Getting Married · Chapter
Home Manners Are Bad Manners explained
This chapter examines how the indissolubility of marriage allows spouses to abandon basic civility and kindness at home, treating their partners and children with a level of rudeness they would never display in public.
What happens
This chapter examines how the indissolubility of marriage allows spouses to abandon basic civility and kindness at home, treating their partners and children with a level of rudeness they would never display in public. It argues that the institution of marriage, by trapping people together, fosters domestic tyranny and the decay of humane communication.
Themes in this chapter
Critique of Marriage as an Institution
The chapter directly criticizes how indissoluble marriage licenses domestic incivility and abuse, contrasting it with the civility required in general society.
Hypocrisy and Social Pretense
Highlights the hypocrisy of individuals who maintain polite manners in public but treat their families with cruelty and neglect, using marriage as a dispensation from common decency.
Key passages
“These terrors conceive marriage as a dispensation from all the common civilities and delicacies which they have to observe among strangers, or, as they put it, 'before company.'”
Such people view marriage as a license to abandon the politeness and consideration they show to strangers, behaving at home in ways they would never dare in public.
Summarizes the chapter's central argument that marriage can become a cover for domestic rudeness and tyranny.
“If such people took their domestic manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world.”
If these individuals behaved in public as they do at home, they would quickly become socially isolated.
Emphasizes the stark contrast between public and private behavior enabled by the indissolubility of marriage.