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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Our fashion may indeed be considered the aggregate of the opinions of our women … The domestic class of women … [is virtuous] in the very refraining from an attempt to influence public opinion.
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1831)The middle classes interest themselves in grave matters: the aggregate of their sentiments is called OPINION. The great interest themselves in frivolities, and the aggregate of their sentiments is termed FASHION.
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1833)Consider these two observations about fashion and opinion by the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, penned two years apart. The affinities between them are manifest. So are the differences. The first was included in a comparison of ‘the spirit of society’ in England and France in 1831, a comparison that was dominated throughout by the fundamental dichotomy of ‘public’ and ‘private’, delineated as that between men and women. ‘The proper sphere of woman’, Bulwer-Lytton then stated further, ‘is private life, and the proper limit to her virtues, the private affections’; in contrast with ‘public opinion’, that exclusive masculine realm that should remain free of ‘feminine influence’.
But by 1833 Bulwer-Lytton's understanding of the antithesis between fashion and opinion had revealingly changed, replacing a polarity of gender with a polarity of class. He no longer designated ‘fashion’ as the aggregate of the opinions of women, but instead as the aggregate of the opinions of the upper classes; and ‘public opinion’ was no longer the domain of men, but instead the aggregate of the opinions of the ‘middle class.’
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