All posts tagged Belinda

The Provoked Wife by Sir John Vanbrugh (1697)

‘Lord, how like a Torrent Love flows into the Heart, when once the Sluice of Desire is open’d! Good Gods! What a Pleasure there is in doing what we should not do!’
(Lady Brute)

Cast

The cast list is clipped and to the point i.e. not as entertaining as some.

THE MEN
Constant
Heartfree
Sir John Brute
Treble, a Singing-Master
Rasor, Valet de Chambre to Sir John Brute
Justice of the Peace
Lord Rake, Companions to Sir John Brute
Colonel Bully
Constable and Watch

THE WOMEN
Lady Brute
Belinda, her Niece
Lady Fancyful
Madamoiselle
Cornet and Pipe, Servants to Lady Fancyful

Brief plot summary

Sir John Brute is tired of matrimony. He comes home drunk every night and is continually rude and insulting to his wife. She is meanwhile being tempted to embark upon an affair with the witty and faithful Constant. Divorce is not an option for either of the Brutes at this time, but forms of legal separation have recently come into existence, and would entail a separate maintenance to the wife. Such an arrangement would not allow remarriage. Still, muses Lady Brute, in one of many discussions with her niece Belinda, ‘These are good times. A woman may have a gallant and a separate maintenance too’.

Belinda is at the same time being grumpily courted by Constant’s friend Heartfree, who is surprised and dismayed to find himself in love with her. The bad example of the Brutes is a constant warning to Heartfree to not marry.

The Provoked Wife is a ‘talk play’, with the focus less on love scenes and more on discussions between female friends (Lady Brute and Belinda) and male friends (Constant and Heartfree). These exchanges are full of jokes, but are also thoughtful and often have an air of melancholy and frustration.

After complications caused by a forged-letter, the play ends with marriage between Heartfree and Belinda and stalemate between the Brutes. Constant continues to pay court to Lady Brute, and she continues to shilly-shally.

Extended plot summary

Lord Brute has a soliloquy about bored he is of being married – he encounters Lady Brute who asks an innocent question and sets off his surly angry replies – then Lady Brute has a soliloquy wondering what she did in her life to merit such treatment (although she admits 1. she married Brute for his money 2. everyone warned her about him, but she thought she could ‘change’ him.)

Enter Belinda, Lady Brute’s niece, and they have an extended dialogue about what a brute Lord Brute is. Belinda has spotted that her aunt is in love with Constant. Lady Brute gives a speech about how women ought to resist the temptation to flirt and coquette. Both then unite in critiquing the character of their neighbour, the exorbitant flirt and narcissistic Lady Fancyful.

Scene 2 Lady Fancyful’s dressing room Where we meet the lady herself and there is comic interaction between her English maid – who tells the truth about her appearance – and her super-flattering French fashion adviser, Mademoiselle, who tells her what she wants to hear. A letter arrives containing a song some admirer has composed for her. Lady Fancyful calls for Pipe her musician who comes and sings it.

Another letter arrives, Fie! she is so popular! It is more prosaic, from an admirer who says he will tell her all her Faults if she comes to the Walk in St James’s Park. There follows a comic dialogue between Lady Fancyful, who feigns to be shy and nervous of meeting an unknown man. Mademoiselle hands her all her accoutrements and virtually drags her out the door.

(It is a notable feature of this scene that entire sentences from Mademoiselle are in French, indicating that the audience was expected to understand it. Does this indicate the openly educated aristocratic audience which plays were still targeted at, at this late date?)

Act 2 Scene 1 St James’s Park Enter Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle. The letter writer turns out to be Heartfree, who they know already to be ‘a profess’d Woman-hater’. Heartfree proceeds to tell Lady Fancyful she’s a damn attractive woman but has made herself so prettified and pretentious that she has become a figure of fun. He says he will reform her. Lady Fancyful decries his awful manners, and they exit.

Heartfree is immediately greeted by Constant (who we know from Scene 1 that Lady Brute knows is paying court to her) and they have a dialogue which is, in effect, Cynicism (Heartfree) talking to True Love idealism (Constant). Heartfree provides one summary:

I persuade a Woman she’s an Angel, and she persuades you she’s one.

At greater length:

As for her Motion, her Mien, her Airs, and all those Tricks, I know they affect you mightily. If you should see your Mistress at a Coronation dragging her Peacock’s Train, with all her State and Insolence about her, ‘twou’d strike you with all the awful Thoughts that Heav’n itself could pretend to from you; whereas I turn the whole Matter into a Jest, and suppose her strutting in the self-same stately Manner, with nothing on her but her Stays and her under scanty quilted Petticoat.

Constant has loved Lady Brute since he first saw her at her wedding and wonders why she studiously avoids him. Heartfree says ‘Tis women for you’, but we know it’s actually because ‘Lady Brute’ does in fact love him but wants also to remain true to her principles.

Enter Lord Brute who is brutishly blunt about how he hates being married, though he concedes that Lady Brute is virtuous. He invites Constant and Heartfree to come out tonight, get drunk and bed some whores.

Scene 2 Lady Fancyful’s Lady Fancyful admits to Mademoiselle that Heartfree’s rudeness did in some manner affect her. Enter Mr Treble who has set a poem of Lady F’s to music. He sings it. She asks if there are any new songs in Town and Treble produces another one which they get Lady F’s singer, Pipe, to sing.

The chief characteristic of the poems in these plays is how utterly mechanical and unlyrical they are (like the plays themselves, like the taste of the times):

Not an Angel dwells above,
Half so fair as her I love.
Heaven knows, how she’ll receive me;
If she smiles, I’m blest indeed;
If she frowns, I’m quickly freed;
Heaven knows she ne’er can grieve me.

Lady Fancifull can’t get Heartfree out of her thoughts and agonises about writing a letter to him.

Act 3 Lord and Lady Brute and her niece Belinda are just finishing luncheon. He declares he will smoke and is anticipating being visited. The womenfolk wonder if the visitor is Constant and vow to stay in the room, despite his choking smoke. They deliberately prattle about their petticoats to wind up Sir John until he loses his temper, throws his pipe at them, and drives them out the room.

Heartfree and Constant arrive at this moment and ask Sir John what’s wrong and he curses all women. He invites them to sit and share a glass, he notices Constant is sad, because of a woman, is it? This is dramatic irony because it is, of course, because of Sir John’s own wife that Constant is sad. Sir John proposes a toast to Constant’s mistress, with the same ironic effect.

A servant announces some of his hearty friends (Lord Rake and Colonel Bully) are at the door calling him away to drink and make some kind of plan for the evening. He tells our two heroes to stay till he gets back. Heartfree realises this is an opportunity for Constant to forward his troth and agrees. Exit Lord Brute.

Enter Lady Brute and Belinda who good-humouredly spar with Constant (who feels faint with love for Lady B) and Heartfree, who allows himself to be taught how to be a Perfect Man by pert Belinda.

Enter Lady Fancyful (‘an Inundation of Impertinence’ as Lady Brute calls her) who lights up the stage very much as Lord Foppington lights up The Relapse. She proceeds to tell the ladies how rudely Heartfree addressed her and suggested she reform her entire appearance and manner and very amusingly to act out how clumsy and crude he would have her be.

Belinda realises that Lady Fancyful is in love with Heartfree, and decides to make her jealous by a little flirting with Heartfree. It works, as Lady Fancyful reveals in an aside to the audience: she does fancy Heartfree and Belinda flirting with him does make her jealous.

Heartfree grows bored, realises there’s no scope for Constant to advance his love suit to Lady Brute with the room full of women, and they leave. Lady Fancyful is very irked by the devout leave Heartfree takes of Belinda, while almost ignoring her. She vows to go home and study her revenge.

Re-enter Constant leading to a very elevated dialogue with Lady Brute, in which he declares his love and she replies with her Virtue.

LADY BRUTE: He who has Discretion enough to be tender of a Woman’s Reputation, carries a Virtue about him may atone for a great many Faults.
Const. If it has a Title to atone for any, its Pretensions must needs be strongest where the Crime is Love. I therefore hope I shall be forgiven the Attempt I have made upon your Heart, since my Enterprize has been a Secret to all the World but yourself.
LADY BRUTE. Secrecy, indeed, in Sins of this kind, is an Argument of weight to lessen the Punishment; but nothing’s a Plea for a Pardon entire, without a sincere Repentance.
CONSTANT: If Sincerity in Repentance consists in Sorrow for offending, no Cloyster ever inclos’d so true a Penitent as I should be.

You need your wits about you to really grasp the cut and thrust of these sharp remarks. There is something very intimate about such a deep and searching matching of wits, more so than in conventional love compliments. Constant and Lady Brute draw very close but at the end, when he asks for some token that he may have hopes his suit is heard, she tears his hand from hers and says that’s all she has time for and runs out.

When Heartfree re-enters Constant is in raptures that Lady Brute has at least given him Hope although, when Heartfree asks how she expressed it, it is comedy (and maybe an indication of how difficult it was even for contemporary audiences to follow such a cut-and-thrust dialogue) that Constant can’t remember the precise form of words she used. In fact, if you have to carefully reread the end of the dialogue to realise that she didn’t.

Scene 2 Sir John, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully in a pub, drinking and singing songs about going to the Devil. It is interesting that these songs are all cast in opposition to the government and the prevailing culture. They reference recent legislation about freedoms of speech and association, which they declare themselves against. It is the old aristocratic culture defying the new mercantile, legislative Whig culture of William III.

Scene 3 Lady Brute’s bedchamber Lady Brute and Belinda have a complex dialogue in which they first declare that women only behave the way they do (wear uncomfortable stays, go to plays, walk in the dusty park, even live in smoke-filled London) with the aim of attracting men, as if they were trivial frivolities they could throw off at any moment.

They then go on to describe in minute detail all the artifices they employ at the theatre to show themselves off to men, to smile to show off their teeth, show a variety of facial expressions, Yes it is a ridiculous world in which women so perform for men. And yet, Lady Brute finishes, Nature has given them One Thing which ensures they will always be top.

Yet our kind Mother Nature has given us something that makes amends for all. Let our Weakness be what it will, Mankind will still be weaker; and whilst there is a World, ’tis Woman that will govern it.

Then they talk about their loves. Lady Brute confesses she is weakening under Constant’s constant attack and pledges of love. But she wishes she had a partner in crime and asks if Belinda will not surrender to Heartfree. He isn’t that interested, Belinda replies. They agree to see the two young blades again, in Spring Garden, but will wear masks next time for greater amusement.

Act 4 Scene 1 Version 1 Lord Brute, Lord Rake and the Colonel refer to having stabbed someone i.e. in a drunken street brawl! They confirm their aristocratic, Royalist sympathies by accosting a passerby who turns out to be a dissenting i.e. non-confirmist tailor. They steal the vicar’s gown that the tailor was carrying, Lord Brute dresses up in it, and then they accost what the jovially refer to as ‘the enemy’ i.e. the constable and watch. Lord Brute attacks them with a club but the watch overcome him and arrest him (the others run off).

Version 2 In 1725 the play was revived and Vanbrugh, still living, rewrote this scene to make the poor tailor who the posh drunks (the ‘Courtiers’ as he calls them) attack, a woman’s tailor – and he is carrying not just any woman’s outfit, but a dress he has made for Lady Brute!

Sir John Brute immediately requisitions it and puts it on so that, when they are stopped by the constable and the watch, the latter joke about him being an Amazon, and Sir John drunkenly jests that he is Boudicca:

SIR JOHN: Sirrah, I am Bonduca, Queen of the Welchmen; and with a Leek as long as my Pedigree, I will destroy your Roman Legion in an Instant—Britons, strike home!

This makes the repartee with the constable, and then with the justice of the peace they bring him before, much funnier, in the broad pantomime tradition of men dressing up as women – if he is the queen then his accompaniers must be his maids of honour and so on – there is much more scope for banter, but it doesn’t stop there.

David Garrick in Vanbrugh’s Provoked Wife, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane painted by Johann Zoffany (1763)

Still drunk, Sir John tells the justice that he is none other than Lady Brute. This raises things to a new comic level, with Sir John giving an extended impression of a rebellious, drunken, lawless wife and the justice and officers sympathising with the poor – and they think, absent – Sir John.

But I am intrigued: did Vanbrugh revise this scene because it made the plot tighter, tying in his wife even to Sir John’s wild nights out, and shedding a drunken ironic light on the marriage which is the subject of the play?

Or because, by 1725, ridiculing the clergy had simply become untenable in what, over the 25 years to the revised version, had become a much more restrained and bourgeois society? That it had become too controversial and disrespectful to appear in a ‘comedy’? Whereas grown men dressing up as women is not only timelessly funny, but politically safe?

Scene 2 Heartfree can’t get the thought of Belinda out of his head and when Constant joins him he can’t help revealing that he, too, is one of the party of unhappy lovers. A servant brings a letter, pretending to be from anonymous admirers but infact from Lady B and Belinda, inviting them to a rendezvous in Spring Walk that evening at 8pm. Heartfree says he is too lovestricken to go, but Constant persuades him.

Version 1 Drunk Sir John Brute in the disguise of a cleric is brought by the constable to the house of the justice who politely tries to get to the bottom of it. When asked his name Sir John hiccups and says his name is Hiccup and the justice asks if he is one of the Hiccups of Norfolk. After more banter the justice lets him go. On the way out Sir John asks the constable if he wants to go pick up a whore, and when the latter says no, curses him and staggers off into the night.

Version 2 As explained above, in the 1725 revision of the play, Sir John is dressed in his wife’s dress, and this allows for the a joke whereby drunk Sir John accuses the arresting officer of trying to ravish him! It is literally knockabout stuff:

SIR JOHN Sir, there may have been Murder, for aught I know; and ’tis a great Mercy there has not been a Rape too—that Fellow wou’d have ravish’d me.
SECOND WATCH: Ravish! Ravish! O lud! O lud! O lud! Ravish her! Why, please your Worship, I heard Mr. Constable say he believed she was little better than a Maphrodite.
JUSTICE: Why, truly, she does seem a little masculine about the Mouth.
SECOND WATCH: Yes, and about the Hands too, an’t please your Worship; I did but offer in mere civility to help her up the Steps into our Apartment, and with her gripen Fist—ay, just so, Sir.
[Sir John knocks him down.]

Scene 3 the Spring Garden Heartfree and Constant meet with Lady Brute and Belinda wearing masks/disguises. All of them are shadowed and eavesdropped on by Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle, also in masks. Heartfree & Constant & Lady Brute and Belinda are just commencing some heavy bantering when Sir John enters the scene, still dressed as a doctor of divinity and roaring drunk. He hails Constant and Heartfree as friends and grabs both the women, assuming they are their whores. Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle retired in fear to a nearby arbour.

Heartfree, who never wanted to come anyway, leaves, Sir John starts insulting the ‘whores’, at which Lady Brute runs to Constant for protection and shows him her face. Heartfree re-enters, Belinda runs to him and shows him her face. Realising who the ladies are, Constant and Heartfree order Sir John to leave which, a little improbably, he does.

Belinda and Heartfree now have a fairly frank conversation in which he admits he loves her and might even go as far as marriage. It’s getting dark. She invites him to take a turn around the park and the exit. Meanwhile, Constant is chatting up Lady Brute and tells his friend not to hurry back.

Constant tells Lady Brute his love but she puts up objections; she is married and is not her virtue, her loyalty to her awful husband, part of what Constant likes about her? If she abandoned her virtue would it not destroy his love? And more of the same. Constant decides to storm the citadel and starts kissing her hand, her arm, her neck and pulls her towards a nearby arbour. Except this is the very arbour Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle are hiding in. As Constant and Lady Brute reach the entrance to it, Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle come running out past them.

Because of this, Lady Brute is thrown into utter terror that they witnessed her kissing a strange man, her reputation will be shot, her virtue worthless, her life not living. Terribly upset, she grabs Belinda, who is now just returning from her stroll with Heartfree, and rushes her off home.

The last word goes to Lady Fancyful, who is herself upset at seeing Heartfree pay court to Belinda, and out of her upset emerges a determination to take revenge.

Act 5 Scene 1 Lady Fancyful’s house A brief recapitulation of Lady Fancyful’s determination to be revenged.

Scene 2 Sir John Brute’s house The men have come back to Lady Brute’s house i.e. there are Constant, Heartfree, Lady Brute and Belinda. The servant assures them Sir John was seen staggering blind drunk into a tavern and will be some while, so ladies invite the men to stay and play a round of cards. But they have barely settled before the servant reappears to announce Sir John was kicked out of the tavern and has unexpectedly arrived home!! Quick quick, a panic-stricken Lady Brute hides the men and Belinda in the closet!

