Time & Perspective Quote by Mary Wortley Montagu

Montagu’s genius here is how casually she detonates the period’s social economy. “Pretty fellows” were meant to be currency: charming men as entertainment, flirtation as proof you were still in the game. She grants their value only in the shallowest sense - they “entertain” her “sometimes” - and then flips the expected hierarchy. Pleasure, she implies, is not evidence of respect. You can be diverted by what you “despise.” That’s not coyness; it’s a refusal to let amusement be mistaken for admiration, or attention for consent.

The puppet show image does the real work. In a culture obsessed with performance - salons, courtship, reputations staged and restaged - the metaphor is surgical. Puppets move, they gesture, they provoke laughter, yet the spectacle is fundamentally hollow: strings, scripts, cheap sensation. Montagu positions herself as the viewer who sees the mechanism. She can laugh while holding onto judgment, a posture that reads like an early feminist defense against being recruited into the very games she’s expected to play.

There’s also a quiet class-and-gender power move in “I own.” She concedes a small human weakness only to reassert intellectual control: she will not be bullied into reverence. In the early 18th century, when women’s wit was often treated as ornament, Montagu uses wit as a blade - amusement without allegiance, sociability without surrender.