"There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong"
About this Quote
MacLane’s refusal to recognize “right and wrong” isn’t a dreamy shrug at morality; it’s a dare, delivered with the flat certainty of someone tired of being graded by other people’s rubrics. Coming from a young, early-20th-century woman writer who made her interior life the main event, the line reads as both philosophical posture and social insurgency. She isn’t arguing that nothing matters. She’s rejecting the authority of the judges.
The repetition does the work. “There is really no” sets up an allegedly objective claim, then “I recognize no” snaps it back into the personal: the world may insist on moral categories, but she won’t ratify them. That pivot exposes the subtext: morality, as she’s experienced it, is less a timeless code than a mechanism of control - especially over female desire, ambition, and self-narration. If “right” and “wrong” are the tools used to domesticate her, then refusing the terms is a way of reclaiming authorship.
Context matters because MacLane wrote at a moment when women’s public expression was still routinely treated as evidence of pathology or vanity. In that climate, declaring independence from moral binaries becomes a kind of stylistic self-defense: she denies her critics their favorite vocabulary. It’s also a modernist move before the label sticks - the sense that the self is too messy, too contradictory, to be audited by Victorian bookkeeping.
The line’s sting is that it’s not asking permission. It’s announcing a private jurisdiction, where the self, not society, is the final court of appeal.
The repetition does the work. “There is really no” sets up an allegedly objective claim, then “I recognize no” snaps it back into the personal: the world may insist on moral categories, but she won’t ratify them. That pivot exposes the subtext: morality, as she’s experienced it, is less a timeless code than a mechanism of control - especially over female desire, ambition, and self-narration. If “right” and “wrong” are the tools used to domesticate her, then refusing the terms is a way of reclaiming authorship.
Context matters because MacLane wrote at a moment when women’s public expression was still routinely treated as evidence of pathology or vanity. In that climate, declaring independence from moral binaries becomes a kind of stylistic self-defense: she denies her critics their favorite vocabulary. It’s also a modernist move before the label sticks - the sense that the self is too messy, too contradictory, to be audited by Victorian bookkeeping.
The line’s sting is that it’s not asking permission. It’s announcing a private jurisdiction, where the self, not society, is the final court of appeal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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