Sir John staggers in, filthy and bloody, and is rude and insulting to his wife. He begs a kiss, and she is so disgusted he deliberately smothers her in kisses till she is as dirty as him, then ‘tumbles her’, presumably onto a couch or divan. First he wants a ‘cold tea’ and proceeds to kick open the door of the closet and discovers… Heartfree and Constant! Sir John is elaborately, drunkenly polite to them and Lady B begs them to leave which – after assuring Sir John of his wife’s virtue they do.

Sir John has a bit more rant, slumps into a high chair and falls asleep snoring. Lady Brute is thrown into a panic (again) about her reputation. Belinda comes up with A Cunning Plan. They’ll tell Lord Brute that Belinda and Heartfree are now a loving couple and that they hid in the closet to escape detection and rumour, Constant hid with them so as to protect her ladyship’s reputation. Belinda says she’ll even go so far in backing up the story as to marry Heartfree – which leads to more dialogue about suitable and unsuitable marriages.

Having arrived at this plan, they ironically curtsey to the stinking filthy slob in the chair and call a servant to clean him and put him to bed.

Rasor, the servant they give this task to, alone on stage, now reveals that he has overheard everything the women said and will use this information to tell the French maid he is in love with in order to win her favours!

Scene 3 Lady Fancyful’s house Mademoiselle has told Lady Fancyful that her own paramour is Rasor from Lord Brute’s household i.e. she is the paramour Rasor was talking about a a moment ago. Lady Fancyful tells Mademoiselle to tell Rasor to tell Lord Brute everything that happened in the Spring Garden, masks, making love, kissing and all i.e. to betray Lady Brute’s adultery to him.

Exit Lady Fancyful. Enter Rasor who rushes over and snogs Mademoiselle, and then dangles his news in front of her, demanding kisses before he tells her everything he overheard i.e. Lady Brute loves Constant, the trio hiding in the closet, Lady Brute conspiring to help Belinda marry Heartfree.

But then Mademoiselle, conversely, dangles her news in front of him, demanding kisses as she tells him about the couple meeting in Spring Walk. She gets Rasor quite worked up and, for more ‘favours’, demands that he goes back and tells his master (Sir John) all she has revealed. He exits.

However, only seconds later, Lady Fancyful enters and regrets her course of action. It will probably lead to Belinda and Heartfree getting married, which is the last thing she wants. She tells Mademoiselle to call Rasor back!

Scene 4 Constant’s lodgings It is, by now, the next morning. Heartfree and Constant are pondering how to talk Sir John out of his suspicions at finding the pair of them in his wife’s closet when a letter arrives. It’s from the ladies who say explain their Cunning Plan i.e. to tell Sir John the couple were hiding because of Heartfree and Belinda’s secret intention to get married, which they wished to keep hid.

Good plan, but Heartfree is reluctant and it leads to an extended dialogue about fidelity in marriage (that old, old, old chestnut).

Scene 5 Sir John Brute’s house Constant and Heartfree rendezvous with Lady Brute and Belinda. Belinda asks Heartfree how he fancies the idea of matrimony and he says it’s a leap in the dark but he’s prepared to risk it (hardly young love).

Enter Sir John who is not unnaturally quite rude about finding two strange men in his wife’s closet. But Constant quickly rises to defend Lady Brute’s virtue and discovers (as Heartfree had told him) that the coward Sir John quickly backs down.

Sir John soliloquises, declaring he’s never loved his wife and she’s never loved him, he doesn’t know why she married him, and lamenting that he is without doubt a cuckold to the young stallion in front of him, who has threatened to draw his sword. The choice comes down to dying a hero or living a rascal. Oh well…

And so he gives his hand to Constant and, when Heartfree asks for the hand of Belinda, willingly gives it – all the while cursing and damning them both as dogs!

Two Revelations Meanwhile, Lady Fancyful has crept in in disguise, takes Belinda aside and reveals – in disguise – that she is an anonymous woman who is already married to Heartfree who made her swear not to tell anyone or he’d murder her! With wild improbability, instead of spotting this as a scam, clever Belinda is depicted as believing it and herself betrayed by Heartfelt’s bigamy.

At the same time a servant hands Heartfree an anonymous letter, supposedly from ‘a friend’, claiming the author has slept with Belinda, had a child by her and another is on the way!

Thus when Constant turns to ask the happy couple if they want to send for a priest, they both burst out with bitter accusations of the other, insisting the wedding be delayed, and start to chase each other round the stage!

Rasor, the servant, watching this, laments his part in their downfall and decides to set all right. He exits and returns a) dressed in sackcloth as a repentant b) pulling in Lady Fancyful and Madamoiselle.

He undoes all the complications of the plot. he tells the cast that Lady Fancyful lied in the anonymous letter as from a woman who was married to Heartfree; that the letter claiming Belinda was ever made pregnant was also a lie; and he tells Sir John that no illicit activity took place before the closet scene i.e. he is not a cuckold.

Rasor sets all straight and miserably apologises to the whole cast.

Belinda and Sir John ask who made him do it? Rasor claims he did it, he fell like Adam, out of Lust. Who was his Eve? He pulls off the mask of Mademoiselle. The company gasp! But behind her was the snake, Satan. Rasor pulls off the mask of Lady Fancyful!! The company gasp again!!

ALL: Lady Fancyful!
BELINDA: Impertinent!
LADY BRUTE: Ridiculous!
ALL: Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Lady Fancyful tries to put a brave face on it till the end, claiming that Belinda and Heartfree will make such a wretched couple she was doing them a favour – then pompously exits, followed by Mademoiselle.

Heartree and Belinda promptly forgive each other and prepare to go to church. Constant interrupts to sing a love song which, inappropriately, describes the sad fate of an innocent maid in ancient Greece who lets herself be ravished then is abandoned by her lover. Hmmm. In the last six lines Belinda and Heartfree say, nonetheless, they’ll risk it, and:

HEARTFREE: Then let’s to Church: And if it be our Chance to disagree——
BELINDA: Take heed—the surly Husband’s Fate you see.

Constant and Lady Brute are, however, no further forward in their love affair. It is an oddly muted and almost sad finale.

Thoughts

This play isn’t as good as The Relapse because a) its central the monster figure, Lady Fancyful, isn’t as epically monstrous as Lord Foppington was in that play, and b) there is something frustrated and melancholy about the frustrated love of Constant and Lady Brute.

Unless I’m missing something, they don’t even speak in the finale, let alone get anywhere near marrying – for that would overthrow the premise of the play which is Lady Brute’s solid virtue.

Articles about The Provoked Wife describe it as ‘a talk play’ or even a ‘problem play’ i.e. one designed to prompt discussion of the ‘issues’ by the audience. I hazard the suggestion that this is to overcredit theatre audiences as moral philosophers rather than as, well, people out for a night’s entertainment.

If you went for dinner after seeing the play, in the middle class tradition. possibly one line of chat would be to discuss the rights and wrongs of Lady Brute’s behaviour – which is certainly complex. My opinion would be that she made the same mistake so many women do (I say this because I listened a few days ago to a radio news item about the new legislation being brought in to help battered wives in which the same way of thinking came up again and again) – that she could change a brute. She had an over-high opinion of her ability to change someone, and an under-real understanding of how difficult it is to change anybody. (I speak as the father of two teenagers who I have been trying to persuade to get up before noon and tidy their own rooms for what seems like several hundred years.) Changing people’s behaviour is hard; changing their character almost impossible.

So is she right to reject Constant and remain in her unhappy marriage? It certainly feels wrong to have played Constant along as far as she did, if she has no real intention of leaving her husband.

But in my opinion, the real talking point of the play is that it is marred. In a number of ways it doesn’t quite come off, it feels unfinished, it feels like it needed one more draft to make it mesh.

The most obvious aspect of this is the way the traditional ‘blocker’ of the happy marriage of the young couple doesn’t evolve organically from the setup but is introduced only at the end of the final act (Lady Fancyful’s scheme to discredit Heartfree and Belinda)… and then is promptly undone about two minutes later. These plays veer close to being farces, and this last minute complication and last second resolution feel stuck on with sellotape.

And the ad hoc, last-minute feel of the Complication goes some way to undermining the comic grandeur of Lady Fancyful. She has such epic comic promise in the first half, that we feel her determination to outdo Belinda and grab Heartfree for herself deserved some grander, wilder, more elaborate Scheme.

So maybe it is to some extent the ‘issues’ which it deals with which give The Provoked Wife its rather chewy, problematic flavour. But it is also the way the entire plot structure feels a little undercooked and leaves you feeling somehow cheated.

Vanbrugh’s style

That said, Vanbrugh’s prose style again shows itself much more clear, direct, comprehensible and therefore more obviously funny than many of the other comedies I’ve read. This quote isn’t particularly funny, I give it as an example of his clarity.

BELINDA: Sure it must feel very strange to go to Bed to a Man.
LADY BRUTE: Um – it does feel a little odd at first; but it will soon grow easy to you.

‘A little odd’, I was just struck by the perfect naturalness of a phrase which we still use 320 years later.

Here’s another example.

BELINDA: And some careful Thoughts on your own, I believe, have hindered you from sleeping. Pray how does this matrimonial Project relish with you?
HEARTFREE: Why, ‘faith, e’en as storming Towns does with Soldiers, where the Hope of delicious Plunder banishes the Fear of being knock’d on the Head.

Hmm. Maybe what I like about it is its lack of subtlety and sophistication. Possibly I am not sophisticated enough to appreciate the more recherché and long-winded texts. Whatever the reason, I think there’s no denying Vanbrugh’s style is pithier, his phrasing more direct and accessible than his contemporaries.

Sir John Brute has a handy quote which sums up the thing I’m talking about, the way many characters in other Restoration comedies express themselves in such lengthy and convoluted phraseology, sometimes mixed up with legal or specialised jargon, that you need notes to understand them – and that the characters sometimes don’t even understand each other!

SIR JOHN BRUTE: Your People of Wit have got such cramp ways of expressing themselves, they seldom comprehend one another.

In my view, Vanbrugh is never like that. He is always lucid and forceful in his expressions.

(After writing that, I read the Wikipedia article which explains that The Relapse was deliberately phrased simply and bluntly ‘to be suitable for amateurs and minor acting talent’, but that The Provoked Wife was written for more versatile professionals including leading actors of the day, and so is deliberately more emotionally subtle. That may be true, especially the scenes in which Lady Brute and Belinda, or Constant and Heartfree, discuss the emotional subtleties of their situations – but I don’t think it disproves my basic point that, even in those situations, Vanbrugh has a gift for clarity of expression unmatched by his rivals.)

Misandry

BELINDA: Well, you Men are unaccountable things, mad till you have your Mistresses, and then stark mad till you are rid of ’em again. Tell me honestly, Is not your Patience put to a much severer Trial after Possession than before?
HEARTFREE: With a great many I must confess it is, to our eternal Scandal;

Misogyny

LADY BRUTE: We are as wicked, Child, but our Vice lies another way: Men have more Courage than we, so they commit more bold, impudent Sins. They quarrel, fight, swear, drink, blaspheme, and the like: Whereas we, being Cowards, only backbite, tell Lyes, cheat at Cards, and so forth.

As I’ve mentioned, in my opinion these formulations aren’t intended to be the statement of some great philosophy or worldview, the reverse. They are the social clichés and stereotypes of their day, bromides and truisms which have little or no value as statements of fact, but are the oil which lubricates the complicated machinery of the comic plots.

HEARTFREE: I shou’d have, if I had a good Opinion enough of her’s, to believe she cou’d do as much by me. For to do ’em right, after all, the Wife seldom rambles, till the Husband shews her the way.
CONSTANT: ‘Tis true, a Man of real Worth scarce ever is a Cuckold, but by his own Fault. Women are not naturally lewd; there must be something to urge ’em to it. They’ll cuckold a Churl, out of Revenge; a Fool, because they despise him; a Beast, because they loath him. But when they make bold with a Man they once had a well-grounded Value for, ’tis because they first see themselves neglected by him.

You can choose to read this stuff as meaningful and so be upset by the way it transgresses our 21st century woke values. Or you can see it as the verbiage and small change of conversation which is required to make the plays go.

Related links

Reviews of other Restoration plays

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by Simon on August 12, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on August 12, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/the-provoked-wife-john-vanbrugh/

The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)

BELLMORE: Come, come, leave business to idlers and wisdom to fools; they have need of ’em.  Wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation; and let Father Time shake his glass.

In his lengthy reply to the stinging criticisms of the contemporary stage contained in the polemical pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage written by the bishop and theologian Jeremy Collier, William Congreve tells us that he wrote his first play, The Old Bachelor, while recovering from ‘a fit of sickness’ aged just 19! It’s an astonishing achievement for one so young.

A few years later, in 1692, young William arrived in London and showed The Old Bachelor to the leading literary figure of the day, John Dryden who, with typical generosity, declared he had never seen such a good first play in his life, but that it needed a bit of work cutting down to length and re-ordering some of the scenes.

Once revised, The Old Bachelor was promptly accepted by the only theatre company then performing in London, the United Company, and opened in March 1693. It was a smash-hit and had an extraordinary run of fourteen nights, which was getting on for a record for a Restoration comedy; some new plays ran for the bare minimum of three nights!

If you think about it, these incredibly short runs tell you everything about the size of the audience for these plays. It was minuscule. Was it even in the thousands? And this puts in context the many prologues and epilogues to the plays. Often the playwright and the actors knew key members of the audience personally, and so were directly addressing known individuals in the prologues and epilogues.

The Old Bachelor‘s success was in part attributed to the skilful performances of veteran performers Thomas Betterton and Anne Bracegirdle in the roles of Heartwell and Araminta, respectively.

I was startled to learn in a footnote that the music for the play was composed by Henry Purcell.

Cast list

I find the cast lists of these plays not only useful, but sometimes amusing – the comic names and descriptions – in their own right:

MEN
Heartwell, a surly old bachelor, pretending to slight women, secretly in love with Silvia
Bellmour, in love with Belinda
Vainlove, capricious in his love; in love with Araminta
Sharper
Sir Joseph Wittol
Captain Bluffe
Fondlewife, a banker
Setter, a pimp
Tribulation Spintext, a Puritan preacher (who never actually appears in the play)
Mr Gavot, musician to Araminta
Servant to Fondlewife.

WOMEN.
Araminta, in love with Vainlove
Belinda, her cousin, an affected lady, in love with Bellmour
Lætitia, wife to Fondlewife
Sylvia, Vainlove’s forsaken mistress
Lucy, maid to Sylvia
Betty, maid to Belinda

It’s all set in London. As I’ve read more of the plays, I’ve realised that Aphra Behn’s setting her most successful play, The Rover, in Italy, is by far the exception not the rule of Restoration comedy. Almost all the comedies are set in the same city and the same time as the audience. They are completely contemporary.

Act 1

Bellmour and Vainlove are two weary rakes. Vainlove likes seducing women but is easily bored and actively dislikes it if they come on to him. He goes to show Bellmour but gives him the wrong one by mistake, it is a letter from Vainlove’s recently spurned lover, Sylvia, reproving him for abandoning her. It then comes out that Bellmour slept with her, apparently in disguise so she didn’t realise who he was! But she sincerely loves Vainlove and he has dumped her.

Next Vainlove gives Bellmour the letter he’d intended to show him, a love letter from Laetitia, the wife of the comic character Fondlewife – he paid her a few polite compliments and now she’s sent him a damn love letter telling him her husband will be out of town on business and to come and see her in disguise. He asks Bellmour to do him a favour and do it for him – but Laetitia’s lovely says Bellmour – yes, but I hate being forced into an affair, complains Vainlove. They discuss getting Vainlove’s tailor, Settler, to provide a disguise for Bellmour. They briefly discuss the feeble character of the husband, Fondlewife, then Vainlove leaves ‘on business’.

Bellmour complains that he is already in love with one woman, has a dozen or so mistresses, and now Vainlove is suggesting he take on his beloved, God it’s an exhausting business, being a libertine! He says this in the form of a soliloquy, alone onstage, at which point enter Sharper, whose role is to provide comic asides, and start with a good line:

SHARPER:  I’m sorry to see this, Ned.  Once a man comes to his soliloquies, I give him for gone.

Enter Heartwell who they both mock for being a grumpy old misanthropist who doesn’t believe in love. Heartwell in turn mocks Bellmour and Vainlove for expending so much energy in the pursuit of women, and has a particularly cynical speech about how, when you’ve finally gone through all this faradiddle in order to get married, your baby will end up looking like half the aristocracy of England because your wife will have been unfaithful with them all. Visitors coo and tickle the baby and say:

‘Ay, the boy takes after his mother’s relations,’ when the devil and she knows ’tis a little compound of the whole body of nobility.

Heartwell leaves ‘on business’ and Bellmour spots two stock comic characters, Sir Joseph Wittol, a foolish knight, and his companion, the cowardly bully, Captain Bluffe, who he points out to Sharper. Bellmour explains that the night before he came across Wittol being set upon by footpads and freed him, though Wittol ran off without identifying his rescuer.

