The Code of the Woosters

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1938

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

Class Satire of Master and Servant

The central premise of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories is innately satirical: The servant Jeeves is altogether superior to Wooster, his master. More intelligent, resolute, level-headed, and shrewd, he’s also better educated, which he shows by correcting Wooster’s literary references and diction (such as his misuse of “incredulous”). The farcical plots of the Jeeves stories, including The Code of the Woosters, center on Wooster’s congenital rashness and naivete, which unfailingly get him into trouble, from which only Jeeves can extricate him. Thereby, Wodehouse wryly suggests that the class hierarchy of early 20th-century England is largely artificial and that members of the lower classes are often more capable, imaginative, and resourceful than their so-called superiors. Underscoring this, most of Wooster’s privileged circle (Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stephanie Byng, Aunt Dahlia, Madeline Bassett, etc.) are hardly more competent or sensible than himself; in fact, most of them look up to Jeeves as an all-knowing Johnny-on-the-spot who can extricate them from their own follies, so he often seems the only “adult” in the room.

Despite his modesty and air of deference, Jeeves seems, in all but name, the true master of the household. Wooster, well aware of Jeeves’s superior judgment, accedes to him in almost all matters, and when they do have a prolonged “clash” (usually involving some fashion choice of Wooster’s, such as a mustache or a pair of purple socks), Jeeves always gets his way in the end, usually after helping his master out of some fix. In this novel, when Wooster tells his friend Gussie about his absolute refusal to let Jeeves talk him into a “Round-the-World cruise,” Gussie gives “a rummy sort of laugh” (60), as if knowing what the outcome will be. In the end, when Wooster finally agrees to the cruise, Jeeves informs him that he has already bought the tickets.

In addition, Jeeves declines some of his master’s more foolish orders, such as to leap off a cupboard and swaddle a fierce dog up in a sheet or to attack a police officer with a shovel. He always has a better idea. In a literary context, these satirical reversals seem to echo J. M. Barrie’s comic 1902 play The Admirable Crichton, in which an English butler, marooned on a desert island with his aristocratic employers, quickly becomes their de facto ruler by virtue of his innate superiority in all practical matters. In addition, the 1963 film The Servant, for which acerbic English playwright Harold Pinter wrote the script, nods darkly to Jeeves and Wooster in its depiction of a Machiavellian valet who methodically dominates and enslaves his wealthy, childlike employer—this time as tragedy rather than farce. In this novel and the other Wooster and Jeeves stories, Wodehouse repeatedly makes the cutting but comedic point that inherited wealth and an upper-class education (typically in French, Latin, and the Classics) provide little preparation for many of the vicissitudes of life and are no substitute for native intelligence, prudence, and strength of character.

Subversion of Pastoral Comedy

A thoroughly modern man-about-town, Bertie Wooster never feels on shakier ground than when he’s sequestered, often against his will, in the country. Several of the Jeeves stories, including The Code of the Woosters, propel their farcical plots by abstracting him from his London habitat and marooning him in large country houses (Totleigh Towers, Brinkley Court, Blandings Castle, etc.) where mild dilemmas and misunderstandings proliferate among the groves and pastures. In this novel, Wooster is wrenched from his comfortable London flat by the machinations of his willful Aunt Dahlia and the desperate entreaties of his hapless friend Gussie, and he must navigate the terrain and pitfalls of rural Gloucestershire, which to him are foreign. As critics have noted, these developments, and the Jeeves stories in general, cast a wry backward glance at the age-old genre of pastoral comedy (Amis, Martin. “One Wodehouse, Two Hanleys, One Green.” The New York Times, 1978).

