Wit & Attitude Quote by Susanna Moodie

Moodie’s line lands like a curt laugh in the face of 19th-century respectability: marriage, she suggests, is less romance than governance. “Enough of the first” is blunt on purpose, refusing the era’s expectation that widowhood should come packaged with pious nostalgia or a dutiful search for another protector. The joke has teeth because it turns the sentimental ideal of the husband into a bad bargain she’s already audited.

The real charge sits in her domestic grammar of power. “Lie down mistress, and get up master” is a sly inversion of the separate-spheres doctrine that told women they ruled the home while men ruled the world. Moodie exposes how conditional that so-called rule is. At night, in the private sphere where a woman is supposed to be “mistress,” she can claim autonomy, even authority. By morning, daylight restores the public order: the “master” rises. The bed becomes a political boundary, and the rhythm of daily life becomes a lesson in how patriarchy reasserts itself.

Context matters: Moodie lived through emigration, hardship, and the precarious economics of women’s dependence. Her work often inventories what polite language tries to hide: survival, labor, the transactional nature of family arrangements. This isn’t a manifesto dressed up as a quip; it’s a practiced intelligence using wit as leverage. She’s not rejecting companionship so much as refusing a system that demands she bargain away self-possession for legitimacy.