Act 2 scene 1

Sharper follows Sir Joseph to the location where he was mugged the night before, then pretends to be his mysterious rescuer but says that, alas, he lost a hundred pounds in the affray, and starts trying to dun Sir Joseph for it. This blustering old fool is trying to find a way out, when his sidekick and defender turns up, the swaggering blustering bully Captain Bluffe, and there is a richly comic scene of Sharper egging both men on to silly heights of boasting and braggartry, Bluffe in particular being scandalised that his heroic escapades in the recent wars don’t seem to have been reported in the news gazettes!

Act 2 scene 2

Araminta, in love with Vainlove, squabbles with her cousin Belinda, who affects to despise men –

BELINDA: Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.

But is secretly in love with Bellmour. Araminta says Belinda dreamed of Bellmour last night, called out his name and embraced her (Araminta) as if she was him. Stuff and nonsense, cries Belinda, and calls her servant to prepare her things to go out, but at that moment a servant announces that Bellmour and Vainlove are visiting. After some indecision, Belinda decides to stay after all, in order to protect her cousin’s reputation, of course – though her cousin teases her it’s solely to see Bellmour.

Prolonged repartee during which all sides wittily cap each other’s allusions and barbs, with generalised sententiae about love and devotion. Araminta emerges as the quickest-witted of them – all of these plays feature one strong, determined and clever woman. There is a passage of particularly barbed banter between Bellmour who extravagantly paints his devotion and Belinda who scorns him. In fact when he asks her what she can do for her, she says shut up, which leads to a comic sequence where Bellmour continues his conversation in sign language until Belinda is so exasperated she lets him speak again.

Their musician, Mr Gavot, performs a song Araminta has written. This happens in most of the plays. Did Restoration aristocrats write songs this glibly and easily for their lady loves or is it purely a theatrical convention?

Act 3 scene 1

Sylvia is the woman Vainlove has jilted, and Lucy is her maid who, as so often, impertinently tells her boss the true state of affairs, namely that Vainlove will never love her again. Sylvia is consumed with envy for her love rival, Araminta, but Lucy says she has a Plan to fix that – send Vainlove a cloying letter as if from Araminta – a woman’s enthusiasm always puts Vainlove off.

LUCY: Contrive a kind letter as from her, ’twould disgust his nicety, and take away his stomach.

Meanwhile, here comes Heartwell – Lucy encourages Sylvia to make the best of a bad job and hook him. Soon she’ll be old. She needs to get a husband before she can.

Vainlove and Bellmour have tailed Heartwell to Sylvia’s house. They watch as the ageing foo hesitates whether to in or not and commit himself to the snare of womanhood. He does, as Bellmour and Vainlove stifle their mirth. Then Vainlove’s tailor, Setter, arrives: he has prepared a full set of clothes which allow Bellmour to masquerade as the earnest Puritan preacher Spintext.

Bellmour tells Setter to meet him with the costume later and exits. Setter launches into a comically high-minded speech about the relative merits of a manservant and a pimp. Lucy comes upon him and, as so often, a lead male character’s manservant is in love with a lead woman’s maidservant, their working class love affair echoing their betters’ affair but more crudely.

Congreve gives this kind of set scene an extra spin by having Lucy put on a face mask before talking to Setter and, given that his soliloquy was already laughably pretentious, the couple then launch into a parody of highfalutin’ tragedy, complete with what were obviously obscure and archaic words to convey their eminence and lofty sentiments. Lucy extracts from Setter that his master will be in Covent Garden later, then manages to get away without being covered in slobbery kisses.

Wittoll and Bluffe enter. Bluffe is cross that Sir Joseph has given Sharper £100, and works himself up into a fury of vengeance, declaring that if only Sharper were here, he would take his revenge and… at that precise moment Sharper and Bellmour appear onstage and Bluffe performs a comic blustering retreat. Sharper quickly detects how angry they are with him but also what cowards they are – and so takes to kicking Wittoll and beating Bluffe who swears he will have vengeance, but not now, not here, it’s too public and various other excuses.

Sharper and Bellmour exeunt laughing.

Act 3 Scene 2 Silvia’s lodgings

Enter Heartwell, the ageing anti-love exponent, the old bachelor of the title, and Sylvia, Vainlove’s jilted lover. Heartwell has laid on a dance, music and the performance of a song to impress Silvia. He then jangles his purse full of gold coins at her. His wooing of her is done in the higher, more poetic style the play occasionally drops into. Heartwell combines high-flown rhetoric with emotional clumsiness, for example offering to buy Sylvia outright. But when she beings to talk about marriage, he is suddenly very reluctant to marry her – because he thinks marriage is a fool’s estate – suggesting instead that she become his licensed mistress. Which makes Sylvia cry that she doesn’t want to live as a whore and burst into tears.

But when he finally leaves, after grabbing a few kisses, Sylvia turns to the audience and says:

SILVIA:  Ha, ha, ha, an old fox trapped –

Suggesting that everything she said in their scene together, all the sighs and tears, were a ploy, a trap to get him to marry her, to get her hands on his money. (Money is never far from the surface of these plays; they reveal what a major role it plays in human relationships.)

Sylvia’s servant Lucy enters and says she’s contrived a letter to Vainlove as if from Amarinta which will wreck their love.

Act 4 scene 1

Bellmour dressed up as the Puritan Spintext:

BELLMOUR: I wonder why all our young fellows should glory in an opinion of atheism, when they may be so much more conveniently lewd under the coverlet of religion.

Exits. Enter Fondlewife who, in a soliloquy, reveals he is jealous of his beautiful young wife, Laetitia. Then a scene in which he suspects her of adultery and she, in comic asides, reveals she is frightened he knows her true intent i.e. to be unfaithful with Vainlove, whilst to Fondlewife’s face playing the aggrieved wife. They both use baby talk which makes the scene more funny. Finally, she manages, with umpteen kisses, to pack him off on the overnight journey he’s taking on ‘business’.

It is an important fact that Fondlewife has arranged for a chaplain or preacher to be with her and instruct her while he is away. This is the content of the letter she had sent to Vainlove and which he showed Bellmour right at the start of the play i.e. ‘my husband is going away for the night, come in the disguise of a preacher.’

Vainlove and Sharper. They read the letter they’ve been sent, as from Amarinta, but in fact by Lucy. She has done her work well, correctly predicting that by making Amarinta come on strong, puts Vainlove off her:

VAINLOVE: I hate to be crammed. By heaven, there’s not a woman will give a man the pleasure of a chase: my sport is always balked or cut short. I stumble over the game I would pursue. ’Tis dull and unnatural to have a hare run full in the hounds’ mouth, and would distaste the keenest hunter. I would have overtaken, not have met, my game.

So they plan to meet Amarinta at Covent Garden that evening, but Vainlove will now spurn her. (Sharper thinks he’s a fool.)

Act 4 Scene 2

Bellmour, in disguise as Spintext the preacher, is shown into Mrs Fondlewife i.e. Laetitia’s rooms. No sooner has the servant left before he throws off his disguise and reveals himself to Laetitia who feigns shock and surprise, mainly because she was expecting Vainlove. But the scene is devoted to showing Bellmour’s formidable seduction technique as he slowly wins her round and by the end, by pretending to have a fainting fit, he gets her to agree he can lie on her bed to recover, and they exeunt into her bedroom.

Act 4 scene 3 St James’s Park

Setting for the afternoon rambles of the layabout aristocracy. Enter Belinda and Amarinta. It is much more obvious that Belinda is meant to be pretentious and affected and tells Amarinta how she took it upon herself to correct the manners of a country family up in town for the first time.

They put on masks as Sir Joseph Wittoll and the boasting soldier Captain Bluffe approach and there is some comic banter before the ladies spy Vainlove approaching, and tell the two buffoons to bugger off, although Sir Joseph realises Amarinta is heiress to a vast fortune and tells us in an aside he’d like to marry her.

The point of the scene is for Amarinta and Vainlove to be left alone, so he can act cold and in a roundabout way berate her for the letter she sent him. But since she didn’t send him the letter, she has no idea what is going on and quickly becomes angry, storming off.

Act 4 scene 4 Fondlewife’s house

Bellmour and Laetitia have had sex and emerge from the bedroom to hear Fondlewife’s voice coming up the stairs. Bellmour gathers up the preacher costume and Laetitia bundles him into the bedroom before opening the door to Fondlewife and Sir Joseph.

In this farcical scene, Fondlewife announces that he needs to go into the bedroom to collect the papers he forgot to take for his ‘business’ and Laetitia desperately tries to think up pretexts to stop him, at one point bundling into Sir John when Fondlewife’s back is turned and claiming the old bodger tried to molest her; which Fondlewife believes and pushes Sir John out the door with vivid Biblical imprecations.

But Fondlewife is still determined to enter the bedroom (where Bellmour is hiding) and so Laetitia suddenly has a brainwave and tells her husband the preacher came round and was giving her lessons in piety but had an attack of stomach ache and is lying on the bed. Fondlewife buys this, tiptoes into the bedroom, sees the form of Bellmour on the bed, gets his papers and tiptoes out, telling Laetitia they must get the maid to look after the poor preacher when… he sees the book. A book on the floor. The book Bellmour brought with him. And is it a book of devotion and piety? No. Fondlewife picks it up and realises that it is a French novel, The Innocent Adultery! No priest would carry this. Bellmour is busted!

Angrily, Fondlewife calls for the unknown man to come out of the bedroom, while Laetitia pleads she has no idea who he is or what he was doing there, wretched please which Fondlewife now brusquely dismisses.

But this scene turns into a further demonstration of Bellmour’s mastery as he manages to outface the situation. He comes out of the bedroom and confronts Fondlewife, declaring he is a whoremaster who pinched Spintext’s costume, then pretended to have colic in order to lie on her bed and was about to call her in when Fondlewife appeared – so he never got as far as seducing Laetitia.

Bellmour exudes confidence. Laetitia talks babytalk to Fondlewife. The latter softens. She faints. He believes her. Thus gullible husbands.

Act 5 scene 1 The street

Bellmour meets up with Setter and tells him the disguise worked a treat. Then they both see Heartwell arriving at Silvia’s house. Setter exits and Bellmour chats up Lucy, Silvia’s maid, with a kiss (seems like she’s one his many conquests) and some money, and asks her to keep up the pretence that he is a preacher, so he can marry the silly couple.

Enter Vainlove, Sharper and Setter. Setter tells them that the letter which upset Vainlove, the letter pretending to come from Amarinta, was in fact concocted by vengeful Silvia. This clears the way for Vainlove to be back in love with Amarinta!

The final scenes get confusing. Bellmour in the guise of the preacher falsely marries Heartwell and Silvia, then takes her aside, reveals his true identity and promises he will find her a better husband. He pops back into the street and tells Setter and Sharper to keep their eyes peeled for a replacement husband then exits. At this point Sir John and Captain Bluffe come along.

Setter and Sharper then have a whole series of machinations, some of which happen in whispers, or offstage, in some of which they pretend information to dupe Sir John and the Captain, and also Heartwell who Sharper appears to torment by dragging him towards his own house, promising him a fine young wench who’s up for a shag… until Heartwell realises it’s the wife he’s just married that Sharper is talking about. I got lost in the maze. I read this passage a couple of times and still didn’t understand the ins and outs. Partly because they don’t clearly state what they’re planning to do, they disappear into corners to mutter with the people they’re gulling…the schemes they’re cooking up only become clear as they emerge in the final scene.

In the penultimate passage, Bellmour and Belinda, Vainlove and Amarinta, are invited to Heartwell’s house. Somehow Sharper has got Silvia out of the house and conspired to convince Heartwell that his wife of half an hour is already off whoring. The four leads tease Heartwell about his stupidity in marrying and his cuckolded state: Belinda in particular emerges as sharp tongued and witty.

As Eric Rump points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition, this tormenting of Heartwell amounts to bullying and triggers him to give a speech which echoes Shylock’s in The Merchant of Venice:

HEARTWELL: How have I deserved this of you? any of ye?  Sir, have I impaired the honour of your house, promised your sister marriage, and whored her?  Wherein have I injured you?  Did I bring a physician to your father when he lay expiring, and endeavour to prolong his life, and you one and twenty?  Madam, have I had an opportunity with you and baulked it?  Did you ever offer me the favour that I refused it?

At moments like this does the comedy topple into something much more serious, into something momentarily closer to tragedy? Is it that much more serious precisely because it emerges from comedy, rather than one of the era’s over-wrought tragedies?

Eric Rump points out that the role of Heartwell – the Old Bachelor of the title – was taken by Thomas Betterton, the ‘Laurence Olivier of his day’, who also played tragic leads and so would have given the role more depth and seriousness than a purely comic actor. However you judge the effect, it is extremely impressive of Congreve to have touched this deeper nerve when he was barely into his twenties.

Anyway, our boys and girls goad Heartwell into declaring he will do anything to be rid of his married state, which is what they’re conspiring for all along – and we, the audience, know that he is not in fact married at all, since the ceremony was carried out by Bellmour in disguise.

On the last three pages the elaborate scam is revealed. Sharper and Settle have married Sir John and Captain Bluffe to two women they thought were Amarinta and Belinda – except they aren’t. The real Amarinta and Belinda now take their masks off to reveal themselves – to the two braggart soldiers’ shock and surprise – and when they turn to the women they have married – they reveal themselves as Silvia and Lucy.

SIR JOHN: Pray, madam, who are you?  For I find you and I are like to be better acquainted.
SILVIA: The worst of me is, that I am your wife—

So Lucy is married to Captain Bluffe – who announces he will no more to the wars – Silvia is married to the insufferable Sir John, but does at least acquire a title. And Heartwell breathes a huge sigh of relief to realise he isn’t married after all.

And Bellmour – with the abrupt reversal in attitude for which these plays are notorious – declares he is happy to acquire the fetters of marriage with acid-tongued Belinda. It only remains for Vainlove to marry Amarinta and all the loose ends are tied up but Bellmour notices Vainlove, given his contrary psychology, showing signs of reluctance to marry her and so announces that he and Belinda will get married first the next morning, to set an example to Vainlove and Araminta.

Then there’s the traditional music and dancing.

Animal imagery

There’s a lot of animal imagery. Vainlove is referred to as an ass, Bellmour an ape and a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Heartwell an old fox, Sir John a lion, women as hares to be hunted or partridges to be covered, cuckolded men are like stags with horns. The references add colourful imagery to the endless truisms about love and marriage and adultery.

Maybe they link to Belinda’s comment about ‘filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man’, but I don’t see that there’s anything very deep going on here. All the Restoration comedies are based on a worldview which sees human beings as amoral animals devoted to quenching animal drives, lust being topmost, but also drunkenness and gluttony, and using their God-given minds not to seek a devout and spiritual life, but to concoct fantastically complicated schemes for their own debauchery.

SIR JOSEPH: Nay, Gad, I’ll pick up; I’m resolved to make a night on’t… Adslidikins, bully, we’ll wallow in wine and women. Why, this same Madeira wine has made me as light as a grasshopper.

Quite often, reading these plays, you can sympathise with Bishop Collier and his characterisation of the plays as deliberately encouraging lust, avarice, greed, gluttony, jealousy, anger and sometimes violence.

VAINLOVE: Why did you not find me out, to tell me this before, sot?
SETTER: Sir, I was pimping for Mr. Bellmour.
SHARP: You were well employed.

More noticeable is Congreve’s way with extended metaphors, or with a metaphor which allows him to bring in colourful imagery. Thus at the very opening Bellmour has a little speech which in four clauses contains four images from the game of bowls:

BELLMOUR: Business is the rub of life, perverts our aim, casts off the bias, and leaves us wide and short of the intended mark.

This is so contrived I wonder if the actor paused and waited for a ripple of applause from the audience at the author’s cleverness.

At the start of Act Five, Bellmour bumps into Setter who asks him how things went in the plot to have sex with Laetitia, and both of them jokily use an extended naval metaphor to describe the result:

SETTER: Joy of your return, sir. Have you made a good voyage? or have you brought your own lading back?
BELLMOUR: No, I have brought nothing but ballast back – made a delicious voyage, Setter; and might have rode at anchor in the port till this time, but the enemy surprised us – I would unrig.

So Bellmour has unloaded his cargo.

Misandry

Woke modern critics attack the Restoration comedies for their misogyny e.g. Sharper describing Araminta as:

a delicious melon, pure and consenting ripe, and only waits thy cutting up.

But it seems to me that all the characters, regardless of gender, age or class, manipulate and denigrate each other on the basis of an utterly heartless and cynical worldview. And for every dismissive generalisation the men make about women, the women make one about men, and the aristocrats make about their servants, and the servants make about their stupid masters.

  • BELINDA:  Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.
  • LUCY: Man was by nature woman’s cully made:
  • HEARTWELL: Lying, child, is indeed the art of love, and men are generally masters in it
  • ARAMINTA to VAINLOVE: Thou hadst all the treachery and malice of thy sex

The plays may contain umpteen libels against women, but the biggest indictment is how the men talk and behave and Belinda has a vivid little speech about how, in the end, disappointing men are, after all the impressive wooing, once you actually marry them.

