian, Brookner writes like a novelist of manners: she’s attentive to the invisible rules that govern who gets to feel entitled and who gets assigned guilt as a default setting. The subtext is classed and gendered, the world of drawing rooms and professional spaces where female politeness functions as social glue - and as a silencing mechanism. It works because it’s brutally legible: you can hear, in two sentences, the centuries-old bargain women are still pressured to honor - be “good,” and you’ll pay for everyone’s comfort with your own blame.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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