Cora Kaplan argues that instabilities of class and gender, opened up by republican and liberal political philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, became the central concern of a range of bourgeois discourses in the nineteenth century. In the novel, for example,

A notion of ‘true womanhood’ had therefore to be constructed which was differentiated both from masculinity and from subordinated races and classes: ‘The difference between men and women in the ruling class had to be written so that a slippage into categories reserved for lesser humanities could be averted.’ At the same time, however, the subordination of women through ascribing to them a ‘primitive’ propensity for passion, means that ‘The line between the primitive and the degraded feminine is a thin one.’ Women of the ruling class are therefore assigned an incoherent place and meaning: they at once epitomize the distinctive quality of their class and represent its vulnerability to internal subversion.