BELINDA:Thou art so troublesome a lover, there’s hopes thou’lt make a more than ordinary quiet husband.
BELLMOUR: Is that a maxim among ye?
BELINDA: Yes: you fluttering men of the mode have made marriage a mere French dish… You are so curious in the preparation, that is, your courtship, one would think you meant a noble entertainment – but when we come to feed, ’tis all froth, and poor, but in show.  Nay, often, only remains, which have been I know not how many times warmed for other company, and at last served up cold to the wife.

The exhausted libertine

I think it’s Dorimant in The Man of Mode that critics point out sounds tired – or is it Belvile in The Rover? The point is that many of the plays start with the leading male character sounding exhausted.

Now, the critics I read appear to take this at face value as an indictment of the libertine lifestyle as a whole, as if the plays are observational documentaries. But something in Bellmour’s final words in this play made me realise there’s a simpler and less moralising interpretation.

Structurally, all the plays end with the lead characters marrying and many critics have pointed out the complete lack of psychological verisimilitude involved in witty, cynical characters who’ve spent four acts slagging off marriage as an institution for stubborn fools – suddenly decide marriage is a wonderful state and enter into it with boundless enthusiasm.

Seen from this perspective, the trope of the tired libertine makes more sense. It stands to reason that, in preparation for this last act about-face, hints should be dropped right from the start that the lead libertine is actually quite tired of his life of endless seduction and is, in fact, teetering on the brink of abandoning it.

And therefore that the male lead’s expression of these thoughts and feelings have little or no moral or psychological content, but are a structural necessity of the form, as formulaic as most other aspects of the plays.

In fact, almost all these Restoration comedies can be reinterpreted as the final acts in the libertine’s long career. They’re all plays about Life Changes and Conversions.

Related links

Reviews of other Restoration plays

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by Simon on July 29, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/the-old-bachelor-william-congreve/

Pure Posy by Posy Simmonds (1987)

From 1977 to 1987 Posy Simmonds drew a regular cartoon strip in the Guardian newspaper gently mocking the middle-class lifestyles and liberal concerns of a regular cast of a dozen or so fictional characters, centred on:

  • Wendy Weber, a former nurse, married to verbose polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber, trying to attend night school while being mother of a brood of six children, ranging from little Benji to teenage glamour-puss Belinda
  • Jo Heep, married to tedious alcoholic whisky salesman Edmund Heep, and mum to two rebellious teenagers who’ve adopted the punk look
  • Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, and mother of a young baby

Throughout the period the cartoons were periodically gathered together into books, namely:

  • Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
  • True Love (1981)
  • Pick of Posy (1982)
  • Very Posy (1985)
  • Pure Posy (1987)

And these books were themselves gathered together into a huge compendium volume, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus, which was published in 2012 and now appears to be the only way to get hold of the cartoons.

Pure Posy is the fourth and final in the series of collections (given that 1981’s True Love wasn’t a collection but a one-off ‘graphic novel’, following the schoolgirl crush of a naive young woman, Janice Brady, for a regular cast member, tall, suave, philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright).

Historical context

Pure Posy brings together 75 Posy cartoon strips from 1985 through to 1987, a period of great historical change. In Britain the Miner’s Strike of 1984-5 tore the country apart and polarised political and social opinion, while Mrs Thatcher’s harsh monetarist economic policies saw unemployment continuing at record highs in many parts of the country. And yet those who had jobs, especially nice jobs in the City and service sector, had never had it so good, and thrilled to all sorts of new fashions, big shoulder pads, big hair, jogging, health food etc.

On the international scene the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 was soon followed by the launch of his new policies of glasnost and perestroika which, although nobody suspected it at the time, would lead to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and the collapse of socialist ideology all around the world.

But for the first few years, the ones covered by this strip, all most of us saw was a continuation of the worsening relations between the world’s superpowers and the escalation of tensions which terrified everyone that there might be actually a nuclear war, and which was symbolised, in England, by the ongoing protests by thousands of women at the Greenham Common airbase.

Pure Posy

In general the Posy strip formed a haven away from politics and the hurly-burly of events reported elsewhere in the Guardian newspaper, focusing, as it does, on the domestic concerns and foibles of the Weber, Wright and Heep households, with occasional forays off to meet new, unnamed characters to make other points about middle-class, white, heterosexual, well-meaning liberal Londoners.

As in the previous books the strips are deliberately not placed in the chronological order of their publishing but arranged to create a sort of seasonal progression through one notional year, opening with Christmas-themed strips, and in-between progressing through spring, summer holidays, autumn, and back to Christmas again.

The triumph of Thatcherism

That said the general cultural spirit of the times does hang heavy over many of the strips, depicting the extinction of the old 1960s values of caring and concern, in a welter of greed and materialism.

This is epitomised by a very telling strip from 1986 which depicts a local working-class couple commenting on the changes they’ve seen in their neighbourhood, namely that, in the later 1970s/early 1980s, posh middle-class nobs moved in, all called Gemma and holding dinner parties and hiring au pairs but… they spoke as if they were genuinely concerned about unemployment and the need to invest in infrastructure and the NHS and so on. They were nobs, but they were also ‘sort of middle-class socialists’.

Nowadays a new breed of nobs are moving in, who show all the signs of middle-class gentility i.e. obsession with wine, interior furnishings, hiring au pairs and nannies and having a pretty little place down in the country, BUT… they have abandoned their soft-left scruples: Now they say we’ve got to be realistic about unemployment, they choose private medicine over the NHS, they unashamedly send their children to private school.

In other words, this strip epitomises the success of Thatcherism in making middle-class people across the country feel unembarrassed about making money and spending it selfishly.

This one strip shows how the cosy, rather smugly liberal, soft socialist and feminist and environmentalist worldview of George and Wendy Weber became old hat, old fashioned, musty, irrelevant, marginalised, swept away by a new generation of thrusting young entrepreneurs and money-makers.

This theme is further demonstrated by the ‘Ox and Tiger’ strip in which the Webers are at a dinner table – but no longer accompanied by other bearded sociologists and dungareed feminists – now it’s being hosted by a coiffured chap in stripey shirt and red braces, who looks like a banker out of an Alex cartoon.

The world was moving on around the Webers and they were not moving at all, they were being outflanked and outnumbered, even by their own children (notably their go-getting materialist daughter, Belinda who is given several strips despising their useless, woolly old-fashioned values).

Themes

Changing times / the Weber values becoming passé (9)

  • Pot-head revisited The Webers hire Crispin Naylor, a young fogey down from Oxford to tutor their daughter Beverley. He is astonishingly old-fashioned, dressed in a tweed suit and smoking a pipe, he berates the 1960s generation as the ones who undermined the fabric of society. (The ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was broadcast in 1981. The expression ‘young fogey’ was coined in 1984.)
  • The ox and tiger The middle-aged, middle classes have no idea how they’ve screwed up the world for the unemployed young, who bitterly resent them.
  • W.O.T. For some reason Simmonds coins the expression Wifully Over-Tasked for people who choose to over-work or use work as an excuse not to face relationships or parental responsibilities.

W.O.T. A doctor warns (1986) by Posy Simmonds

  • Fortress Britons Simmonds quotes the famous John of Gaunt speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II (‘This other Eden, demi-paradise..) contrasting the jingoistic words with the reality of a society in which everyone’s afraid of everyone else, has burglar alarms on their cars, persons and multiple locks on doors and windows.
  • Gingerbread without guilt At a very swanky private party given for Stanhope Wright a kind of strippergram arrives, except that she has an odd role, which is to assuage Stanhope’s guilt at revelling in such luxury and persuade him that the party is giving employment and jobs to all sorts of people. She is a ‘guilt-o-gram’.
  • Weights and measures Another strip depicting the fad for jogging, exercising and losing weight, depicting a party of bright 1980s people dominated by a smart woman who shows off how much weight she’s lost… until a very ‘big’ woman joins the conversation at which point they change the subject.
  • Toujours la politesse Belinda Weber’s rich City boyfriend is struggling to write a thank you note to George and Wendy for letting him stay over, and describes the evening to a work colleague, ridiculing George being a househusband, them letting the kids stay up and their general liberal permissive household. Maybe Guardian readers were meant to sympathise with the Webers but the thing is… City boy won.
  • Babaware A balding, paunchy middle-class chap goes to a Mothercare type shop pushing a buggy with a very small child in it and asks an assistant about an item of clothing for it, and the assistant makes the mistake of asking, Is it for your grandson? No my son says the man. So the strip is addressing the (middle-class) trend for men to become fathers older and older.
  • Lunch break An office meeting attended by four men and two women who all appear to be equals discussing business, turnover, profits etc. they break for lunch and the men go to a bar where they’re served by scantily-clad young women, while the two women go to an Italian restaurant where they enjoy being fawned over by handsome young Italian men. Then they reconvene and carry on business. Is this strip making a comment on feminism, or equality, or real gender differences? To a modern reader the most striking thing is that they go to a restaurant for lunch break. Or that they have a lunch break at all.

Women and feminism (7)

  • Rough winds do blow On Bank Holiday the Webers drive down to the countryside to visit friends, but after a stroll through the fields and a drink in a pub, George snaps at his host, and we see him worrying and fretting about his work. Don’t worry, explains Wendy, he’s always like that when it’s his turn to look after the kids. Maybe that’s funny but I thought it just insulted men.
  • The house-keeping A wife suggest to her husband that she stops working (as the dogsbody in an art gallery), they stop employing a nanny, she’ll be able to shop properly and have good hot meals ready, iron his shirts and everything properly washed… then she pulls his nose and says ‘April Fool!’ Presumably this is meant to be funny, because in Posy Simmonds’s view, all men’s deepest wish is to have their wives at home looking after the kids, keeping a good house and so on.
  • A mother’s plea Hand-written in dancing script, this is a letter from the statue of a suckling mother perched high on a plinth over some busy street, about how she is ignored, isolated, mute, passive, and only notice her to call her a single-parent family and a threat to society.
  • Always in the news George is in the front room watching telly with Wendy and two of their older daughters, as the news reports a succession of violent and sexual crimes perpetrated by men, while George – cartoon-style- gets smaller and smaller and smaller until, as the three women tut, ‘Tsk, men eh?’ he makes his excuses and leaves. I guess that’s because all men are rapists, paedophiles and child-murderers.
  • Pictures of the ages Like the Seven ages of women and the Seven ages of men cartoons she drew, this wordless strip shows the progress of a woman in twelve pictures from baby to old lady (dressed all in black in a parody of the painting Whistler’s mother [full title ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1’ by the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler]).
  • Long in the tooth Stanhope is in bed with his wife, Trish and for the first half dozen pictures is flossing his teeth which makes a peculiar tic and toc sound. Suddenly his wife says, ‘Stanhope, I want to have another baby before it’s too late’. ‘What’s brought this on?’ asks Stanhope, continuing to make the tick tock tick tock sound of her biological clock.
  • The world turned upside-down My wife remembers reading this strip back in 1987 in its original Guardian context and laughing out loud, it was so true! A harassed secretary, being leered over by her boss, dreams of a world in which women are in charge and men are patronised, touched up and made to do menial tasks, leered at by security guards and building workers etc.

Difficulties of motherhood and childcare (4)

  • Who worries about the worriers? Looking miserable and exhausted, Wendy walks home with a mum friend and explains how she gives all her energy to supporting her husband, her mother, Benji and Tamsin and Sophie and the babysitter and the bloody car and even the cat… ‘No one ever worries about ME!’

Who worries about the worriers? by Posy Simmonds (1986)

  • An inspiration to us all Having given the kids their tea, Wendy Weber reads an interview in a women’s magazine with a successful globe-trotting woman writers, whose smug patronising tones make Wendy screw the mag up and chuck it in the bin.
  • Nature abhors a vacuum Another ironic reversal: for ten pictures a youngish mum tells Wendy how wonderful it is to finally have her kids off her hands, as they are starting full-time school, painting a vivid picture of what hell it is to be sole carer for young children, and Wendy supportively asks what she’s going to do next, get a job, do a PhD? And the mum dreamily says… ‘Thing is… I thought I’d have another baby.’
  • Cheerful thoughts George and Wendy are in their garden with a heavily pregnant mother, but the conversation soon takes a pessimistic turn as George in particular rants against the horribly violent aggressively materialistic society the new baby will be coming into. Result: general depression.

Childhood and small children (4)

  • The ratings Two youngish children are watching a TV soap in which the characters are shouting and criticising each other, until the voices of their parents in the kitchen get louder and we realise the parents are having a row (she’s accusing him of being selfish and being out every night and leaving her to do all the housework) and so the kids turn away from the TV to watch the squabbling shouting soap which is their parents’ marriage, until the parents quieten down and the bored children return to the TV.
  • Little ones’ lunch A busy strip divided into 4 to six boxes each depicting the various stages of children playing with, putting in their mouths, spitting out, mixing with uneaten food or spitting at their neighbours one of: fizzy drinks, jelly and ice cream, noodles with sauce, chocolate digestive biscuits, stew mash and peas.
  • Men’s talk Two little girls come into a room where two little boys are falling about laughing and eventually find out it’s because one little boy has looked at another boy’s willy. So the girls ask to look at the boys’ willies and themselves fall about with laughter, at which the little boys are aggrieved: ‘S’not funny.’

Men’s Talk by Posy Simmonds (1986)

  • Good sports Little Katie’s birthday party, where the bien-pensant liberal parents are determined to give everyone who takes part in the games presents – although ironically this creates lots of upset and unhappiness because those who genuinely won something are aggrieved that children who didn’t get exactly the same as them.

Divorce

Divorce featured strongly in the previous collection; for some reason it doesn’t feature at all in this one.

Ironies of love (2)

  • Live-in-love Young woman takes her cat to the vet. The cat is furious because after five years of living alone together, the woman’s fiancé has moved in so now the cat is pooing everywhere and generally misbehaving.
  • Moon flush A middle-aged woman is reading a romantic novel (the text of which is given in an unusual font, a type of Courier) and the cat is fidgeting with boredom so she shoos her out into the garden where the cat proceeds to re-enact the ‘romantic’ scene depicted in the novel, with a female cat, till their caterwauling prompts George Weber to throw a shoe at them and the cat scampers inside back to her owner’s lap just as the latter burst into tears at the sad love story she’s reading and the cat sobs at the missed opportunity for a shag.

Sex and adultery (5)

  • Forbidden fruit An ironic reversal of the reader’s expectations, for we find dedicated philanderer Stanhope Wright chatting up a dishy old flame at a Christmas party, and asking whether they can have a quick one for old time’s sake, but, when they sneak outside, it is revealed that they’re both being furtive and ashamed because they’ve nipped out… for a smoke!

Forbidden fruit by Posy Simmonds (1986)

  • Good timing One of the pastiche cartoons Simmonds is so good at, five rows of pictures which depict the four phases of a casual sexual encounter, namely: well before, before, during, and after – and on the left of the rows a bunch of Rococo cherubs hassling one of their number to intervene with an important message. It’s only at the very last picture that you realise they are encouraging him to prompt one or other of the participants to ask: WHAT CONTRACEPTIVE PRECAUTIONS ARE YOU TAKING?’ (Given that this dates from 1986 it’s surprising Simmonds isn’t satirising the Safe Sex / use a condom message, which first appeared in British journalism in 1984.)
  • Just past it That said, this strip from 1987 is about AIDS, featuring Belinda Weber sitting at dinner with her parents and some friends complacently discussing AIDS and how difficult sex is going to be for young people today… until she burst their complacency by suggesting that the AIDS virus has been about longer than people think, like back into the 1960s… at which the smug middle-aged people start panicking.
  • Where there’s a will A long ironic strip wherein inveterate philanderer Stanhope Wright chats up an old flame over lunch and they agree to have a shag, but there’s a snag: wife? au pair? STD!? No, it’s the new neighbourhood watch scheme and the snooping neighbour Primula Stokes. To evade her ever-watchful gaze Stanhope outlines a plan of Byantine complexity and the would-be shagee politely declines.

A writer’s life (3)

  • Nine till five Satire on a woman writer who has to produce a weekly column showing how she puts off all her other chores and social engagements yet still manages to leave it to the last minute and have a massive crisis the night before.
  • J.D. Crouch As far as I can see this is the first appearance of the tubby, middle-aged, bearded writer J.D. Crouch, who will go on to become a regular feature in post-Posy strips (in 1992 Simmonds commenced a year-long strip solely about him and a writer’s life). Here he is in his natural habitat – the book signing – when unexpectedly his ex-wife appears and asks him to sign a copy of the book for: herself who he beat up in 1975, one each for the writer’s she saw him plagiarise (Kingsley Amis, John Updike, Alan Sillitoe, Gunther Grass), one each for the children he has never bothered to visit, one for his former researcher who he was knocking off while his wife lay in hospital… during which recitation Crouch shrinks smaller and smaller until he is hiding under the table. Men, eh.
  • The pleasure of their company A literary party at which a load of writers mill about gossiping about new books, are jealous of more successful writers, criticise book deals and publishing execs and publicity people and generally bitch and backstab, ending with the ironic conclusion that they don’t know why they bother attending them. A strip like this just makes you despise book luvvies even more.

