"Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?"
About this Quote
Butler’s line is a needle slid under the fingernail of Victorian piety: if heaven is marketed as perfect happiness, why does its brochure quietly omit the institution everyone is told to treat as sacred? The joke is structured like a legal cross-examination. “Distinctly and repeatedly excluded” mimics the tone of scriptural footnotes and doctrinal certainty, then pivots into a question that pretends to be naive while smuggling in an accusation. Butler isn’t arguing against marriage with a manifesto; he’s letting heaven’s own terms do the work.
The subtext is two-pronged. First, it punctures the sentimental ideology that frames marriage as the peak of human fulfillment. If marriage were purely beatific, heaven would logically be full of it. Second, it implies that marriage’s real social function in Butler’s world is less about joy than about regulation: property, respectability, sexual containment, gendered duty. Heaven, in this quip, becomes the control group where all the justifications fall apart.
Context matters: Butler wrote in a culture that publicly sanctified domestic life while privately absorbing its disappointments, compromises, and quiet cruelties. His wit is a pressure valve for that hypocrisy. The brilliance is the modesty of the move. He doesn’t need to describe marital misery; he simply asks whether the afterlife’s planners know something the clergy won’t say out loud: that the “general felicity” might be threatened by the very arrangement society insists is our moral destiny.
The subtext is two-pronged. First, it punctures the sentimental ideology that frames marriage as the peak of human fulfillment. If marriage were purely beatific, heaven would logically be full of it. Second, it implies that marriage’s real social function in Butler’s world is less about joy than about regulation: property, respectability, sexual containment, gendered duty. Heaven, in this quip, becomes the control group where all the justifications fall apart.
Context matters: Butler wrote in a culture that publicly sanctified domestic life while privately absorbing its disappointments, compromises, and quiet cruelties. His wit is a pressure valve for that hypocrisy. The brilliance is the modesty of the move. He doesn’t need to describe marital misery; he simply asks whether the afterlife’s planners know something the clergy won’t say out loud: that the “general felicity” might be threatened by the very arrangement society insists is our moral destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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