The Wodehouse-Wilde Nexus Endures
P.G. Wodehouse’s novel “The Code of the Woosters” offers a delightful reprieve to readers weary of everyday stress and boredom. Whatever the unwholesome mixture of these elements one flees, Wodehouse provides the antidote to societal tedium and political severity: intelligent and ironic comedy.
Despite that which its familiar setting in the English countryside fails to provide, the Wooster world’s amenities more than compensate. The eloquent but rather idle Englishman, Bertie Wooster, swimming in currency; the reserved and immaculate manservant Jeeves at the ready.
Set adrift in a sea of petty quarrels among rich clans, brushes with the law and a series of nearly botched betrothals — over an undercurrent of rampant blackmail — these men barely avoid a “durance vile” for Bertie. The novel’s protagonist, Bertie Wooster is a wealthy bachelor who lives with Jeeves at his home in London’s Berkeley Mansions and finds his way into all sorts of improbable entanglements.
Bertie Wooster is Wodehouse’s main vehicle of wit and dramatic irony, while Jeeves supplies the wisdom. The plot centers around a cow creamer, a collector’s item which Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia orders him to steal from Sir Watkyn Bassett, rival collector and town magistrate. Bertie is also tasked with saving “sensitive plant” Gussie Fink Nottle’s engagement to Madeline Bassett, Sir Watkyn’s niece, which draws him to the Bassett country house.
Hijinks ensue as Bertie endeavors to nab the silver cow and reunite one and then another pair of lovers — Stephanie “Stiffy” Bing and curate Harold “Stinker” Pinker — all while evading “the clutches of the law” with which he was previously acquainted.
Additional duties include recovering a lost notebook of insults penned by Gussie about Sir Watkyn and fascist “Black Shorts” frontman Roderick Spode, the latter proving a menace and a nuisance until the revelation of his secret passion for designing women’s undergarments reduces him to “on-a-leash” subservience.
“The Code of the Woosters” displays Wodehouse’s mastery of the comic genre and his care for language. Perhaps a short review of the various lists one is impelled to compile in its margins will provide a sufficiently seductive taste of these talents.
For going and coming, one finds chaps and ladies having “biffed off,” “shimmered in” or “trickled out,” provided they haven’t already “beetled off” or “nipped to the door.” A slew of gallant terms of endearment flow as well from Bertie to his Aunt Dahlia. The loving but coercive matron often “totters in” to a greeting of “old ancestor” or “aged relative.” Reserved for Pop Bassett is the mordant “old disease,” or alternatively “old poison germ.”
Wodehouse deftly establishes rhythm in his prose with these quips, and he sustains it by bending language to his whim. This is humorously accomplished through the shortening of words — “pash” for passion, “the situash” for situation — and of names or objects to their first letter.
These techniques are often constituents to Wodehouse’s many memorable one-liners which, along with the plot, are about the finest testament to his craft as can be offered in short space. One finds, for example, that while “not actually disgruntled,” Jeeves “was far from being gruntled” in the opening pages of the novel.
What’s more, contained in Gussie’s journal of invectives is a note that watching Spode eat asparagus “alters one’s whole conception of man as Nature’s last word.” And, while certainly stirring, the newt custom of waggling tails at one another during mating season is, to Bertie, “not my idea of molten passion.”
Those enticed by the above should experience for themselves Bertie’s discovery of Roderick Spode’s dictatorial aspirations and his subsequent confrontation with the maniac. These scenes show Wodehouse weaving political subtext in with humor — note that the “Black Shorts” derive from the fascist Italian “Black Shirts” militia — while displaying Bertie at his most dignified and oblivious.
Scarcely political and light even on true social commentary, “The Code of the Woosters” is a farcical representation of respectable Britain’s social convention and melodrama.
If done through an unserious lens, it still captures serious vistas of honor and character — both embodied by the creed for which the book is named. Bertie’s parodistic dedication to the code sustains the plot and might suggest a more sober takeaway. Yet of course, it is also central to the farce; it highlights the incongruity of a man so frequently entangled in silly and juvenile debacles yet so bent on honor and dignity.
Readers of Wodehouse and of a previous piece might have in mind another writer who used butlers and English bachelors to satirize high society. In fact, the parallels between Wodehouse’s body of Wooster-themed work — for the cast forms the basis of many of his other novels — and Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” are striking.
