The Social Status of Exodus explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• The Body and Mortality

  The chapter discusses the body's origin and its concealment through clothing, addressing the tension between physicality and social dignity.

• Art and Aesthetics

  Tailoring is presented as an art form that remakes man, with the tailor as a creator who shapes identity through aesthetic choices.

• Alienation and Belonging

  The tailor is despised and ostracized despite his essential role, highlighting themes of social alienation and the paradox of belonging.

Characters to notice

• Exodus

  Referred to as 'Exodus the Oxonian,' he is presented as a sunbeam in a cut-away, embodying the tailored ideal of man.

• Jehovah

  Mentioned as 'Jehovah The Tailor,' a figure surpassed by another greater tailor whose seams he is unworthy to unloose.

Key passages

• “Out of the hands of God the aboriginal muscle-pattern with its ominously cruciform completion in view of propagation indulged its uniform imputation of the image and likeness of Deity”

  From God's creation, the original human form, shaped with a cross-like structure for reproduction, consistently claimed to be made in God's image.

  This passage introduces the theme of divine creation and human form.

• “And man at last assumes his self⁠—respect And man with his amorphous nature who defied the protoform of Who made him but has not denied Him obeyed the tailor who remade him and denies him”

  Man finally gains self-respect by obeying the tailor who reshapes his form, even though he defied his original creator.

  Highlights the tailor's role in granting social dignity.

• “He is despised this ostracized fancier of travestied torsoes weaver of fig⁠—leaves out of cheviot who staked the plot of manhood in his nobler form”

  The tailor is scorned and shunned, a lover of disguised bodies who weaves coverings from wool and invested in man's higher nature.

  Emphasizes the tailor's paradoxical social status.