"Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke"
About this Quote
The line lands like a slap because it sounds like misogyny wearing the mask of divine logic, then twists the knife with that final phrase: "a sort of ghastly joke". Cather isn’t offering theology so much as staging a bitter little drama about who gets to be taken seriously. By putting the insult in God’s mouth, she exposes how patriarchal judgment often pretends to be natural law: women fail not because the world is built to trip them, but because Providence itself is snickering.
The word "trusts" is doing covert work here. Talent is framed as something lent out by an authority figure, which mirrors the era’s gatekeeping: editors, patrons, institutions, reputations. Women artists were "allowed" ability, then punished for exercising it in public. The "infernal mess" reads like an internalized accusation - the fear of being messy, ambitious, insufficiently graceful - and also a rage at the double bind. Create boldly and you’re unwomanly; create modestly and you’re minor.
Cather’s own life sharpens the irony. She built a major career in a culture eager to treat women’s writing as a parlor trick or moral duty, not an aesthetic vocation. So the "ghastly joke" isn’t that women are incompetent; it’s that women are handed talent in a world that rigs the conditions of failure, then calls the wreckage proof. The sentence performs the cruelty it critiques, letting readers feel how easily contempt gets laundered into "common sense."
The word "trusts" is doing covert work here. Talent is framed as something lent out by an authority figure, which mirrors the era’s gatekeeping: editors, patrons, institutions, reputations. Women artists were "allowed" ability, then punished for exercising it in public. The "infernal mess" reads like an internalized accusation - the fear of being messy, ambitious, insufficiently graceful - and also a rage at the double bind. Create boldly and you’re unwomanly; create modestly and you’re minor.
Cather’s own life sharpens the irony. She built a major career in a culture eager to treat women’s writing as a parlor trick or moral duty, not an aesthetic vocation. So the "ghastly joke" isn’t that women are incompetent; it’s that women are handed talent in a world that rigs the conditions of failure, then calls the wreckage proof. The sentence performs the cruelty it critiques, letting readers feel how easily contempt gets laundered into "common sense."
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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