SOURCE: Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. “The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter.” In Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage, pp. 77-104. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

In the essay below, Birdsall explores the contrast of lifestyles between Sir Fopling Flutter's rule-bound world of social pretense and Dormant and Harriet's natural, honest, and self-deterministic world. The critic posits that Sir Fopling's milieu is “a dead world … being exposed by juxtaposition to a living one.”

Fashion n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.

Reason, v.i. To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

If Etherege's third and last play (1676) is by common consent his best, it is also his most insistently tough-minded and unremittingly open-eyed and honest. The comic challenge which the chief protagonists Dorimant and Harriet hurl at their self-consciously polished, rule-bound world is one which draws its...