Academia (3)

  • George retires? In the poly canteen George’s colleagues speculate that he’s retiring and in a chorus tell him about the pitiful perks he’s amassed in 17 years working there (a small parking space, use of the Xerox machine, he can claim for cassette tapes on expenses), all of them tending to how pitiful and puny his rewards are, except that… in an ironic reversal… they all reveal that they are madly jealous of these huge perks and tell him he’d be mad to quit.
  • The absent-minded professor George has a nightmare in which he actually really kicks an insufferable colleague he’s dreamed about kicking for years.
  • To whom it may concern George is angry that he’s been asked to provide a reference for one of his pupils without the student asking him first, also that the boy was lazy and rude. At first he types out the truth, but then we see the debate in his wooly liberal conscience as the figure of the student asks what right George has to ruin his life and, slowly, reluctantly, George goes back through his draft revising it and systematically lying.

Middle class mores and hypocrisies (10)

  • Year of the tiger A dinner party where most of the guests are lamenting how awful 1985 (the year of the Ox) was but how they’re looking forward to 1986 (year of the Tiger) and proceeding to chunter on about the new vintages of Bordeaux and champagne and so on – leading to an outburst by the posh host’s son. An unshaven man who points out that he and his girlfriend are unemployed. They represent the new year and the anger of the tigers.
  • Union Jakes In the Brass Monk pub the Weber’s are discussing Britain with some Americans and the conversation somehow gets onto toilets and toilet humour and the assembled Brits make fools of themselves by trotting through the amazing gamut of slang expressions we have for toilets and crapping.

Union Jakes by Posy Simmonds (1986)

  • New minorities A comment on the spread of health food shops and jogging, Edmund Heep is in a cheap corner shop where his punk sons spot him and encourage him to buy a selection of crisps and buns and lollies, but when they go out onto the street we see all the other shops have become gentrified (‘Croissant Neuf’, the Natural Food Store, the Grainery, Herbalism) and it is they who are regarded as oddballs and cranks.
  • Senses and sensibilities A very structured strip in three rows of five pictures, the top row showing three high street shops, including clothes, burgers and records: in the next row pedestrians experience the five sense of sight (nice looking clothes), smell (of fired burgers and chips), taste (people munching burgers on the street), hearing (sounds from the record shop), touch (two women feeling nice clothes). And in the third row is the reaction of passersby to a tramp (unsightly, smelly, distasteful), a busker (unheard) and some vagrants who tell passersby to fuck off (untouchable). This is the kind of strip my daughter (aged 17) read and asked me, ‘So? What’s it meant to be about?’ Maybe Posy’s strips are an early example of ‘virtue signalling’ and reading them was meant to make you feel that, somehow, you more sensitive and caring about the homeless and squalid high streets than anyone else… all without the effort of putting down your newspaper.
  • The Age of REASON A television commentator reports that inhabitants of gentrified Balaclava Road are up in arms because one new incomer has stripped away all the chintzy facade of his house and restored it to being the Victorian artisans’ dwelling (which, we then learn, the entire street, despite their facades, actually consists of).
  • School steps Two teachers at parents’ evening discuss how there’s been a lot of them this evening, them being the parents who fuss about giving their beloved kids extra coaching and tutoring and support and so on and the punchline is that… these are all the signs of over-concerned step-parents. (This 1986 strip is notable for having a non-white person speaking, an apparently Asian male teacher.)
  • What Monet can buy At a house party that posh woman with the big blonde hair and twin pearl necklace we’ve met at her second home and running the Society for People With Second Homes, ribs Wendy because she’s heard Wendy is sending Bev to a private school. No no no no no insists Wendy, however can we expect to tackle inequality and improve the state system if the middle classes abandon it etc etc? But then the daughter in question reveals that she does have a private tutor and Wendy turns bright red with embarrassment.
  • May Day The Webers and children drive through wretched Bank Holiday traffic, the children requiring stops to throw up, everyone getting tired and angry… all to visit George’s mother in her rest home, whereupon she is subtly dismissive of all the presents they’ve brought and moans and complains. Maybe this is meant to prompt ‘the wry smile of recognition’ but I found it simply depressingly accurate.
  • French impressionists A funny strip in which the Webers take some French friends to the Royal Academy and, to the Webers’a amazement, the French rave about the foggy, grey, dull English climate. Really? Yes think of the great masterpieces it has produced and then… they point at some of the shops along Piccadilly showcasing the great names of British art, namely… Harris Tweed, Burberry and Barbour!
  • Smoke signals Bonfire night and three London neighbours have fires which pinpoint their social class: the posh Belpers are burning wood they brought back from the countryside, admittedly with one or two disposable nappies in it; the Timmises are burning an old settee and some shag pile carpet, the Webers are burning old books and magazines and theses (in a symbolic bonfire of so much of the late 60s / early 70s French intellectual content they valued and went out of date like old fruit).

Pastiches and parodies (5)

  • The Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas is retold with the king giving a poor collector of wood in the snow ‘Take this sovereign and this tie / This clever bar utensil / And this stilton and this pie / This matching pen and pencil’… and then the strip cuts to some moustachioed club bores telling a silly joke at a modern party.
  • A second cartoon features Good King Wenceslas and his rich party-goers besieged in their castle by four million unemployed for whom they have zero sympathy: ‘Don’t bore us with talk of strikes / Or your whingeing blather / Off your bums and on your bikes / And pull yourselves TOGETHER!’
  • Pilgrimage An extended skit which takes the opening verses of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…’) but applies it to middle-aged, middle class people going on pilgrimage to sanctuaries and health spas.
  • Spring song The text is written in Simmonds’s trademark chintzy hand-written script (technically, dancing script, I think) which tells a jingle (‘As I awoke this morning, I heard a funny thing…’) which is ironically set against poor student Jocasta Wright waking, crunching around in her dingy student flat, and suddenly realising she’s late handing in her dissertation.
  • Household tips from the household gods Not sure it’s really a parody, but the strip is dominated by the Greek gods who give spring cleaning tips on how to clean various dirty areas round the house, like the kitchen floor or the toilet, but give up when – unexpectedly – this includes nuclear waste! A reflection, maybe, of the Chernobyl disaster (26 April 1986).

Second homes (3)

  • Arcadia Also a parody, two large pictures, the first showing an 18th century gentleman and wife admiring a winsome country cottage, the second in the present showing a coachload of tourists turning up to photograph the same cottage, now the second home to rich Londoners.

Old Arcadia by Posy Simmonds (1986)

  • Different species Rich London family enjoy walking round the cliffs near their second home identifying plants and species until, in the final frame, they enter a packed pub of locals and we are shown the latter’s thoughts, assessing their worth, calling them a blight, and figuring out how to mulch them for money doing repairs and gardening.
  • Turning an honest penny Tresoddit is the fictional seaside Cornish village Simmonds has invented to take the mickey out of the way the countryside is colonised by rich Londoners buying up second homes. The strip concerns Kevin Penwallet, one-time lecturer in anthropology who gave it up to open a shop in Tresoddit but has been forced to abandon all his socialist principles and reinvent it as an emporium of revoltingly twee knick-knacks for posh London mums to coo over and pay extortionate prices. Again, this isn’t funny so much as depressingly accurate.

Christmas (3)

  • The book opens with one big photo showing a Santa on top an open-top red bus yelling ‘Ho Ho Ho’ in the middle of an Oxford Street absolutely thronged with harassed shoppers, even the bus driver looks pissed off, and Wendy Weber is among the throng and yells up at Santa, ‘It’s NOT FUNNY.’
  • The book ends with a sequence of Christmas strips:
  • Thinking of you this Christmastide Notorious philanderer Stanhope Wright is slow coming to bed with wife Trisha. Being Christmas-time, she is thinking about all her relations, making a list of everyone she’s got to send a card to. Stanhope, by contrast, is weighed down by fears about his relations which are, of course, sexual in nature: He worries that he may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, maybe even AIDS!!! and so runs through a list of all the women he’s had sex with – Helen after the D&AD awards, Vicki, Penny, you never know. It is typical of Simmonds to be really depressing at Christmas-time.
  • Edmund Heep’s problem page An oddity made up of two big pictures in which you’re asked to spot the difference – except I don’t think there were any differences. Another in which you’re asked to spot the four policemen – except I don’t think there were any policemen in it. Edmund asks three riddles, none of which I thought were funny or interesting. And then there’s a maze the reader has to navigate to help drunk Edmund back to his house.

Teenagers and the Generation Gap (3)

  • George and Wendy’s eldest, Belinda, is moping round the house leading the parents to worry what it could be – break-up with boyfriend? pregnant? herpes? other STDs? drink? drugs? debt? trouble with the police? general depression? But then she comes bouncing out of the loo happy and clutching a box of tampons: she’s had her period and she’s not pregnant.
  • Family planning Trish Wright is showing her step-daughter Jocasta photos of a family wedding tutting about the ghastly relatives. Jocasta says Don’t knock the family, it’s the cornerstone of society (echoing Thatcherite rhetoric), and then ironically goes on to point out how the young couple getting married in the photo will end up having to support a whole array of ageing relatives (as is coming true in our own time).
  • Hair today A young dud with stubble and a ponytail goes into a barber’s who presents him with a bewildering range of haircuts, until the dude says he needs one that will help when he goes home to see his parents to beg for money since he can’t survive on his grant.

Edmund Heep the alcoholic (3)

  • Good samaritans Heep is staggering home drunk in his sheepskin jacket and beer belly, and about to throw up, ignored by decent couples who pass by on the other side of the road when… he is accosted by two skinhead bovver boys who appear to be rifling through his pockets, finding £20 notes etc, but… it turns out they are looking for a 20p piece to open a nearby street lavatory. They find one, pay, help him into it, wait till he’s thrown up, then help him out and give all his money back, and walk off, two modern angels.
  • Giving up An ironic reversal where the appalling Edmund Heep is propping up the bar at some pub and showing off to friends how he’s cut back on smoking by making a cigarette log which he then shows them and reveals.. he’s smoked two packs already that day!
  • Edmund Heep’s problem page as above

Miscellaneous (4)

  • Live from the scene of the tragedy An odd strip devoted to satirising TV news, showing a reporter shoving his microphone in front of someone who’s just witnessed a terrible (unspecified) tragedy, asking how they feel, and the interviewee does what most of us wish they would do in these situations, which is knee the insensitive, crass reporter in the nuts, grab his microphone, and asks him how he feels now!

We bring you – live, from the scene of the tragedy… by Posy Simmonds (1986)

  • To a tree Wendy gets furious with the council workmen who’ve come to prune the tree in front of the house, insisting they cut the bloody thing down as it is a magnet for dog poo.
  • A modern alphabet 26 acronyms, starting with AIDS and going through to the Zzzz of a homeless person in a cardboard box, via  CND, GBH, PLO, UB40, and VDU among others.
  • Two American tourists wonder just what it was that stood out most for them on their visit to Britain and trot through a set of clichés – was it the pub, the language, the history and culture, the healthy lifestyle – to each of which, as you might expect, Simmonds gives a typically depressing, downbeat ironic visual counterpoint (the language of Shakespeare is old codgers in a pub, the healthy food is sausage and mash and beans) until they conclude – depressingly – that whatever it was they sure are glad they don’t live here.

Animal liberation and vegetarianism (2)

  • Flying fur Unexpectedly, a strip showcasing ‘speciesism’ in the form of a selection of furry toys in a department store all complaining about how humans exploit them for food, fur, research and so on
  • Only connect Linked to this 1987 strip which has a straightforward vegetarian message, as the lamb joint Wendy Weber serves up to guest starts singing and dancing.

Homosexuality (1)

  • A kind of liberation The one and only strip about homosexuality in the strip’s ten year existence, this is an odd one about George going shopping with a gay friend and how the gay friend camping it up has ruined all the effort George has put in over the years to persuade the proletarian shopkeeper that it’s OK for men to do the shopping and the housework. I couldn’t work out if this is insulting or patronising, but I couldn’t see how it could be considered funny.

A kind of liberation by Posy Simmonds (1985)

Politics (4)

  • The game of happy families The one and only appearance of the dominant personality of the age, Mrs Thatcher, showing her playing a game of happy families with a vicar which is ruined when it’s revealed one of the cards has run off with his PA leaving a one-parent family to sponge on the state.
  • Heresies and blasphemies George and Wendy try to persuade their daughter Sophie to come on a march against nuclear dumping. the joke, such as it is, is that they present it as a duty, and Sophie resents it as a duty, which eerily echoes the pieties and sitting and standing and shuffling round which used to accompany attendance at church.
  • Suffering Compares the suffering of anonymous dark third World figures (war, famine, disease etc) with the suffering of the bien-pensant middle classes who read Guardian reports about it; and the real relief (food, medicine, money, water, clothes etc) is juxtaposed with the ‘relief’ felt by the Guardian-reading classes at how much they raised and donated to charity.
  • Consequences A surprisingly blunt and crude ‘political’ strip in comparing the fates of three drivers pulled over by the police. The rich white man talks his way out of it. The posh white woman gets off, although not without the policeman patronising her (‘Is this your boyfriend’s car?’). And then a black man driving an expensive car who doesn’t even wait for the police to ask if he’s stolen it but drives right out of the strip. Ending with the rhyme: ‘If you drive a motor car… You’ll get stopped, the chances are. But as a rule, you’ll be alright, If you’re male and posh and white.’ I found this crude, obvious and patronising, especially from a writer who includes no black or Asian or ethnic minority characters in any of her strips. In fact, the black man in this strip appears to be the only black person who speaks in any of the ten years of Posy Simmonds’ cartoon strips and his role is – to get into trouble with the police. Can’t help feeling Simmonds deals in stereotypes which are as patronising and clichéd as anything you’d find in the Sun or Daily Telegraph but just that they’re the patronising stereotypes of her tribe.

The end of the Webers (2)

  • Cutting the cord At a barbecue George sees his grown-up daughter Belinda in a huddle with notorious philanderer Stanhope Wright and thinks she must be propositioning him. In fact she is asking if he will ‘give her away’ at the big traditional wedding she’s planning to have, since her ‘principled’ feminist father refuses to.
  • Wedding party politics A strip describing Belinda’s marriage to options trader Mr Alistair Razer-Dorke, humorously profiling all the relatives and guests in terms of their party politics. In fact the wedding is an opportunity for Simmonds to review the key characters she’s created and whose company readers have kept over the previous ten years – and to say GOODBYE. The Posy strip’s time was up.

Thoughts

I showed my teenage, feminist daughter this book and she surfed through a dozen or so strips before handing it back saying she didn’t find anything in it funny in it, the opposite. She said she felt she was being nagged or scolded – a common enough feeling for readers of the Guardian, which after all is targeted at self-flagellating liberals who feel guilty because they’re not doing enough about sexism and racism and homophobia and Islamophobia and the environment etc.

Some of the Posy strips are funny, but many of them rely on this mood or attitude – of taking a perverse pleasure in being told off or lectured or harangued. Of course the reader feels that, because they are being told off, they somehow rise above the guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs and injustice of the world. As if being nagged and lectured, cleanses and absolves you. As if, by reading a bitter comic strip about homelessness, and tutting and tsking about it, you have in any way whatsoever ameliorated the problem of homelessness.

It’s a peculiar psychological state, this state of recognition of some social ill, without any kind of proposal for what to do about it – and it is much the most frequent feeling you experience at the end of reading a strip, far more so than humour or comedy.

But the real story of the book is the way the Webers with their polytechnic-level, woolly soft liberal socialism and feminism and vegetarianism and permissive attitudes and touchy-feely concern about society and everyone less well-off than themselves had lived far beyond their sell-by date.

The strip had become stuck in that world, a world which had become a small island, a leftover of faded 1960s ideas, while the big wide world outside had moved on into a violent schizophrenic situation, caught between the millions thrown onto the dole, especially in the North of England and Wales, by the wide-ranging devastation of British industry, symbolised by the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 (not referred to anywhere) – while down in London, the City and related service industries of advertising and TV and publishing had never had it so good, with money cascading out from bankers’ bonuses into holiday homes, and new fashions for clothes and music and foreign holidays, while the escalating tension between the superpowers gave even the most stoic sleepless nights.

Not much of this, the drastically changing national mood, could be captured in the Webers’ homely little world, which is why it was the right decision to kiss them goodbye. And why I admire the cleverness with which Simmonds did it, the book climaxing in the highly symbolic marriage between the Webers’ own daughter, go-getting daughter Belinda – who had repeatedly repudiated and criticised their narrow old views – and rich, posh, public school City banker, Alistair Razer-Dorke.

