Marriage Quote by Marie Corelli

Corelli’s line weaponizes the domestic ideal by reducing it to an inventory of noises. Husband-as-institution gets recast as husband-as-soundtrack: morning irritability, daytime profanity, nocturnal absence. It’s a joke with teeth, because the punchline doesn’t argue against marriage in the abstract; it argues against the labor of managing a man’s moods when the same disruptions can be obtained, cheaply and with less cultural baggage, from pets.

The intent is both comic and defensive. As a high-profile unmarried woman in late-Victorian Britain, Corelli lived in a culture that treated matrimony as proof of respectability and a woman’s adulthood. This quip flips that surveillance back on the audience: you think a husband is necessary? Fine. Here are the “functions” you seem to value. The subtext is that what society calls companionship can look, from inside the house, like entitlement and inconvenience dressed up as tradition.

It works because the animals aren’t random; they map neatly onto stereotypes of domestic male behavior while remaining safely deniable. A dog “growls” rather than “complains,” a parrot “swears” rather than “lies,” a cat “comes home late” rather than “cheats.” That slippage lets Corelli indict the marital script without writing a manifesto.

There’s also an authorial wink: Corelli, a bestselling novelist with a flair for melodrama and public persona, understands that the sharpest social critique often arrives in the form of an after-dinner anecdote. The line isn’t just about marriage; it’s about who gets to define a life as complete.