In Wilde’s famous three-act play, bachelors Algernon Moncrieff and Jack “Ernest” Worthing attempt to navigate the bores of their upper-class milieu by “Bunburying.” This involves the creation of fake relatives or friends who then serve as their excuse to leave home and seek pleasure.
In town, Jack becomes “Ernest”, the name he gives to his fake brother to fool his ward Cecily Cardew back in the countryside. Once Algernon, who has always known him as Ernest, discovers this, he reveals to Jack the similar untruth surrounding his own friend, the invalid Mr. Bunbury.
Things get complicated when Jack proposes to Gwendolen Fairfax, to whom he is and absolutely must be “Ernest.” Cecily, meanwhile, has fallen in love with “Ernest” after hearing Jack’s tales of his wickedness. When Algernon visits Jack’s countryside Manor House pretending to be “Ernest,” the resulting engagement precipitates a dispute between Cecily and Gwendolen, who now both believe themselves to be marrying “Ernest.”
After the facade crumbles and some general brooding takes place, Jack discovers that his name was Ernest all along; having been misplaced at birth by Miss Prism, now Cecily’s tutor, “John” was his childhood guardian’s choice of title, while “Ernest” was his name at birth. Jack realizes that he is Algernon’s brother and, inter alia, his marriage to Gwendolen goes through.
The resemblance between Wodehouse and Wilde here — and it should be mentioned that Wilde arrived first — spans more than just their ingenious plots and choices of setting.
For one thing, several archetypes are shared. There is the gentleman of hilariously refined clumsiness; the witty butler at his service; and even the domineering and terrifying aunt. These are not perfect pairings — most visibly when comparing Jeeves to Lane or Merriman — but they are well-defined nonetheless.
Take Lady Bracknell, Algernon’s aunt and the self-appointed arbiter of several of the play’s marriages. Her resolute and fearsome orations on education, class and womanhood recall both Aunt Dahlia and Bertie’s Aunt Agatha, who purportedly “eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.”
Through such characters, each writer criticizes the upper-class for its superficiality and its hypocrisy. But this is done to varying degrees.
Wodehouse clearly wants to broadcast the pettiness and absurdity of affluent countryside life through Bertie’s escapades. But the farce runs deeper with Wilde; he wields a sharper sword and launches a more forceful attack on society. Where “The Code of the Woosters” is a top-notch comedy, “The Importance of Being Earnest” is more pointedly satirical.
Wilde explicitly takes on the inverted nature of his target, namely the amorality and stupidity which underlie its claims of superiority, with deadpan remarks that illustrate this disconnect.
On morality, Wilde manages to poke fun at the rich by parodying its take on the class system. After all, says Algernon, “if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?” As it follows the discussion of the servants’ inclination to champagne instead of wine, which disturbs Algernon, Wilde gets at the triviality of upper-class judgments of proper moral conduct.
Perhaps one of the sharper epigrams of Wilde’s play appears as Lady Bracknell studies Cecily’s frame while considering her possible marriage to Algernon. Saying, “The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of profile,” Lady Bracknell shows temporary awareness of the former only to comically negate it in the second half of the line.
Given that “want of profile” refers to the ritual of molding the female appearance into one that is fit for marriage, and seeing as how looks and money are the only “really solid qualities” a girl was thought to offer toward this end, this passage speaks to Wilde’s attempt to mock the treatment of women and the ordeal of marriage in the Victorian age.
So closely are the two ideas juxtaposed in this line that it reminds one of another Wildean phrase. Though not from this play, it undoubtedly breathes within its pages: “The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”
Wilde broaches several other themes in this way, most notably education and foolishness versus cleverness, as part of his critique.
Though less deliberate in its exposure of the defects of its characters and their environment, “The Code of the Woosters” retains an advantage over “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Its first-person narration affords it an added dimension for humor — viz. the formidable psyche of Bertie Wooster — which contains within it extra room for implied rather than ventriloquized social criticism.
Those who intend to brave the coming, resocialized times without the trusty voices of these authors are “apt to be fogged,” as Bertie once declared. Between Wodehouse’s linguistic inventiveness and Wilde’s wit, the two men channel their genius into literature that remains nourishing to imbibe.
