Wit & Attitude Quote by Jeanne Tripplehorn

Tripplehorn is doing the actor’s tightrope walk: defending a character without laundering the messiness that makes her worth playing. Calling Barb “a sort of every woman” is less a claim that her choices are typical than a bid for recognition. She’s asking the audience to stop treating the polygamous-wife label as a freak-show tag and start reading it as a human coping strategy. That’s the intent: widen the frame until “polygamy” stops being the whole story.

The quote works because it toggles between admiration and indictment in the same breath. “Incredibly strong” and “incredibly generous” are virtues we’re culturally trained to celebrate in women, especially wives and mothers. Then comes the loaded pivot: “seemingly insane.” Tripplehorn isn’t endorsing the judgment; she’s naming the viewer’s reflex and then rerouting it. The word “seemingly” is the tell. It admits how easily a woman in an extreme domestic arrangement gets pathologized, and it quietly critiques that rush to diagnosis.

Context matters: Barb is a character built to be legible inside a world outsiders instinctively reject. Tripplehorn emphasizes “definite reasons” to signal causality over spectacle - economics, faith, family stability, personal bargains. It’s also a meta-commentary on what serious TV was doing in that era: turning taboo subcultures into empathy machines. The subtext isn’t “polygamy is fine”; it’s “don’t confuse your shock with her irrationality.”