The Immortal Gold-Digger

I time-traveled this month and shot into the future.  For a while now, I’ve been focusing on Wodehouse’s early oeuvre, mostly from the teens and 1920’s.  It has been fascinating to observe the style evolution of one of the acknowledged masters of English prose.  The Girl in Blue was written at the other end of his career and was published in 1970(ish).  The plotting was exquisitely tight and the four storylines (or was it five; it was hard to tell because they whizzed about with astonishing speed) came in and out of the frame like the warp and weft threads of a skilled weaver.  Lines were repeated for comic effect, and I got the sense that Plum was having fun playing with details.

To my astonishment, one of the main female characters was an air hostess.  Generally, the women in these stories are employed as private secretaries, writers, or actresses.  While all three of these professions also appeared, the presence of a stewardess reminded me that we weren’t in the Kansas of the 1930’s anymore.*  The female anti-hero was a writer who was astoundingly beautiful and unsuccessfully tried to nab an American corporate lawyer.  What is more, she had a secondary occupation: gold-digger, which is probably one of the oldest professions in the written word.  The contempt that Wodehouse had for this woman almost dripped off of the page.  Fortune-hunters have always had an interesting time of it in literature.  They can be of the cool and calculating mold, like Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre, or a pitiable lass thrust into desperate circumstances; like Gwendolyn in Daniel Deronda and about a thousand others I could rattle off. 

Vera, such as was her name, was in a different camp.  True, she possessed the element of cool calculation that is a universal trait of your average adventuress, but what struck me was that Wodehouse wrote about her in a style that was reminiscent of the way that he wrote his underworld characters.  The thieves that appear in Wodehouse, and there are quite a lot of them, always work in pairs or groups, and there are numerous conversations that transpire as they concoct their nefarious schemes.  While there was no official criminal gang, Vera did have a number of conversations with her mother, a successful gold-digger herself, wherein they laid out the means by which Vera would ensnare her prey.  Fortunately for our American friend, his sister intervened and tried to knock sense into him, and then he caught the object of his lust kissing another man. 

There were certainly other women in Wodehouse who were fortune-seekers, or who had other motives regarding their intendeds, but this was the first time that I know of where he treated this type as a criminal.  I could speculate about what brought about this change in attitude, but the truth is, without access to the man himself, the answer will remain unknown.  My own pet theory is that, having lived through two world wars, a Cold War, and enduring hippies and the emergence of disco, his thinking might have changed.  While there were not many opportunities for women to earn money when Wodehouse put pen to paper at the dawn of the twentieth century, that situation was no longer the case in the 1970’s.  It is possible that, for a man who worked like a dog for over seventy years and wrote about ninety books, he valued the work ethic, and thought that his characters should as well. 

*While I’m ruminating over modernity and Wodehouse, I also had a think this morning about how progressive the women are in these books.  As much as I get impatient with poorly-written works that discuss the representation of women (few have anything important to say, and I am usually left wondering wither the articles on the representation of men?), it is remarkable that women play a leading role in Wodehouse books.  If I’m ever at a loss for material on this blog, I’m afraid that I might pursue this topic at greater length.