“Odd that marriage, a public display and free to all, gives way to that most secret of liaisons, an adulterous affair” (16).
The narrator’s wry observation of a public display of commitment transforming into a private betrayal is, superficially, a syntactically clever way of contrasting the publicity of marriage to the secrecy of adultery. However, the phrases “free to all” and “gives way” do the most work to convey the narrator’s attitude toward marriage and to reveal how the narrator attempts to position themself in the audience’s eyes.
The narrator’s description of marriage as a “public display and free to all” could be taken to mean that marriage is a public display that its audience does not have to pay to attend or observe. However, the word “and” between the phrases “public display” and “free to all” suggests that the phrases modify marriage separately, and that what the narrator is actually saying is that the public display of marriage can be enacted by any two people at no cost. If marriage is free, and is directly at odds with adultery, then the unstated implication is that there must be some cost to adultery. The implication that adultery is both costly and secret, while marriage is free and public, diminishes the importance of marriage while simultaneously dramatizing the narrator’s previous affairs. The narrator invites the reader’s pity by flipping the traditional dichotomy of marriage versus adultery so that marriage seems to come free and easy while adultery requires a payment in exchange for the intimacy of a secret liaison.
With the phrase “gives way,” the narrator excuses themself from blame for the destruction of their lovers’ marriages. If a marriage simply “gives way” to an adulterous affair, then there is no single explanation for the collapse. Rather, the yield implies that the marriage was not strong initially, or that its flimsy publicity caused it to folding into a secret affair. By playing up both the cost of adultery and the flimsiness of marriage, the narrator asks for sympathy for their experiences while also sidestepping the reader’s judgement.