Simmonds did, in fact, return to writing a weekly cartoon strip for the Guardian for the year 1992-3, and the Webers and a few other characters do, in fact, make a few scattered cameo appearances in it – but it was entirely the right decision for her to end the Weber strip in 1987 and move on to other projects and new perspectives.

Credit

All Posy Simmonds cartoons are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

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Posted by Simon on June 15, 2019

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Very Posy by Posy Simmonds (1985)

From 1977 to 1987 Posy Simmonds drew a regular cartoon strip in the Guardian gently mocking the middle-class lifestyles and liberal concerns of a regular cast of a dozen or so fictional characters, centred on:

  • Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to verbose polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber, and mother of a brood of six children, ranging from little Benji to teenage glamour-puss Belinda
  • Jo Heep, married to tedious, drunk whisky salesman Edmund Heep, and mum to two rebellious teenagers who’ve adopted the punk look
  • Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, mother of a young baby

Throughout the period the cartoons were periodically gathered together into books, namely:

  • Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
  • True Love (1981)
  • Pick of Posy (1982)
  • Very Posy (1985)
  • Pure Posy (1987)

And these books were themselves gathered together into a huge compendium volume, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus which was published in 2012 and now appears to be the only way to get hold of the cartoons.

Very Posy is the third the series of collections, given that 1981’s True Love was a one-off ‘graphic novel’, loosely based on the schoolgirl crush of one of the characters, Janice Brady, for a regular cast member, tall, suave, philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright.

Historical timeline

Very Posy brings together 91 Posy cartoon strips from 1981 through to 1985. These were the years when I was a student at university. I looked up a historical timeline of the period and discovered that the key events were:

1981

  • Mrs Thatcher is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
  • Ronald Reagan is President of America
  • Leonid Brezhnev is leader of the USSR
  • In January the Yorkshire Ripper is caught, bringing to an end a reign of terror over the Yorkshire region where he had murdered 13 women over a five year period
  • The Iran Hostage Crisis (which had started in November 1979) ends in January 1981 with the release of American diplomats in Tehran
  • April 4 – first flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia
  • From April to July there are riots in major British cities, the biggest being the Brixton riot in London, the Handsworth riots in Birmingham, the Chapeltown riot in Leeds and the Toxteth riots in Liverpool.
  • MS-DOS was released by Microsoft along with the first IBM PC
  • On 29 July Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles
  • In September 1981 a Welsh group, Women for Life on Earth, arrive at Greenham Common air force base to protest against the decision of the British government to allow cruise missiles to be stored there

1982

  • The first CD player sold in Japan
  • Dutch Elm Disease destroys millions of Elm Trees
  • On Friday 2 April Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, sparking an international crisis and a war with Britain which lasts until British victory on 14 June
  • September, the American centres for Disease Control used the term ‘AIDS’ (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) for the first time.
  • November – Leonid Brezhnev dies and is replaced as leader of the USSR by Yuri Andropov

1983

  • The June 1983 general election returns a Conservative government led by Mrs Thatcher with an increased majority of 188 MPs, against the Labour Party led by Michael Foot
  • What would become the world’s most popular word processing programme, Microsoft Word, is launched.
  • In Ethiopia following the worst drought in history the death toll reaches a staggering 4 million.
  • The US starts deploying Cruise Missiles and Pershing Missiles in Europe at the Greenham Common Air Force Base, prompting the growth of the women-only camp of protestors
  • On Saturday 17 December 1983 members of the Provisional IRA set off a bomb outside Harrods in Knightsbridge, killing three police officers and three civilians, and injuring 90 people.

1984

  • February – Soviet leader Yuri Andropov dies and is replaced by Konstantin Chernenko
  • April – the National Cancer Institute announced they had found the cause of AIDS, the retrovirus HTLV-III
  • DNA profiling developed
  • Apple releases the Macintosh computer.
  • 12 October – the IRA bomb the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party conference in a bid to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher narrowly escaped injury, five people were killed and 31 were injured
  • 31 October – Indira Ghandi, first woman Prime Minister of India, is assassinated by her own bodyguard and Sikh nationalists
  • 6 November Ronald Reagan re-elected President of the United States, defeating Democrat Walter Mondale.
  • Following the widespread famine in Ethiopia many of the top British and Irish pop musicians join together under the name Band Aid and record the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas, recorded on 25 November and released on 3 December.
  • December 2-3 – the world’s worst industrial accident when the Union Carbide Pesticide plant in Bhopal India leaks lethal gas, leading to a death toll of some 4,000, some estimate long term deaths at 16,000

1985

  • January – Palestinian terrorists the Italian Cruise Liner Achille Lauro and murder an old Jewish man in a wheelchair.
  • March – on the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and so leader of the USSR.
  • May – the Heysel Stadium disaster when Juventus football fans trying to escape from Liverpool fans were pressed against a collapsing wall in the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, Belgium, before the start of the 1985 European Cup Final, leading to the deaths of 39 people – mostly Italians and Juventus fans and 600 injured.
  • Music CDs commercially launched.
  • 10 July – The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior is sunk by French Agents, killing a Dutch photographer.
  • Saturday 13 July – the Live Aid concert is watched by an estimated 1.9 billion viewers, across 150 nations, nearly 40% of the world population.
  • 19 September – Mexico City Earthquake kills 9,000
  • In response to the spread of AIDS governments around the world launch health and public awareness programs, including the promotion of condoms and safe sex.
  • The first .com domain name is registered and the first version of Windows is released.

Very Posy

Next to none of these world-changing (Gorbachev), traumatic (assassinations, terrorist bombings, famine) or innovative (slow spread of personal computers) events are reflected in the Posy strip. The opposite. The Posy strip formed a safe haven from politics and the hurly-burly of events reported everywhere else in the Guardian newspaper. Instead we are treated to the overwhelmingly domestic concerns of the Weber, Wright and Heep households.

Interestingly, Simmonds mixes the strips up so they are deliberately not in chronological order, with strips from 1985 near the beginning, and ones from 1981 at the end. If there is any structure it is a subtle seasonal one with the book opening and closing with Christmas cartoons, with some summer holidays ones in the middle, some spring showers in the first half, giving the whole thing a subtle underpinning of the changing calendar year.

Themes

Women and feminism (21)

  • A soap opera In the form of an opera i.e. everyone sings rhyming arias, Trish Wright rages at her broken washing machine till smug husband Stanhope offers to do it all down the laundrette but discovers it’s not such an easy process as he thought.
  • Men at work Seedy Edmund Heep, in a workspace surrounded by pin-ups, is preparing lewd Valentine Day cards for some of the young women in the office but when he goes to give them he discovers the girls also have pin-ups, of fit young men and he and the other men are (hypocritically) appalled. Tsk, men, eh.
  • The rebirth of Venus in which three women discuss and pester a friend into losing weight in a series of pictures which spoof and parody Botticelli’s famous Birth of Venus to make a feminist comment on how women are forced to conform to body stereotypes.
  • A super woman’s day A cartoon showing how impossible it is to be a modern woman and expected to serve up breakfast to the family, wave them off to work, arrive at the office, do some wise shopping at lunchtime, return to the office, greet the kids back from school, read to them, cook dinner, serve dinner and still have the energy to be… a whore in the bedroom!
  • In a maternity ward three or four female relatives have come to visit a mum with a newborn baby, and the strip shows us all of them, plus visitors to the other mums, all agreeing that a girl is nice but a boy would be better!
  • Momma’s fault Wendy is watching a TV soap in which three generations of women all blame their mother’s for ruining their lives – while her own children stand by, ignored.
  • Acceptable lies and the unacceptable truth A hectic strip in which her assistant and colleagues all lie to clients and customers to cover the fact that Jennifer Cole is not at work because she’s at home looking after her kids during the school holiday. The strip is rounded off with a feminist motto as twee and smug as any Victorian doily: ‘As business folk you now know why / Us working mums are bound to lie.’
  • Waiting for mummy In an anonymous family the mum works while the dad looks after the kids (he is shown reading the paper and ignoring them) until the harassed mum gets home and finds she has to comfort her little girl, and the baby, and her husband and look after the dinner which is coming to the boil. Oh the world is so unfair to women!
  • Debits and credits ‘A full-time working mum has many cares…’ which include trying to persuade her needy infants to accept certain friends round for tea simply to repay the debts she’s accrued from their mums looking after her own kids. Oh it’s so tough being a working mum!
  • Mother’s quiet time Jocasta visits an old friend who’s just had a baby, to discover she is at her wit’s end by the constant endless crying of her infant.
  • Public view A straight-out feminist view on breast-feeding which takes a classical painting of a mother breast-feeding which everyone finds adorable and acceptable in an art gallery, and then cuts and pastes the same image into all kinds of social situations where everyone disapproves.

  • The milk of human kindness A split-screen strip, on one side a frowsy mum, Rose, is disgruntled because she helped out a businesswoman friend for a few hours, tidied and breast-fed the baby and then the businesswoman got home and was disgusted by the breastfeeding and made her feel really inferior – on the other side of the strip the slick businesswoman, Rose, is pissed off because she got home to find Rose had breastfed her baby which made her feel like a negligent mum, made her feel really inferior.
  • Taboo At a packed family lunch Sophie, one of the older Weber children comes and whispers in Wendy’s ear. Then Wendy whispers in all the other women’s ears. Only right at the end do we discover Sophie had whispered that she’d started her period and she nails Wendy’s hypocrisy, for she’d said it was something perfectly natural, something to be celebrated, not something to be hushed up. So why did she whisper about it and not tell anyone?
  • Useful occupations An elderly woman takes a call from her daughter who is upset that she didn’t get a job she applied for. She tries to cheer her up, not least by explaining that women didn’t go out to work in her day – which doesn’t get a very sympathetic response.
  • Medical precautions Jocasta visits her GP who tells her he is planting a chaperone at the door – leading to a misunderstanding where Jocasta assures the doctor he doesn’t think he’ll try anything and the doctor assures her the chaperone is for his sake, in case Jocasta tries anything – leaving them both seething.

  • Fly’s undoing At a business meeting the only women present manages to persuade the men to back her deal. However she knows they’re all going to go off to the gents and persuade each other to change their minds. She wishes she could be a fly on the wall and… is miraculously transformed into a fly and flies into the gents’ and does indeed hear the hawks talking the doves out of agreeing her deal!
  • Paradise lost the Weber’s are on holiday on a hot beach and the women are going topless when George realises a couple of beach bums are commenting, in French, on the shape of every passing woman’s breasts. He intervenes giving them a feminist lecture, name-checking Lacan and Levi-Bruhl and Rousseau to blast them for objectifying women and giving them another chain to shackle them and so on. The French guys just yawn, stretch and stroll away.
  • Grief A woman’s unrestrained grief embarrasses her friends and family. People think grief should be more restrained and demure. The dichotomy is expressed by a contrast between a Picasso image of a weeping woman and an emollient Victorian image of a slightly sad and dignified lady. Sexism!!

Grief by Posy Simmonds

  • The nightmare of Pauline Woodcock Pauline Woodcock (42) international finance correspondent flies to an assignment in the Middle East but has a nightmare in which she is refused entry to the conference because it is for men only, and is forced to go and sit among the harem women who criticise her for having no husband or family and hating women. But it is only a dream and so not a very valid satire on the sexism of Muslim countries.
  • Momentous news Diane, aged 36 and a TV producer, has finally gotten pregnant but when she tells her friends at a garden party they reveal that everyone they know is having a baby late, it’s a fashion, it’s a trend thus patronising and humiliating her.
  • A message to the Monstrous Regiment Peculiarly, this is the final cartoon in the book: It is in the form of a message from Field Marshall Sir Desmond Blundel-Bolass to what he calls The Monstrous regiment, obviously meaning the entire female population, saying they’re a proud little regiment with a long track record of cooking and cleaning and child-rearing, but recently there have been signs of bolshiness and women deserting the regiment to take up jobs in industry, business and so on. THIS MUST STOP and women return to their proper subservient roles. Maybe it triggered a laugh of recognition at the time (1984) but to me it seems elaborate and ‘clever’ but oddly pointless.

Difficulties of motherhood and childcare (2)

This obviously overlaps with the large number of working mum strips, with some of the Childhood and small children strips, and with the Divorce strips, all of which depict small children shedding light on the hypocrisies of divorced couples.

  • Music and movement At little Katy’s birthday party the parents gather in the kitchen and nervously discuss the way the five year olds are jigging and jiving to highly sexualised pop music, while George delivers another of his pretentious semiotic interpretations which is no good to anyone.
  • Charity begins at home Working mum Gemma leaves her two little kids in the care of wonderful nanny, Anita, but she tells so many people how wonderful Anita is that one by one all the other middle class mums in the street get Anita to care for their children until her place looks like a zoo – much to Gemma’s chagrin.

Childhood and small children (7)

  • Timor mortis The Weber children’s guinea pig dies and the parents, and grandma, give the kids contradictory stories about what happens to dead animals
  • On a long-distance drive George and Wendy are pestered to pull over at a roadside pub where the kids pig out on steak and chips but George eventually explodes at the so-called waiter and describes at length why every single item was disgusting.

  • Music and movement At little Katy’s birthday party the parents gather in the kitchen and nervously discuss the way the five year olds are jigging and jiving to highly sexualised pop music, while George delivers another of his pretentious semiotic interpretations which is no good to anyone.
  • The birth of the blues A mum has had a baby and is at home nursing it surrounded by cooing friends and family. The strip focuses on the baby’s sister who is hassled by the grown-ups into saying ‘thank you’ for having a new brother.
  • Monkey business Wendy takes the younger children to the zoo where they see monkeys mating and ask mummy what they’re doing. This dilemma has already cropped up at least twice already in the strip. This time Wendy patiently explains a gentle form of the birds and the bees and the gag is that, as she does so, the monkeys put their hands over their baby monkey’s ears to protect their innocence.
  • Just rewards Billy’s mum takes him to play at a friend’s house where he misbehaves – saying rude words, screaming, snatching things. but each time mummy tells him to stop he does. This, the mum explains to her friend, is because she’s instituted a reward system – every time he obeys mummy he gets a reward, and enough rewards buy him a toy. Cut to Billy who has worked out how to play the system, and so deliberately plays up wherever they go – in order to obey the instruction to behave – and thus earns lots of toys!
  • The dark Two of the Weber kids lock themselves inside the old fridge the Weber’s have thrown out to Wendy’s hysterical horror.

Divorce (3)

This is here because after a divorce, Simmonds is interested in the experience of the mother who usually ends up keeping custody of the children, and so ‘divorce’ comes under the broader heading of Women-Feminism-Motherhood-Childcare-Divorce.

  • Unworthy thoughts Two little children come back from a weekend with their daddy and tell the divorced mummy what a great time they had, he took them on a CND march, introduced them to his lovely new girlfriend, had a barbeque and bought them new clothes. The mum promptly rings up the dad to give him a ear-bashing, asking him why on earth he’s being so nice and trying to suck up to her?
  • Home-sick A divorced dad takes his small kids out to a burger bar and the little girl immediately feels sick. All the way home, including on the bus, he is trying to get the little girl to throw up in the street before she gets home. But she doesn’t. She saves it up for the moment she walks through his ex’s door and throws up all over the phone books – prompting a prolonged ear-bashing from his ex about filling them with junk food etc etc.
  • Dad’s girlfriend A divorced woman’s two little kids are joking and taking the mickey out of her ex-husband’s new girlfriend, Lynn, at which the mum’s smirk of satisfaction grows larger and larger… unti lthe kids say they don’t want to go to dad and Lynn’s at Christmas – at which point the um realises this will ruin all her plans to go skiing with her new boyfriend Robert… and immediately leaps to the defence of Lynn, telling the kids what a wonderful person she is and how she has a really cool new video!

