Ernest Weldon

Ernest Weldon is the husband in Dorothy Parker’s “Too Bad,” a brief portrait of marriage worn down by boredom. Simone de Beauvoir uses his homecoming and evening routine to make a larger point: spouses may coexist without open antagonism and still lose the capacity to share anything of substance. Ernest’s courteous gestures toward his wife do not overcome their growing silence; instead, their ordinary evening becomes a measure of intimacy without genuine connection.

Identity and Introduction

Ernest appears as one half of a married couple whose domestic life has settled into a repeated, emotionally diminished pattern. The account gives little independent biography: it identifies him through his behavior at home and contrasts that behavior with his apparent talkativeness among other people. His significance lies less in an elaborated personal history than in the way his small habits help expose the distance between conjugal familiarity and active companionship.

The scene opens when Mrs. Weldon answers his ring at the door. She greets him brightly, and the two smile at each other; Ernest responds with a casual hello and asks whether she is home. They kiss slightly. He hangs up his hat and coat, takes the evening papers from his pocket, and hands one to her. These gestures establish a recognizable domestic welcome, but their politeness is already notably slight: the couple can perform the forms of greeting without finding much to say within them.

The Evening Routine

After settling in, Ernest asks what his wife has been doing during the day. She has anticipated the question and even planned to recount the small events of her day, but when the moment comes, the account seems dull to her. She answers that she has done nothing and turns the conversation back to him, asking whether he had a nice day. The failed exchange is not simply a lack of material to discuss. Mrs. Weldon has experiences she could tell him about; what disappears is her sense that telling them to Ernest would matter.

Ernest begins to answer, but his interest wanes as he speaks. At the same time, Mrs. Weldon becomes absorbed in breaking off a loose thread from the wool fringe of a nearby pillow. He eventually describes his day as fairly good, and the exchange comes to rest without developing into conversation. The loose thread is a small, concrete counterpoint to the couple’s stalled talk: her attention fixes on an incidental task while the opportunity for shared attention unravels.

The narrative stresses that this communicative failure is specific to their relationship, not an inability either spouse has with everyone. Mrs. Weldon can talk well enough with other people, and Ernest, too, seems talkative in other company. Their silence is therefore presented not as an inherent incapacity for speech but as a condition of their life together. The contrast makes the marriage’s isolation more pointed: each can communicate elsewhere, while their home offers no comparable exchange.

Marriage, Habit, and Boredom

Mrs. Weldon looks back to their engagement and wonders whether they ever had much to say even then. At the time, this did not trouble her; kissing and other forms of physical courtship occupied their attention. Seven years into marriage, however, kisses can no longer fill the evenings. The passage gives the couple’s silence a duration and a history: what once seemed unimportant has become an everyday problem that neither has resolved.

Their quiet is not the comfortable silence of people content to sit together. Mrs. Weldon experiences it as a failure of duty, like a hostess watching a party go badly and feeling that she ought to do something. Ernest reads industriously, then begins yawning aloud around the middle of the paper. His yawns trigger something in Mrs. Weldon: she says she needs to speak with Delia and hurries to the kitchen. There she lingers, looking vaguely into jars and asking half-heartedly about laundry lists; when she returns, Ernest has gone to get ready for bed. His reading and yawning, her retreat to the kitchen, and the departure to bed form a recurring sequence of withdrawal rather than a shared evening.

The routine’s scale sharpens its meaning. The text observes that in one year three hundred of their evenings were like this, and that over seven years the number exceeds two thousand. The arithmetic turns an apparently trivial domestic scene into a long accumulation of lost opportunities. Nothing spectacular breaks the marriage; its deprivation consists in repetition, with each evening reproducing the same failure to connect.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

De Beauvoir places “Too Bad” within a discussion of marriages that appear to work because their spouses reach a compromise and avoid antagonizing one another. Such couples may live side by side without too many lies, yet still be cursed by boredom. Whether one spouse becomes an echo of the other or each retreats into a separate universe, proximity alone does not produce an exchange on spiritual or erotic terms. The Weldons embody the latter diagnosis through their courteous but unproductive domestic ritual.

Ernest’s role is defined by this contrast between outwardly ordinary conduct and the absence of sustained mutual attention. He comes home, greets his wife, asks about her day, reads the paper, and eventually goes to bed; none of these actions is hostile. Their very normality helps show why the couple’s isolation can persist without a dramatic quarrel. The story’s short scene and the book’s numerical framing make boredom legible as a structure of married life: not one exceptional silence, but thousands of evenings in which the spouses remain together and fail to meet.