"There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about"
About this Quote
Wilde slips the knife in with a compliment, then twists. The first sentence sounds like Victorian piety: the married woman as moral center, devotion as the household’s steady flame. Then the second line detonates the setup. If her devotion is unmatched, Wilde implies, it is also structurally invisible to the person who supposedly benefits from it. The joke isn’t just that men are clueless; it’s that marriage, as an institution, trains them to be.
The intent is classic Wilde: use epigrammatic balance to expose social hypocrisy. “Devotion” is staged as both virtue and labor. A married woman’s loyalty is expected to be total - emotional caretaking, reputation management, the quiet work of smoothing a man’s life into something respectable. The married man “knows nothing” not because he’s uniquely dim, but because the culture lets him treat that devotion as background scenery: always there, rarely named, never repaid at equal cost.
Subtextually, Wilde is also winking at the erotic and the illicit. In his world of drawing-room masks, devotion can be a performance that protects other desires, affairs, or disappointments. A wife’s “devotion” may be less romantic rapture than disciplined damage control. That ambiguity is the point: Wilde praises the devotion while revealing how it can be extracted, misread, and exploited.
Context matters. Wilde is writing against a late-19th-century ideal that sanctified marriage while narrowing women’s agency. The line lands as satire because it mimics the era’s reverent tone only long enough to show the underside: the gendered asymmetry so normalized it passes as sentiment.
The intent is classic Wilde: use epigrammatic balance to expose social hypocrisy. “Devotion” is staged as both virtue and labor. A married woman’s loyalty is expected to be total - emotional caretaking, reputation management, the quiet work of smoothing a man’s life into something respectable. The married man “knows nothing” not because he’s uniquely dim, but because the culture lets him treat that devotion as background scenery: always there, rarely named, never repaid at equal cost.
Subtextually, Wilde is also winking at the erotic and the illicit. In his world of drawing-room masks, devotion can be a performance that protects other desires, affairs, or disappointments. A wife’s “devotion” may be less romantic rapture than disciplined damage control. That ambiguity is the point: Wilde praises the devotion while revealing how it can be extracted, misread, and exploited.
Context matters. Wilde is writing against a late-19th-century ideal that sanctified marriage while narrowing women’s agency. The line lands as satire because it mimics the era’s reverent tone only long enough to show the underside: the gendered asymmetry so normalized it passes as sentiment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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