Sex and adultery (7)

  • Strangers in the night In bed together Stanhope discovers his wife is reading a sexy bodice-ripper and teases her about it.
  • Acting one’s age At a crowded theatre bar, Stanhope makes eye contact with a promising young floozy and Simmonds uses the technique whereby they send dotted eye signals at each other while, in another familiar move, she makes the whole thing a parody, with Stanhope imagining the programme to a grand theatrical production of Their Affair… while his wife spots him and reconceives the same events as a tawdry TV comedy titled ‘It always ends in tears’.
  • And no questions asked Stanhope wakes up in bed with a nubile young woman he has slept with and Simmonds uses the comic, or sardonic technique, of counterpointing all the polite things they say to each other with what they’re really thinking, Stanhope in particular smiling smiling and thinking ‘God, when are you going to bugger off?’
  • Flattery A young woman spends half the strip flattering and chatting up a TV star at a party, giving it her best shot until right at the end he makes his excuses and wanders over to the next pretty fan. This is counterpointed by the same events as enacted by a ewe (Aries) trying to chat up a lion (Leo).
  • Married person’s guide to lunching A series of nine lunches which chart the rise, bloom and decay of an affair carried out , as usual, by Stanhope Wright and his latest victim (which includes a(nother) pastiche of Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe).
  • The transports of love An ironic reference to Stanhope’s car: in the first half he uses it to whisk a pretty young thing off to the countryside where they have a shag, in a picture wherein the car is transformed into an 18th century rococo four-poster bed surrounded by fluttering cherubim – and in the second half, it becomes the scene of an agonised conversation while Stanhope sits with the girl trying to dump her.
  • Derek’s deadly sins A year in the life of a fat gluttonous exec named Derek who regularly stuffs down a heavy lunch with the unbearable Edmund Heep. During the year he chats up a pretty young woman at the office party, and to please his new mistress loses weight, buys new clothes, and the other pub goers take the mickey out of the ensuing affair which runs through May and July but comes a cropper when Derek’s wife finds out about the affair, the relationship breaks up and by the end of the year Derek is back to wearing bad clothes and has his great big beer belly back again.

Academia (8)

  • In his good books Wendy has to sit through dinner with George’s academic colleagues from the Poly all showing off but when they ask her her favourite book, she says Mrs Tiggiwinkle by Beatrix Potter
  • Full stretch George does his yoga while worrying that he is becoming out of touch with developments in the humanities, and ponders resigning.
  • Liaison Presumably published around Valentine’s Day time, this ironically describes the rivalry between the Liberal Studies and Business Studies departments at George’s poly, ending with the suggestion that the two departments amalgamate, which is ironically depicted with one of Simmonds’s flowery rococo pastiches of a valentine’s card between the two.
  • An important meeting George and a colleague go to see the Chairman of governors of the poly but emerge with a surprisingly favourable decision – a big drawing shows what was going on inside each of their skulls, namely that the Chairman made a quick decision because he has a hangover.
  • Unwrappings George and Wendy’s American friend Frisbee Summers is staying. the family pop into a newsagents and while Wendy buys the kids ice-creams George and Frisbee end up discussing the top-row porn mags in high-falutin’ terms of signifying aspects of patriarchal ideology etc. Until Wendy bursts their bubble by whispering ‘Perverts!’ at them both.
  • A notice goes up at the Poly telling staff that unofficial visitors are not allowed. George and his fellow parents on the faculty realise this is a directive designed to stop parents bringing in their children during half term.
  • Eros denied the entire strip is told as a spoof of the Greek gods, wherein Eros fires a dart which hits Mrs Rutland, the Dean’s wife, as she’s chatting to George, and she is suddenly overcome with passion for him, making him blush and the gods panic until another of the gods sends a divine wind to blow away her infatuation and she is restored to normal banality.
  • Funeral rights George is blubbing so much at the funeral of a colleague from the poly who was killed in a car crash that Wendy is proud of him for breaking down sexist stereotypes which insist men keep a stiff, upper lip, and feeling free to express his emotions and… then starts to worry that such an excessive display of mourning will lead colleagues to think he must have been having an affair with the dead woman!
  • The sausage roll that changed the world At a party at his polytechnic, George is pressing the Dean about rumoured cutbacks which might run his new course on Turn of the century Vienna, when the Dean chokes on a sausage roll and Wendy steps in to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre thus saving the Dean’s life – who promptly changes his tune and tells George he’ll see what he can do. (‘It’s an ill windpipe…’)

Middle class mores and hypocrisies (12)

  • Shifting values George and Wendy take a crappy painting his aunt has left him to a valuers who makes an elaborate song and dance over it so that G &W’s opinion is transformed.
  • Black looks George tells Wendy he has just been through an ordeal every bit as bad as the mocking looks he got from his working class dad and his mates when young George went home as an Oxford student – but this time it was the black looks he got as he walked the gauntlet of Belinda and her unemployed punk mates hanging outside the house, as George unpacked the crates of Rioja wine from their Volvo.
  • Left overs George and Wendy have friends round for dinner who praise the cassoulet until Wendy reveals it’s from the freezer of Aunt Gwen who died recently, and left them all her belongings including the contents of her freezer.

  • Killjoy was here Stanhope gets a taxi back from the airport, tanned and still holding his skis from a wonderful skiing break but the glum cab driver soon brings him back to earth and depresses him.
  • Cornish wrestling Taking a cab to the station after a relaxing half-term holiday in Cornwall, George finds a ten pound note down the side of the seat and spends the whole journey agonising whether to hand it in as lost, or use it to pay the fare. He pays the fare.
  • Lingua franca Pippa offers Wendy and the kids a lift back from school and on the way reveals that she’s taken her daughter out of state school and sent her to a private boarding school. ‘They’re very strong on English,’ Pippa explains. They have to be, her daughter in the back thinks – almost all the young ladies at the boarding school are from abroad.
  • Snobs Wendy’s daughter is upset that they won’t buy her a leather skirt for £60, saying all the other girls have got one, and look down on her because she’s poor. What a sordid attitude, Wendy exclaims and tells her daughter that she is in fact, relatively well off with a home and a room of her own and goes to a good school – not to ‘that revolting school in Prosser Street – with all those nasty thugs from the flats.’ To which the family cat comments ‘Sordid attitude’ and Wendy realises what a hypocrite she is.
  • Carping at the shop corner A little gaggle of locals carp about how the local corner shop has changed over the years.
  • Standards of living Wendy leaves Benji with a friend and when her mother and Wendy go to collect him later, the mother spots about a thousand fire and health hazards in the home, whereas Wendy only sees the Noddy book (which I think is meant to be a joke because Noddy books were under fire for being racist).
  • A garden of Eden In early September George and Wendy and a couple of friends are sunbathing in the garden. Then their teenage kids turn up and they become uncomfortably aware of the bumps and blemishes and flab and cover themselves up. Paradise lost.
  • Every picture… At the Wrights’ lovely holiday cottage Stanhope’s art student daughter Jocasta takes Polaroid photos of each other. The joke, such as it is, in the discrepancy between the personal worries and grievances we get to read in their thought bubbles, and the big cheesy smiles they put on for the camera. My daughter read this strip and said, ‘What are they meant to do… shout and scream at the camera? Everyone smiles for bloody cameras and then gets back to their lives.’
  • Lady Bountiful Wendy is walking home from Sainsburys with a friend who points out that Wendy smiles inanely at everyone she meets. Wendy corrects that she only smiles at people less fortunate than her, or who she thinks needs encouraging.  The punchline is that she realises why… why people smile back at her. Standing there weighted down with carrier bags and trailing two mewling children, the reader can see why.
  • Bivouac throughout the strips ‘Bivouac’ is the name given to a kind of Ikea self-service home furnishing company. the strip describes the excitement of buying something in the store, loading it into the car and can’t wait to get it home, then having second thoughts about the extravagant expenditure, and then bickering about who persuaded who to buy it, and then the fate of the bi boxes from Bivouac which is to sit unopened and unloved.

Christmas (8)

Simmonds appears to hate Christmas. Put it this way, all the Christmas-themed strips parody, undermine or satirise the season and its sentiments.

  • Village Christmas
  • What’s in store George and Wendy take the kids to a panto, where they each find something to offend all the family!
  • Och! They’re such a worry The Heeps’ punk sons get kicked out of parties and are forced to go home for New Year’s Eve
  • Festive whirl A circular strip in which George is reluctant to go to a Christmas party, is chivvied into going by Wendy, says they won’t stay long but ends up having a whale of a time, chatting to everyone, then starting to have regrets in the car home, saying he made a number of faux pas, can’t believe he said this, can’t believe he was indiscreet about x, and wakes up the next morning determined not to go to the next Christmas party. Until…
  • The strip World of work has a Christmas theme, consisting of Edmund Heep and a colleague discussing how to wangle the longest break over Christmas.
  • Christmas present George is revolted by a traditional Christmas card from Aunt Bunny containing a traditional cake. George rails against ‘Looking Back Disease’, everyone wanting to preserve a fantasy of some Olde Worlde Christmas and says, if he had his way, they’d dispense with the stagecoach on the Christmas card cover, the Victorian dress, and the port and the lanterns and the snowman, and the robins, out with Santa, in fact out with everything except a message of goodwill. Except that, as he’s dispensed with each of these things, they have been removed from the strip itself until it is just… George and Wendy and a few kids huddling together on a great wide snow-covered plain… with the sound of something hungry howling in the distance.
  • Past 2 o’clock The posh lady with the stiff hairdo and the frightfully, frightfully manner is woken by strangers knocking at the door. It is a reincarnation of Joseph and Mary turned away from the inn and trudging through the snow, and so the humour comes from the tone of voice and excuses made by the posh lady as she explains that she can’t put them up in the main house – the builders are making a frightful mess, but she can put them up in the shed next door, it’s currently housing Sara’s pony but they’re going to do it up and put in a shower and a utility room and decorate it with some rather super tiles they saw in France etc.
  • Christmas wishes A rather bleak strip consisting of two nearly identical big pictures, at the top George and Wendy wishing us a Happy Christmas next to a mantlepiece covered with Christmas cards – underneath, exactly the same scene, but each of the cards has been transformed by one of the worries of contemporary life e.g. a nuclear power station has appeared on the hill behind the sleigh, the wise men had been pointing at a star but now they’re pointing at a mushroom cloud, some deer were looking at a decorated Christmas tree but now they’re looking at a barbed wire fence with a Ministry of Defence Keep Out sign on it. It’s quite funny as humour, but it’s really interesting as social history, as a reminder of just how terrified everyone was of nuclear war or a nuclear accident back in 1983, 36 long years ago.

Pastiches and parodies (7)

Many of the cartoons liven up otherwise mundane events by dressing them in parodies of 18th century rococo or Renaissance paintings, or set them to the tunes of Elizabethan or Victorian songs (updating the words for comic effect) or in other ways frame or transform events into alternative genres, such as when Stanhope imagines a possible affair with a young woman in terms of a grand theatrical production, and visualises a theatre programme giving his and her names as the leading roles…. whereas his wife sees what is going on and imagines the same events as the subject of a silly TV sitcom titled ‘It always ends in tears’.

So humour is often derived not from the events, but from this clever transplanting of them into comically inappropriate genres and formats.

  • The joke Valentine’s Day card in Liaison
  • The appearance and speech of the Greek gods in DIY
  • The use of theatre programmes and the Radio Times format to parody Stanhope chatting up a young lady at the theatre in Acting one’s age
  • Spring fever Spotty punk Julian Heep tries to talk young Helene into shagging him but she refuses saying he’ll just tell everyone at school. The final scene parodies a classical painting of a young man putting his arms round a lady dressed in a classical gown.
  • The transformation of the car into a rococo love nest in Transports of love
  • The rebirth of Venus in which three women discuss and pester a friend into losing weight in a series of pictures which spoof and parody Botticelli’s famous Birth of Venus to make a feminist comment on how women are forced to conform to body stereotypes.
  • Cat lovers is told in the form of a rhyme (as are several others), thus: ‘The cat sat on the mat. Back to the flat come Pat and Jack. Jack hates the cat. The cat hates Jack. Pat loves the cat. The cat loves Pat. Pat sat on Jack’s lap. Jack pets Pat. Jack and Pat want a nap. Scram, cat, scram! Drat the cat!’ which tells the tale of a couple coming back to the flat, smooching and then wanting to go to bed… only to find a big cat poo on the duvet. In strips like this you can see a basic childishness, a simple-mindedness about the strip, which means it wasn’t a big departure for Simmonds to branch out into children’s books – the most successful of which were about… cats!

Teenagers (7)

  • Nature, nurture (and nutrition) Fashionable young Belinda Weber has scorned going to university as her parents hoped and is helping out as waitress in a Directors Dining Room because, as she shouts at her mother, she is sick of living in a poky conversion, sick of kidney beans and lentils, sick of pine dressers. She wants to meet someone rich and drive a Saab and live in a nice house. Thatcher’s children.
  • Virtue’s work Father Stanhope gives lazy skiving art student Jocasta a talking to about needing to get a job.
  • Reaction A mother has a trio of teenagers over, slumped in front of the telly, and is appalled at how heartless and cynical they are, fondly remembering when they were small and got upset at Disney films etc. Suddenly she hears them yukking and moaning and goes in to discover that… they are appalled and revolted by the middle-aged clothes, the bell-bottoms and open shirt being worn by a TV news reporter!
  • Honcho Gun The two punk sons of Edmund and Jo Heep go to the cinema but are so obnoxious they keep being asked to move and are eventually kicked out. Home embarrassingly early, they fend off a bollocking from their dad by ad libbing an enormous long complicated science fiction plot which they make up. ‘When in a spot, baffle ’em wiv Sci-Fi!’
  • Home Jocasta is skint and fed up of living in sordid student accommodationso she turns up back at her parents’ house and moves in, stuffing her face with good food, smoking on the sofa and reading in the bath. As so often, there is an ironic narrative counterpoint to all this as music staves run above the strip depicting the lyrics of the Victorian song ‘there’s no place like home’. My daughter read this strip and asked me, ‘Is it meant to be funny? Because it’s just… obvious’.
  • ABC (as it is spoken) Two young leather-jacketed dudes go into their local pub where the landlord asks them for proof of their age and they get stroppy. The ‘gag; is that the entire dialogue, by all parties, consists of abbreviations: ‘L.O.’ ‘2 G.n.T’ ‘A?’ and so on. Clever. Not particularly funny.
  • Marriage à la mode Belinda announces to her parents that she is going to marry one of the rich directors at the offices where she works as a cook. George and Wendy are distraught that Belinda’s not making the most of her education, those A-levels, doesn’t want to be the strong, independent feminist they brought her up to be and worst of all, wants George to ‘give her away’ at the traditional church service… like a medieval chattel. Ugh!

Second homes (5)

  • Village Christmas The book opens with quite a bitterly satirical cartoon showing a cluster of village cottages round a village church covered in snow in complete silence on December 22, and then in successive pictures how holiday home owners arrive down from London, animate the houses with lights and real fires and arguing and partying over Christmas, nursing hangovers on Christmas Day, and are packed up and gone leaving the village silent again, by 27 December. Looking back from 2019 it’s fascinating to see the seeds of the current housing crisis and resentment at the holiday home-owners who have gutted large numbers or rural and coastal communities, being sown so long ago. But the really striking thing about it is how beautifully it is drawn. In the rest of the book Simmonds’s looseness with faces, which are often erratically drawn, is still in evidence. But her depiction of things, and the details of scenes and scenery (indoors or out) go from strength to strength.
  • Home is the sailor During this period Simmonds introduced the Cornish seaside hamlet of Tresoddit whose point is that it is overrun with Londoners who’ve bought up all the available cottages as second homes.
  • One man’s meat The Weber’s visit posh friends who have a home in the country, and the mum delivers a long speech about how the locals buy really expensive processed food at the local store instead of eating the kind of fresh, vegetarian fare which she recommends.
  • Up and down in the country A satirical speech delivered by the same pomaded lady in a quilted Barbour jacket as the previous strip, who explains the work of the Society for the Preservation of Owners of Second Homes or POSH.
  • Nice little men The same woman with a Barbour jacket and over-elaborate hairdo has such a worry about her second home in the country, and calls out a simply super little man who lives locally, but the nice little man overhears her describing him in belittling, superior, patronising tones on the phone and so does a rush job and clear out grumpily… leaving posh lady wondering ‘But he was such a NICE little man, too.’

Edmund Heep the alcoholic (3)

  • Edmund Heep steps in for a colleague at a conference and gives a deeply embarrassing speech
  • Distinguished service Heep is out of action nursing a hangover so his secretary Jackie has to rummage around in his chaotic filing system to find the needed paperwork.
  • World of work On a crowded bus at Christmas, Heep discusses with a colleague precisely how many days off work they can wangle, this Christmas and next Christmas holidays. Neither of them understand why the two blokes behind them become so angry that one of them shoves Heep’s hat down over his ears until… they pair get off the bus at the next stop and go into the local Job Centre – at which they simply feel SHAME.

Miscellaneous (3)

  • Upright citizens Waiting in a long bus queue an old lady reflects that it’s one of life’s little unfairnesses that whereas young people can lounge or sit in doorways, the elderly cannot without being taken for vagrants.
  • Minor op Wendy goes into hospital for a minor operation. The amusement comes from the way Simmonds quotes Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech to name all the ‘roles’ someone having an operation is called on to perform.
  • The house that Jack bought Nice middle-class Jack sells his house in order to move into the one Mr Shite is selling him but at the last minute Shite gets a higher offer and sells it to someone else leaving Jack’s family stuck in expensive rented accommodation. This just seems to be an utterly humourless comment on the sheer hell of trying to buy or sell a house in Britain.

