"Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising"
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Marriage, Howe suggests, is sold the way a circus is sold: with posters big enough to blot out the tent’s frayed seams. The line lands because it treats romance as an industry, not a destiny. “Advertising” is the tell. He’s not just skeptical about marriage; he’s skeptical about the machinery that convinces people to want it, the bright-painted promises that turn private life into a public product.
As an editor, Howe lived in the era when mass media and mass aspiration started to lock arms. Late-19th and early-20th-century America was learning how to be persuaded: newspapers, broadsides, and branded fantasies. Put marriage in that ecosystem and it becomes less a sacrament than a headline, a social achievement you’re nudged to buy into. The circus comparison does double duty: it implies performance (the couple as act, the home as stage set) and a traveling economy built on anticipation. The best part of the circus is often the lead-up, the parade, the posters. Howe is pointing at that gap between expectation and lived experience.
The subtext is not “don’t marry,” but “watch the sales pitch.” Marriage can still be “a good deal” in the old mercantile sense: a bargain, a transaction, a negotiated contract. The joke carries a bruise: if you enter the tent expecting spectacle every night, you’ll miss the smaller, less marketable virtues that might actually make it work.
As an editor, Howe lived in the era when mass media and mass aspiration started to lock arms. Late-19th and early-20th-century America was learning how to be persuaded: newspapers, broadsides, and branded fantasies. Put marriage in that ecosystem and it becomes less a sacrament than a headline, a social achievement you’re nudged to buy into. The circus comparison does double duty: it implies performance (the couple as act, the home as stage set) and a traveling economy built on anticipation. The best part of the circus is often the lead-up, the parade, the posters. Howe is pointing at that gap between expectation and lived experience.
The subtext is not “don’t marry,” but “watch the sales pitch.” Marriage can still be “a good deal” in the old mercantile sense: a bargain, a transaction, a negotiated contract. The joke carries a bruise: if you enter the tent expecting spectacle every night, you’ll miss the smaller, less marketable virtues that might actually make it work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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