"With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband's absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office"
About this Quote
Auchincloss lands his portrait with the cool precision of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching the American upper class perform intimacy as logistics. The image is severe: a "high pale brow" and "faded brown hair" flattened into geology. She’s not simply tired; she’s been weathered into something durable and stripped of ornament, "like a rock washed clean". That cleanliness isn’t purity so much as erosion. Years of being left behind have scoured away the softness that marriage is supposed to promise, leaving a kind of polished vacancy.
The punch is in the list that follows, a bureaucratic litany masquerading as alibis: conventions, dinners, committee meetings, or the office. The repetition isn’t just scene-setting; it’s an indictment of a social world where public duty and professional busyness become socially acceptable cover for abandonment. Even the sly addition of "or simply at the office" punctures any heroic notion of sacrifice. It suggests that the husband’s absence is not tragic necessity but habitual preference, and that the culture around them is built to validate it.
Subtextually, the wife has been converted into a landmark: dependable, stationary, aesthetically "clean" in a way that makes her easier to live with - and easier to ignore. In Auchincloss’s universe, status doesn’t insulate people from loneliness; it standardizes it, sanding down private pain into a respectable surface.
The punch is in the list that follows, a bureaucratic litany masquerading as alibis: conventions, dinners, committee meetings, or the office. The repetition isn’t just scene-setting; it’s an indictment of a social world where public duty and professional busyness become socially acceptable cover for abandonment. Even the sly addition of "or simply at the office" punctures any heroic notion of sacrifice. It suggests that the husband’s absence is not tragic necessity but habitual preference, and that the culture around them is built to validate it.
Subtextually, the wife has been converted into a landmark: dependable, stationary, aesthetically "clean" in a way that makes her easier to live with - and easier to ignore. In Auchincloss’s universe, status doesn’t insulate people from loneliness; it standardizes it, sanding down private pain into a respectable surface.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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