Life & Wisdom Quote by William Congreve

Congreve sharpens a stiletto and calls it etiquette. The line is ostensibly “advice” to women, but it’s written with the cool malice of a Restoration stage that loved exposing polite society as an elaborate con. Its rhythm is a tightening vise: first, you must not speak what you think; then, you must actively say the opposite; finally, you’re allowed one escape hatch - behavior that contradicts the lie you were required to tell. The joke lands because it’s not just misogyny on display; it’s misogyny made procedural, a user manual for surviving a world that punishes female candor and rewards plausible deniability.

The subtext is transactional: a woman’s speech is treated as social currency, not self-expression. “Contradict” repeats like a drumbeat, suggesting that femininity, as defined by this milieu, is a performance of strategic inconsistency. Congreve’s characters often weaponize flirtation, misdirection, and reputation management; this line captures that ecosystem in miniature. It also flatters the audience’s cynicism. Everyone watching knows the rulebook is rigged, and the pleasure is in hearing it stated with such brutal neatness.

Context matters: late-17th-century London comedy was obsessed with manners, marriage markets, and the surveillance of women’s virtue. Under that scrutiny, speech becomes risky evidence. Actions, paradoxically, can remain ambiguous - deniable, interpretable, “accidental.” Congreve isn’t offering liberation; he’s dramatizing a social order where sincerity is a liability and contradiction is the only sanctioned form of agency.