Wealth & Money Quote by Mary McCarthy

McCarthy lands the blade with that especially lethal mid-century poise: amused, exacting, and only half-disguising her contempt. The setup flatters the theater, then immediately shrinks it into a leisure activity for the rich, lumped with canasta, a social card game designed to keep hands busy and conversation safely trivial. That pairing is the tell. She is not praising drama as an exalted art; she is diagnosing it as an instrument of class comfort.

“The only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth” isn’t an aesthetic claim so much as a sociological one. Theater, unlike a novel read alone or a painting confronted in silence, is a public ritual with rules: tickets, dress codes, intermissions, the communal permission to be “cultured” without being changed. McCarthy’s wealthy audience can purchase proximity to seriousness while remaining insulated from the messier demands of art that might provoke private reckoning.

Then comes the sting: theater “does away with the burden of talk after dinner.” The line skewers the whole machinery of elite sociability, where conversation is both performance and obligation, and where “having something to say” becomes a kind of unpaid labor. Theater functions as outsourced depth. Instead of risking genuine exchange - disagreement, intimacy, or boredom - you buy a sanctioned topic and a ready-made emotional arc. The subtext is brutal: the rich don’t merely consume culture; they use it to manage their own social anxiety, to replace unpredictable human speech with scripted, professionally delivered feeling. McCarthy isn’t attacking theater alone. She’s exposing how taste can be less about love of art than about avoiding one another.