"One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves"
About this Quote
Forster’s line lands like a raised eyebrow aimed at the English bourgeoisie’s favorite hobby: paying for misery and calling it character. The verb “marvels” is doing sly work. It’s polite, almost dreamy, but it carries the chill of social diagnosis. He isn’t simply puzzled; he’s performing the genteel astonishment of someone watching a ritual that has long since stopped making sense, yet persists because it flatters the participants.
The target is a whole ideology of upbringing in which discomfort is treated as moral currency. The middle classes “insist” on it, as if hardship were a curriculum requirement rather than an outcome. And Forster’s most pointed twist is economic: “at such expense to themselves.” This is not just cruelty outsourced to boarding schools, cold bedrooms, and punitive discipline; it’s a self-financed system of emotional deprivation. The parents bankroll the very austerity that will estrange them from their children, then take pride in the transaction.
Subtextually, Forster is probing a class anxiety: the fear of softness, of slipping socially, of raising children unfit for competition in an empire built on restraint and hierarchy. Discomfort becomes proof of seriousness, a prophylactic against decadence, even as it manufactures the very brittleness and repression that Forster’s fiction anatomizes. Coming from a novelist attuned to intimacy, connection, and the cost of “proper” behavior, the line reads as a moral critique disguised as social comedy: a culture so committed to respectability it purchases unhappiness wholesale, then wonders why no one can breathe.
The target is a whole ideology of upbringing in which discomfort is treated as moral currency. The middle classes “insist” on it, as if hardship were a curriculum requirement rather than an outcome. And Forster’s most pointed twist is economic: “at such expense to themselves.” This is not just cruelty outsourced to boarding schools, cold bedrooms, and punitive discipline; it’s a self-financed system of emotional deprivation. The parents bankroll the very austerity that will estrange them from their children, then take pride in the transaction.
Subtextually, Forster is probing a class anxiety: the fear of softness, of slipping socially, of raising children unfit for competition in an empire built on restraint and hierarchy. Discomfort becomes proof of seriousness, a prophylactic against decadence, even as it manufactures the very brittleness and repression that Forster’s fiction anatomizes. Coming from a novelist attuned to intimacy, connection, and the cost of “proper” behavior, the line reads as a moral critique disguised as social comedy: a culture so committed to respectability it purchases unhappiness wholesale, then wonders why no one can breathe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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