The Existential Wodehouse

Jenny Haddon has a nice piece on Wodehouse and Hot Water as her contribution to Norm’s Writers’ Choice series. She argues:

In fact, I disagree with the regular characterization of Wodehouse’s dramatis personae as amiable eccentrics. (Bertie Wooster is a kind man but his slightest gesture towards eccentricity is squashed by Jeeves – one remembers, with regret, the skirmish over the white mess jacket. Lord Emsworth is only intermittently amiable. With the exception of the occasional chorus girl, all PGW’s women are tough cookies who could give today’s feminists a correspondence course in man management.) The amiability is the author’s and it is the amiability of the measured Augustan, who sees life steadily, sees it whole and gets a jolly good laugh out of it. The eccentricity exists only in the characters’ lack of self-consciousness. These are not people-pleasers. Still less are they analysts of their own desires. They do what they want to do.