Love & Passion Quote by George Meredith

Jealousy, in Meredith's hands, isn’t a side effect of love; it’s love’s worst improvisation, the moment tenderness curdles into surveillance. The phrase “love bed” sets up the expected Victorian tableau of intimacy and domestic safety, then Meredith sets it on fire. “Burning snarl” is animal and ugly: not the elegant melancholy of a spurned suitor, but a heat-driven reflex that bites. The line works because it refuses to let jealousy cosplay as romance. It’s not proof you care; it’s proof you’re scared, and that fear has claws.

Meredith wrote in an era that sentimentalized devotion while quietly tightening the legal and social machinery of possession, especially in marriage. Against that backdrop, the “bed” reads as both literal and symbolic: the marital institution where love is supposed to be sanctified, and where jealousy often becomes socially excused, even weaponized, as “protection” of honor. Meredith’s intent feels corrective. He’s puncturing the polite narrative that jealousy is a passionate compliment and rebranding it as combustion in the most intimate room of the house.

The subtext is also psychological: jealousy doesn’t arrive from outside and invade love; it grows inside it when love is built on entitlement. “Snarl” suggests the self’s regression under threat, the lover turned guard dog. Meredith’s compact syntax - almost grammatically broken - mirrors that unraveling. Jealousy doesn’t speak in complete sentences; it snaps.