"Some folk want their luck buttered"
About this Quote
“Some folk want their luck buttered” lands like a rural proverb with a blade hidden in the loaf. Hardy’s line doesn’t just sketch a personality type; it indicts a whole posture toward life: the refusal to take fortune on its own terms. Luck, in this formulation, is already a gift - random, unearned, elusive. But “buttered” implies it must be made smoother, richer, easier to swallow. Not only do these people expect good fortune; they expect it to arrive pre-sweetened, frictionless, customized to comfort.
Hardy’s novels are crowded with characters who mistake the world’s indifference for a negotiation. Tess, Jude, Eustacia: their tragedies aren’t born solely from bad breaks, but from the collision between desire and a social order that treats desire as a kind of moral trespass. The line’s subtext is classed and modern: the expectation of “buttered luck” belongs to those insulated enough to confuse entitlement with fate. In Hardy’s England - late Victorian, tightening its moral codes while industrial life rewired old village certainties - luck isn’t romantic; it’s scarce capital, and the poor don’t get to demand it be served warm.
The phrase works because it’s sensuous and faintly comic. You can see the butter knife, the domestic fussing. That homely image sharpens Hardy’s fatalism: the universe doesn’t cater. Wanting it to is the first symptom of self-deception, and in Hardy, self-deception is how the trap springs.
Hardy’s novels are crowded with characters who mistake the world’s indifference for a negotiation. Tess, Jude, Eustacia: their tragedies aren’t born solely from bad breaks, but from the collision between desire and a social order that treats desire as a kind of moral trespass. The line’s subtext is classed and modern: the expectation of “buttered luck” belongs to those insulated enough to confuse entitlement with fate. In Hardy’s England - late Victorian, tightening its moral codes while industrial life rewired old village certainties - luck isn’t romantic; it’s scarce capital, and the poor don’t get to demand it be served warm.
The phrase works because it’s sensuous and faintly comic. You can see the butter knife, the domestic fussing. That homely image sharpens Hardy’s fatalism: the universe doesn’t cater. Wanting it to is the first symptom of self-deception, and in Hardy, self-deception is how the trap springs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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