“Bring forth men-children only; for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males”

“Bring forth men-children only; for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males” is the Shakespearean line Lycell invokes while toasting Adrienne Ward at her wedding to Drayton. The allusion turns congratulation into a pointed statement about gender and reproduction: it praises the bride’s mettle, yet imagines that strength chiefly as the capacity to bear sons. Its force comes from the story around it, where childbirth is both a source of hope and a demand imposed on women.

The toast and its occasion

At the wedding banquet, Drayton and Adrienne cut the cake before Lycell rises with a glass to toast his younger brother and the bride. He first paraphrases Shakespeare on manhood, then addresses Adrienne through the line about bearing male children. The formal occasion gives his words the shape of a blessing, but the second half of the toast makes reproduction its measure of the bride’s future.

The reference does not land uniformly with the guests. Some whisper, and most do not understand Lycell’s meaning; they dismiss his remarks as the talk of someone strange or drunk. Adrienne understands. The gap between her recognition and the guests’ confusion makes the toast feel less like a shared ceremonial sentiment than a message whose implications are legible within the family’s private history.

Fertility as praise and burden

The line’s emphasis on sons resonates with the story’s persistent anxiety over fertility. A year before the wedding, after Adrienne was sexually assaulted by two or possibly three of Paul’s fraternity brothers, a doctor told her parents and Paul that she could never have children. Paul called the assault an “incident,” urged her never to speak of it again, and said he would marry her that June. The toast’s confident wish for male children thus collides with Adrienne’s history of trauma and the medical judgment that had shaped her earlier understanding of her future.

At the Samsa ranch, however, Adrienne becomes pregnant with Wilder’s pups, and her body’s capacity to nourish them becomes part of her relationship with Drayton. When he expresses his love and anticipation for her child, the narrative associates pregnancy with being needed and loved. Later, her pregnancy with Drayton’s pups becomes a medical emergency: Dr. Wells says that Adrienne will die unless he performs a cesarean immediately, and warns that the babies may not survive because they are small. Against these dangerous circumstances, the toast’s smooth confidence that Adrienne will bear sons sounds less like a simple prediction than an ideal imposed on a precarious body.

The reproductive stakes extend beyond Adrienne. Wilder tells her that Mena is sterile and proposes that Adrienne give her and Drayton the pups she is carrying. Adrienne rejects the plan as something a mother should not be expected to do and challenges Wilder for trying to control everyone’s lives. The Shakespearean line’s appeal to male heirs therefore sits within a plot where women’s fertility is treated as a solution to a collective crisis, and where the question of who bears and raises children is bound up with consent and authority.

Adrienne’s agency and the gendered ideal

The wedding toast can sound like praise of a strong woman, but its prescribed outcome is narrow: her strength should produce male children. That implication contrasts with Adrienne’s insistence that others recognize her as a person with choices. When Wilder begs for forgiveness, she tells him not to call her “a female” as though that were her name. She states that she wants to marry him, Lycell, and Drayton. Her demand makes the difference between being assigned a reproductive role and speaking for herself explicit.

The contrast also appears in Mena’s response to Adrienne’s refusal of Drayton’s order to take her away. Mena watches in amazement because human women are independent and free in ways she has not been permitted to be. She describes the werefemale order as one in which women serve the males, depend on the Alpha’s goodwill, and derive their worth from bearing pups. Mena had previously followed her father’s rules and married the man he selected, but she falls in love with Robert instead. Beside this account, the toast’s son-bearing ideal is not an isolated flourish: it belongs to a social world that repeatedly turns women’s reproductive capacity into a measure of their value.

Meaning within the wedding

Lycell’s quotation compresses the story’s unresolved tension into a ceremonial blessing. Adrienne is celebrated for her mettle, yet the words attach that strength to bearing sons; the wedding honors her marriage, yet her own insistence on choosing its terms has had to oppose male decisions about her future. The guests’ failure to understand the allusion leaves Adrienne as its informed audience, linking the public toast to private knowledge about fertility, family arrangements, and power.

The line does not settle whether motherhood is a source of fulfillment or an imposed duty. The narrative gives it both meanings: Adrienne experiences love and desirability in connection with pregnancy, while she also resists Wilder’s attempt to decide what should happen to her children. In that tension, Lycell’s Shakespearean blessing becomes more than a wish for sons. It exposes the narrow script the story places beside Adrienne’s insistence on being named, heard, and allowed to choose.