She Stoops to Conquer

She Stoops to Conquer questions whether social class is an innate quality or a learned behavior. Throughout the play, various upper-class characters are mistaken for members of the working class, destabilizing the notion that there is any definitive difference between the aristocracy and the common people. Goldsmith suggests through these moments of confused identity that class is determined not only by family, but by behavior, manners, and aesthetic signifiers like decoration and dress. Therefore, he invites the possibility that a person should be valued based on their virtues rather than their birth.

At the beginning of the play, the upper-class Tony Lumpkin goes to a local inn to drink and socialize with laborers, engaging in the same types of lower-class pursuits that they enjoy and initiating a blurring of class boundaries. Tony has no interest in receiving an education that might make him more like a typical nobleman, and he instead sings a silly song about preferring the life at the inn. However, his lower-class companions still perceive his behavior to be aristocratic. One remarks, “the genteel thing is the genteel thing any time: if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly” (13). Tony's friends argue that because he was born a gentleman, anything he does must therefore be genteel.