Wit & Attitude Quote by George Eliot

Eliot slips the knife in with a steady hand: marriage, for many men, isn’t framed as a partnership of equals but as an ego insurance policy. The line is funny in a bleak way because it inverts the sentimental Victorian script. Instead of romance as moral elevation, you get romance as narcissistic maintenance: the wife as a captive audience hired to clap on cue.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Mostly” is the tell - not all men, not always, but enough to make the pattern legible. Eliot isn’t describing a quirky personal preference; she’s diagnosing a social arrangement. “Make sure” suggests vetting and control, as if courtship were less about affection than about quality assurance. And calling the wife “one fool” is both cruelty and strategy: it’s an insult aimed at the woman, yes, but it’s also an indictment of the man who needs that foolishness to feel “wise.” His wisdom is revealed as performative, dependent, and fragile.

Context matters. Eliot wrote from inside a culture that treated marriage as a woman’s central destiny while granting men public authority and intellectual legitimacy. The bargain was often tacit: a woman is rewarded for admiration, compliance, and the soft labor of constant reassurance; a man is rewarded with the sense that his judgments are natural law. Eliot’s subtext is feminist without being sloganized: if your selfhood requires someone else’s self-diminishment, the problem isn’t her “foolishness.” It’s the arrangement that trains her to perform it - and calls that love.