All men want their whores to be unhappy

“All men want their whores to be unhappy” is Anna Wetherell’s indictment of a world in which men’s desire is bound up with women’s misery. The sentence recurs in two different circumstances: first as a remark Aubert Gascoigne remembers from the night Anna was released from gaol, and later as Anna’s emphatic protest during an exchange over her attempted-suicide charge. Its return gives the phrase the force of both a personal grievance and a broader accusation.

The phrase in private

The first occasion belongs to the night Anna followed Gascoigne from the gaol-house to his quarters. With rain beating down and a paraffin lamp softening the room, they took apart her gown at the kitchen table. Anna said, “All men want their whores to be unhappy.” Gascoigne later recalled that he had probably answered curtly, a response that, in retrospect, seemed inadequate to the hurt compressed into her maxim.

Two weeks later, at the Gridiron Hotel, Gascoigne held Anna after Joseph Pritchard had closed the door. His thoughts turned to whether she had tried again to end her life, and he remembered her earlier words. The intimate gesture did not resolve his uncertainty: he wondered whether the gun had misfired when she pointed it at her throat, and whether she could have known it would. In that moment, the phrase returns not as an abstract observation but as a measure of the distance between Gascoigne’s physical closeness to Anna and his inability to understand what she was experiencing.

Repetition as protest

Anna repeats the thought in a sharper form when confronted with the recorded charge. After Gascoigne tells her that she will have to plead, she bursts out, “Every man wants his whore to be unhappy—every man!” The shift from “All men” to “Every man,” and the final repetition, make the claim sound less like a passing remark than a refusal to treat her suffering as private or exceptional.

Gascoigne answers, “Most whores are unhappy,” then asks her to forgive him for stating a simple truth. His reply recognizes the unhappiness Anna names, but presents it as a fact to be observed rather than a condition for which men bear responsibility. The exchange thus turns on more than whether Anna is unhappy: she identifies a pattern of male desire, while Gascoigne’s measured response risks making that pattern seem inevitable.

Meaning and recurrence

The expression connects Anna’s intimate dealings with Gascoigne to the legal predicament surrounding her attempted-suicide charge. In both settings, men interpret or respond to her distress: Gascoigne worries over what she may have done, while the recorded charge confronts her with a formal consequence. Anna’s repeated sentence gives her a direct way to name the gendered circumstances behind that distress, even as Gascoigne’s response shows how readily such suffering can be acknowledged and still treated as ordinary.

The phrase’s force comes from its recurrence and its change in delivery. Remembered in private, it carries the sting of an earlier exchange; spoken again, loudly and with an absolute claim, it becomes a protest against the terms by which Anna is seen and judged. The book does not present Gascoigne’s response as a resolution: the two statements remain in tension, one naming responsibility and the other describing misery as commonplace.