ABSTRACT

Thomas carlyle found his examples of social mystification not in politics and economics, but in clothes. Kenneth Burke believes that "Carlyle's enigmatic symbol may contribute as much as Karl Marx toward indicating a relation between mystification and class relationships". Carlyle, more than Jeremy Bentham or Marx, accepts mystification as a necessary part of social order because mystification creates a state of mind, reverence, which is necessary to social life. The glamor and mystery of the social order is upheld, but with a good deal of playfulness, which passes easily into doubt and irony. Hierarchal "mystery" requires a corresponding rhetoric, "in form quite analogous to sexual expression: for the relations between classes are like the ways of courtship, rape, seduction, jilting, prostitution, promiscuity, with variants of sadistic torture or masochistic invitation to mistreatment. Similarly, there are strong homosexual analogies in 'courtly' relations between persons of the same sex but of contrasting social status".