The account of the sublime developed in the previous chapter suggests that it functions as a mode through which women and femininity are both defined and repressed in the discourse which ushers in the bourgeois capitalist epoch. This might enable an understanding of the way that patriarchal values were taken up by, and became implicated within, the new order's attempt to legitimize its quest for political power. It might also contribute new inflections to recent research into the growing sexual division of labour from the mid eighteenth century which defined ‘the world of work as the prerogative of men’. But I want to argue that we need to read this gendering of aesthetic categories in this period in terms of class and national distinctions as well as sexual difference. This is based on the assumption that, as Cora Kaplan puts it,

In England in the first half of the eighteenth century, questions of class difference became crucial as a consequence of the financial revolution which gathered momentum after 1688. This revolution entailed a hegemonic struggle over the moral and political nature and consequences of the new commercial class and its institutions.