"Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity"
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Meredith distills a whole Victorian moral drama into a cool, unsettling proposition: happiness begins to resemble paradise when ownership is stripped of duty. The key word is "approaches". He stops short of endorsing the fantasy outright, but he wants you to feel its gravitational pull. "Possession" carries the era's double charge: property, yes, but also people, affection, status, even the illusion of having "secured" a life. "Obligation" is the price tag polite society insists is ennobling; Meredith implies it is also the friction that makes pleasure moral, and therefore less pleasurable.
The subtext is a critique of a culture that wraps appetite in etiquette. Victorian respectability preached stewardship - husbands toward wives, aristocrats toward tenants, empire toward colonies - while quietly enjoying the asymmetry those relationships guaranteed. Meredith's sentence is a pressure test: if the obligation disappears, do we discover a purer joy or simply a more honest selfishness? The phrase "to the object possessed" is chillingly clinical. It turns the beloved into a thing, the thing into a silent claimant, and then imagines the owner's bliss at being free of that claim.
As a novelist attuned to desire and hypocrisy, Meredith is probing the psychology of entitlement: the dream that you can have something and not be changed by it, responsible for it, or answerable to it. He sketches the temptation underpinning exploitation - the wish to take without being tethered - and lets "felicity" glitter just enough to reveal how dangerous that wish can be.
The subtext is a critique of a culture that wraps appetite in etiquette. Victorian respectability preached stewardship - husbands toward wives, aristocrats toward tenants, empire toward colonies - while quietly enjoying the asymmetry those relationships guaranteed. Meredith's sentence is a pressure test: if the obligation disappears, do we discover a purer joy or simply a more honest selfishness? The phrase "to the object possessed" is chillingly clinical. It turns the beloved into a thing, the thing into a silent claimant, and then imagines the owner's bliss at being free of that claim.
As a novelist attuned to desire and hypocrisy, Meredith is probing the psychology of entitlement: the dream that you can have something and not be changed by it, responsible for it, or answerable to it. He sketches the temptation underpinning exploitation - the wish to take without being tethered - and lets "felicity" glitter just enough to reveal how dangerous that wish can be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Contentment |
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