Wooster’s entanglements at Totleigh Towers, none of them life-or-death, nevertheless subvert and parody the tropes of pastoral comedy and the romantic view of the country life that it enshrines. Pastoral literature, a wide-ranging genre that originated in ancient Greece, celebrates the simplicity and virtuousness of country living, as opposed to city life, which is portrayed as hectic, artificial, and money-grubbing. Aimed at an urban audience, pastoral comedy typically involves city dwellers who are uprooted by a crisis or other event and forced to live in the country, where they discover romance, humorous mix-ups, and (eventually) a more satisfying, harmonious way of life. The ending is always happy, typically with at least one wedding. The classic example of pastoral comedy is Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which follows two high-born young women, Rosalind and Celia, in their flight from a corrupt, high-handed court to the idyllic Forest of Arden, where they fall under the spell of nature and the simple life. The mollifying effects of nature and bucolic virtue even transform an outright villain, the treacherous nobleman Oliver, into a gentle swain who ends up marrying Celia. The Code of the Woosters, however, reverses these tropes. In Wodehouse’s idyll, the denizens of the country—notably Sir Watkyn Bassett, Roderick Spode, Stephanie Byng, and Aunt Dahlia—are, if anything, even more selfish, petty, and conniving than those of the city. (Wooster, especially, is a babe in the woods compared to them.) Totleigh Towers, pastoral though it may be, becomes the scene of thievery, extortion, physical assaults, and small-minded grudges, and, though two lackluster courtships are patched up in the end, little true romance exists. This extends to the “rustics,” as well: The story’s lone commoner, the cloddish, agrarian-named Constable Oates (who, like one of Shakespeare’s shepherds, speaks with a pronounced burr), is hardly the ideal of Pastoral virtue. No one reforms; to the contrary, chicanery is rewarded, and a young curate is corrupted and turned into a thief. With this satirical upending of Hesiod and Shakespeare, Wodehouse implies that human pettiness and folly may no longer be escapable for anyone.

The Rise of Fascism in Europe

Although Wodehouse published his Jeeves stories over a span of almost 60 years (1915-1974), he employed a “floating timeline,” meaning that his characters don’t age, and their lifestyles and circumstances remain roughly the same. Bertie Wooster is always in his mid-twenties and seems forever suspended in a distinctly 1920s milieu of private clubs and upper-crust frivolity, where war and economic downturns are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Occasionally, however, Wodehouse’s satirical vision does take in aspects of daily life and current events unique to the decade he’s writing in. An example is the intimidating but eventually buffoonish character Roderick Spode, leader of the so-called Saviours of Britain (the “Black Shorts”), which lampoons Sir Oswald Mosley, the premier British fascist of his day, and his British Union of Fascists (BUF), otherwise known as the “Blackshirts.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, particularly during the Great Depression, economic and political instability in Europe gave rise to a number of radical political groups, many of which pledged bold measures to stabilize and glorify their respective nations. Fascism, a far-right, militaristic, authoritarian cult of national pride, gained a foothold in many countries, notably Germany, Italy, Greece, and Spain, all of which elected or were taken over by fascist or fascist-leaning governments during these years. Sir Oswald Mosley’s BUF had much less success, peaking at only about 40,000 members by 1935, before its ban and dissolution five years later upon Britain’s entry into World War II. When The Code of the Woosters appeared in 1938, the BUF was already in decline, which may explain Wodehouse’s treatment of Spode and the “Saviours of Britain” as light comedy, lampooning them as a risible, mostly harmless rabble of fashion-challenged buffoons. As one character notes, their nickname “Black Shorts” originated from their inability to find black shirts, which had all “run out” by the time they arrived on the scene, and Wooster, denouncing Spode to his face, ignores his toxic politics, mocking instead his unsightly “footer bags,” which “disfigure the London scene” (124). Jeeves’s revelation that the menacing Spode is, in secret, an accomplished designer of ladies’ underwear seems the final proof that his bark is worse than his bite. (Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of Hitler or Mussolini.)

An unexpected postscript to Wodehouse’s needling of Fascism was his arrest six years later (in 1944) by the French police for “collaborating” with the Nazis. The charge stemmed from five radio broadcasts Wodehouse made out of Berlin in June 1941, a year after his capture in France by the Germans. The broadcasts weren’t political; rather, they were lightly humorous accounts of his stays at various German internment camps. Nonetheless, they received scathing press in England and France, both for their flippancy and because they were transmitted under the “auspices” of an enemy power (Nazi Germany). The charges were eventually dropped, but Wodehouse never returned to England, choosing instead to settle in the US. In 1975, in a seeming act of forgiveness, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, two months before his death at age 93.