For Better Or For Stupid: Elly's key defect.

While it's rather obvious that John is a rather lazy, selfish man who is has no greater preoccupation than to either avoid or shout down anything inconvenient that would require sacrifice of him, what's not so immediately obvious that he mostly gets away with this because he married one of the dumbest people on the face of the Earth. While everyone knows someone who knowingly stays in a horrible relationship because she's been cowed into submission, it seems to me that Elly is actually stupid enough to think that John is a great person who's on her side despite his tendency to do and say and think inconvenient things that he can be trained out of. This despite the obvious fact that the self-serving creep still thought he was doing her a favour keeping her from doing all the things she wanted to do in this life because the arrogant knob is funny that way.

It's bad enough that she's a stupid wife who, despite being one of the banes of jjamele's existence (viz. the well-off housewife who behaves as if she had been drugged and woke up a mother and housewife), thinks that the boring life she leads is the best possible outcome of her life. While we can spend an eternity thinking that she could have done a lot better for herself than the goggle-eyed dope she's lashed to, she would do it all again given the chance and recommends doing it to others. Worse, someone followed her example despite it being a cautionary one. Just think of it as the last great evil that resulted from her witlessness: being a horrible, stupid failure of a mother brainlessly failing to protect her children from a bad thing.