Politics (2)

  • Don’t know A visually funny strip where Jocasta the art student is wakened by a ringing at her doorbell, trudges all the way down the stairs and the hallway to answer the door to a man canvassing for the local Labour candidate. Jocasta takes the flyer, trudges back upstairs and dumps it next to all the other ignored flyers.
  • Judicium extremum Atom bombs fall and wipe out the world. At the pearly gates there are two queues of the dead, one of hawks and one of doves, both of them blaming each other for what has happened.

Household chores and worries (1)

Possibly the once about the Bivouac shopping trip fits in here as well.

  • DIY A parody in which the Greek gods of the household oversee George and Wendy’s frustrated attempts at spring cleaning.

Thoughts

This detailed enumeration of the strips makes it crystal clear that it contains little or no politics but is overwhelmingly concerned with the cosy mundanities, and stroppy grievances and petty frustrations, of domestic and personal life. Feminism, or the role of women, and in particular a) harassed mothers and b) even more harassed working mums, are the most recurrent subjects.

On the plus side is young Belinda Weber, the glamorous teenager/young woman, strong, independent-minded, who rejects all her mother’s pussy-footing, soft soap liberalism and just wants to marry a millionaire. It’s odd how, having root and branch rejected old-style feminism, Belinda is consistently shown as a well-adjusted, happy winner.

One other thing is striking to the modern reader, which is that all the characters are white and straight.

There are no black, Asian, Muslim or ethnic minority characters, whether in the street, in shops, in the various offices or at the poly, in the schools or at any of the parties, lunches and get-togethers. Race appears as an issue once or twice, for example in the strip when Wendy says she smiles at the new Pakistani woman who’s moved into the street, and says the one person she doesn’t smile at is the appallingly racist woman across the road. When Edmund Heep irritates the men sitting behind him on the bus, one of them is black. That appears to be it.

Similarly, there are no gay or lesbian characters anywhere. The rights and wrongs endured by middle-class white women women women women are proclaimed from the hilltops. The experiences of black, Asian, immigrant or lesbian and gay people are invisible. The Posy cartoon strips are a strictly white, middle-class and heterosexual affair. This, I think, goes a long way to explaining why they have such a cosy, reassuring feel. Nothing threatening or strange ever happens in them.

cf Celeb

Surfing cartoons on the internet I stumbled across the ‘Celeb’ strip drawn by ‘Ligger’, which has been appearing in Private Eye for 30 years or so, describing the sardonic attitudes of an ageing rock star named Gary Bloke. Every one of these Celeb cartoons made me laugh out loud.

Celeb by Ligger

I found more laughs in one Celeb cartoon than the entire 488-page Posy collection but then laughs are not really what she’s after.

Credit

All Posy Simmonds cartoons are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images are freely available on the internet.

Related links

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by Simon on June 14, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 14, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/14/very-posy-posy-simmonds/

Pick of Posy by Posy Simmonds (1982)

From 1977 to 1987 Posy Simmonds drew a regular cartoon strip in the Guardian newspaper gently mocking the middle-class lifestyles and liberal concerns of a regular cast of a dozen or so fictional characters, centred on:

  • Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to verbose polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber, and mother of a brood of six children, ranging from little Benji to teenage glamour-puss Belinda
  • Jo Heep, married to tedious, drunk whisky salesman Edmund Heep, and mum to two rebellious teenagers who’ve adopted the punk look
  • Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, mother of a young baby

Throughout the period the cartoons were periodically gathered together into books, namely:

  • Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
  • True Love (1981)
  • Pick of Posy (1982)
  • Very Posy (1985)
  • Pure Posy (1987)

And these books were themselves gathered together into a huge compendium volume, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus which was published in 2012 and now appears to be the only way to get hold of the cartoons.

Pick of Posy is the second in the series of collections, given that True Love was a one-off ‘graphic novel’, loosely based on the schoolgirl crush of one of the characters, Janice Brady, for a regular cast member, tall, suave philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright. The most obvious aspects of the book are:

– it is twice the length of Mrs Weber’s Diary, at getting on for 90 pages

– the diary format which dominated the first book has been dropped, allowing the strips to stand on their own

– the drawing has changed and improved; the earliest cartoons from the previous book were sometimes drawn with a very heavy, thick outline; in Pick of Posy the lines are thinner, more subtle

– and accompanying this there is a noticable increase in the amount of background detail in the frames. Some cartoonists leave the frames almost empty except for the human characters. Simmonds’s frames are stuffed with detail of an almost photographic realism.

Compare and contrast the almost children-book simplicity of a very early cartoon, most of the frames having a simple white background:

With the style of only a few years later, which is stuffed with minutely catalogued and realistic details, designed to reinforce the mood and meaning of the text.

Class distinctions

Surfing the net around Simmonds I came across an American blogger who said that for a long time he didn’t understand Posy Simmonds cartoons at all. He didn’t get what they were about, they just seemed so British, with no real humour in them. Then one particular strip gave him a Eureka moment and made him realise that Simmonds’s cartoons are predominantly about class, about the thousand tiny subtle markers of class and class distinctions which the British obsess about and which are so opaque or invisible to outsiders. That was the key, and from that point onwards he was able to understand and appreciate them.

I think this is a massive insight. It explains why the strips are almost all talk or thought bubbles, rather than actions or events. Because it is via thoughts and dialogue and words and concepts that the subtle distinctions of class which are Simmonds’s meat and drink are expressed.

But I think you can extend the insight. Her cartoons are not only about class. Age and gender are also dominant themes:

  • Gender in the form of the familiar sex war in which countless women feel they are the hard-done-by, downtrodden, stay-at-home-mums, or harassed working mums, or young women wolf-whistled in the street, or leered over at work by lecherous middle-aged men.
  • Age in the obvious way that the concerned liberal Weber couple have a teenage daughter, Belinda, who has become a punk, goes out with leather-clad bikers, and generally rebels against everything her parents held sacred, as do the two punk sons of alcoholic whiskey salesman Edmund Heep. The presence of these two types of teenage rebellion (one female, the other male) allows Simmonds to make countless jokey observations about the gap between the idealistic 60s generation and the nihilistic 70s generation.

This line of thinking helps explain why the strips are not about broad humour, or puns or boom-boom punchlines, but are concerned with a thousand subtle, acute observations on the differences of class and age and gender which permeate British society and, in particular, which divide the so-called middle classes into scores of sub-tribes or groups.

Mundane subject matter

It explains why so much of the subject matter – what is happening in the strips – is extremely mundane and everyday: it is not the events which are interesting, it is the way they spark divergent responses in this or that middle class tribe, divides men’s responses from women’s, the overly-concerned liberal parents from their spotty stroppy kids.

The wry smile of recognition

It explains why even her strongest fans tend to use words like ‘wry’ and ‘dry’ about her humour, which are code for something which is obviously not serious but also is not trying to prompt laughter. Instead I think the central aim or effect of her cartoons is to trigger recognition: her readers read a strip and nod their heads and think – ‘Yes, I know that sort of angry mum, or leery businessman, or stroppy teenager’. They give you a wry smile of recognition.

It’s the same kind of wry smile that is prompted by her clever-clever references to famous paintings, or use of pastiche elements like suddenly accompanying the strip with the worlds of an Elizabethan song, or slipping into the style of 1950s True Romance magazines.

All the elements – recognition of social types, recognition of their precise class position, recognition of clever cultural references – are designed to make you nod and think, ‘Yes, I get it; very clever’.

Humour

Where there is humour in the strips, beyond the wry smile of recognition, it is most often expressed in ironic reversals – when an exasperated mother, or concerned parents, or adulterous man, set out with one intention and then find themselves ironically frustrated, or (very often) outsmarted by their children or rivals or would-be targets.

A good example is Peaceful twilight years where George’s Aunt Weber comes to stay and is sitting comfortably in front of the television when she starts saying ’89’, repeatedly. George and Wendy look at each other and then have a sotto voce conversation about how the old lady’s going gaga, and Wendy very patronisingly asks if that’s her age. To which Winny shocks her and the reader by replying that, No, 89 is the number of violent TV deaths she’s seen so far this month. ‘They say today’s children see over 10,000 TV murders by the time they’re 15… I’ve seen over 120,000.’ Now that is quite funny.

Or Happy families where Paul and Emma Standish have come round to George and Wendy’s for Sunday lunch and afterwards one of their little kids starts drawing on Wendy’s wall and then on the sofa so Wendy gives her a light smack which leads to an enormous argument and debate about the rights and wrongs of smacking – the comic punchline comes as the strip cuts away to the other kids playing quietly on the floor, one of whom says: ‘It always ends in tears.’

Themes

I tried to do a one-sentence summary of some of the strips just to record what they’re actually about:

  • Spotlight on beauty Wendy buys new wall lights, fits them herself but is then horrified when they spotlight the mess, damp and chaos in her kitchen
  • Happy ever after George and Wendy take the mickey out of all the merchandising surrounding the Royal Wedding, which prompts their teenage daughter Belinda to complain that they’re always belittling things and mocking romance, at which point George and Wendy say they’re just as much in love as ever, which prompts Belinda and the other kids to go ‘Eurgh, GROSS!‘
  • Sunday TV Wendy, her mum and the little kids are watching a TV documentary about lions in Africa which includes scenes of them mating, which prompts her mum to whisper, in French so the kids don’t understand, that they ought to turn it off – so they turn it off and draw the kids’ attention to their two pet rabbits in their cage, but when the adults have left, the kids notice that the rabbits are also mating and -m in an ironic payoff – one of the older kids parodies their grandma by saying ‘Ooh la la, Keith! Pas devant les enfants!’ because, of course, being good middle-class children they do of course understand French.
  • Mea culpa Wendy is in the basement kitchen of the Weber household when she sees a man walking a dog which is doing a poo right outside. She rushes up and out the door to berate him, but he tells her a long shaggy dog story about how the dog was foisted on him by his ailing mother-in-law and he thinks its behaviour is awful, but what can you do? On and on, until it is Wendy who feels abashed and ashamed of herself.
  • Hawks and doves Dominic’s parents are giving a dinner party but the little so-and-so, in his pyajamas, runs around the dinner table shouting and making a fuss and tugging his mums’ skirt: in their minds the guests divide neatly into hawks, who would give him a good smack, and doves, who thinks he is just over-tired and needs attention. The strip ends with his father picking him up at which point he becomes calm and docile, and his long-suffering mother looking daggers at her husband who seems able to mollify their son so effortlessly.

  • Piggy bank George joins everyone else staring at a man who is walking through the street effing and blinding, George goes in to see his bank manager who gives him a hard time about bank security and needing to verify his identity, until George emerges onto the street doing exactly the same kind of effing and blinding as the man the strip started with.
  • Higher education In the Polytechnic canteen on the first day of the new academic year, we see all the staff moaning and worrying.
  • Exchange of views The Dean of the Polytechnic where George works needs to shed some staff and so is shown soft-soaping George and several other old-timers, telling them now is the time to take early retirement, write that book they’ve always wanted to, pick up work as a consultant and so on…

Exchange of views by Posy Simmonds (1980)

  • Identity parade A visiting lecturer at the Poly is introduced to George who recognises him and takes a moment to review where they’ve met – was it at the Uni of Essex in the 60s, at hippy rallies in Hyde Park, at fashionable beatnik cafés, or attending R.D. Laing’s fashionable lectures on psychiatry. Then the penny drops. God, no, it was when they were both in the army doing their national service at Oswestry and the visitor was corporal to George’s private.
  • Clouds of glory A split-screen strip in which George visits the GP because of something up with his poo – on one side the doctor tells him he only weeks to live, all his relatives tearfully come and see him and after his death his magnum opus is published and given a rave review in the Time Literary Supplement; on the other side exactly the same sequence of events leads up to the doctor telling George that, from the state of a sample of faeces he’s given him, George has been eating too much beetroot!
  • Urbs and rus Stanhope and wife Trisha are at their second home in the country and Stanhope pontificates about how his knowledge of country matters and nature is infinitely superior to their neighbour, farmer Pearcey, who is not a real farmer and just makes a mint renting his and to a caravan park. All of which Mr Pearce unfortunately overhears, putting Stanhope in his place with the witty riposte: ‘As the man said, we must all cultivay notre jardin, eh?’
  • THE DENTIST A couple of surreal strips in which Trish Stanhope visits an Australian Marxist dentist who, in effect, hears her embarrassed confession about  how she’s not as left-wing and right-on as she ought to be, what with the second home and the cleaner and the private school for the little ones…
  • Rustic blues Stanhope takes a country neighbour of his, another Londoner who bought up a disused railway station and has renovated it and moans about how he can’t ingratiate himself with the locals to the local pub where – they discover it is packed to the rafters with Londoners down for the weekend and treating the locals to fancy tipples and fags.
  • Home is where the heart is Stanhope drives the family down to his lovely country cottage, singing the praises of the countryside all the way – until he opens a letter waiting for him to discover it is a summons to jury service, at which point he explodes that he’s going to be stuck in this ‘one-eyed dump’ for weeks! (The insult ‘one-eyed’ applied to a remote village will recur in the graphic novels Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe.)
  • Angles and Saxons Stanhope and Trisha Wright are enjoying a picnic in the country with their step-daughter Jocasta, who has brought along her middle-aged boyfriend, an expert in graphs. When a motorbike roaring by sputters to a halt, the boyfriend shows Jocasta a series of graphs based on the likelihood of Stanhope giving the rider a bollocking. But to everyone’s surprise Stanhope is intimidated by the biker, and ends up wishing him well. Much to the chagrin of Stefan the graph-expert. And Jocasta’s punchline to the strip is: ‘Stefan has always believed that British middle class behaviour goes out of its way to defy rational explanation.’ Not that funny.

  • Always welcome Typically English middle-class, envenomed restraint, when Trish and Stanhope welcome Jocasta home to say, and then find themselves lumbered with putting up middle-aged Stefan – going out of their way to make a nice diner for im, and making up the sofa bed with pillows and a duvet – and then retiring to their own bedroom to fret and criticise and disapprove.
  • A room of one’s own Jocasta in her freezing, scruffy student flat at Christmas.
  • Christmas Christmas is a recurrent theme in all the books. Simmonds hates Christmas, all the fol-de-rol and pretending. So the Christmas strip in this book kicks off with Wendy and Trish traipsing through the West End past gaudily decorated shops lamenting which pack of ghoulish relatives are coming to stay this year – but then both notice little Benji cooing over the shop window decorations and Wendy ends up thinking: ‘It’s all a terrible expense… but still… it is Christmas… & one has to do it for the children, after all…’
  • Wish you were here The Christmas Day cartoon is one big picture of Jocasta in bed in her filthy flat, smoking and reading a book surrounded by dirty dishes and fag packets and food wrappers, imagining the polite family Christmas Stanhope and Trish are having with some in-laws who they politely loathe and how everyone is getting on each other’s nerves in that repressed, English way.
  • Lonely heart The thoughts of an Action Man doll who is horrified when his owner’s big sister starts dressing her Barbie doll in the Action Man clothes and putting her in his tank etc.
  • Wendy’s mum comes to stay and insists on doing all the washing up and chores and dusting and cleaning the loo and Wendy is hugely relieved when she finally leaves!
  • Consumers In post-Christmas mode George and Wendy watch ads on TV and George way over-analyse them in terms of ‘reification’ and ‘heuristics’.
  • Perpetuum immobile One big clever cartoon showing alcoholic Edmund Heep propping up the bar at his local and buying drinks for everyone, with his tiresomely cheerful banter.
  • All systems go showing the brand new regional office of International Brewhouse Inc empty, as the designers designed it, and then full of boozy male middle-managers after work, with harassed secretaries having to cover for them. Men, eh!
  • The silent 3 introducing Edmund Heep’s two sons who are safety-pinned, spiky-haired punks, and their mate arguing and swearing at each other all the time.

  • The silent 3: Gather ye rosebuds shows the three punks hanging out, threatening passersby and ogling passing birds, only to reveal at the end that young Jules, occasionally, in the privacy of his own home… can be quite sweet to his old parents, buying his mum a gardening book and his dad a tie.
  • Settlers Quite a funny strip in which George and Wendy are round the house of a friend who’s done up a house in a remote and derelict area, all the language leading you to believe they’re talking about the remote countryside until… they step outside and you realise the house is in n area of abandoned urban wasteland.
  • Happy families Paul and Emma Standish have come round to George and Wendy’s for Sunday lunch and afterwards one of their little kids starts drawing on Wendy’s wall and then on the sofa so Wendy gives her a light smack which leads to an enormous argument and debate about the rights and wrongs of smacking – the comic punchline comes as the strip cuts away to the other kids playing quietly on the floor, one of whom says: ‘It always ends in tears.’
  • An unnamed strip which ironically takes tropes to do with spring, and singing birds and buds breaking through to…. show that these daffodils are blooming in the foetid flat of Jocasta Wright where they start coughing and choking.
  • True confessions Stanhope and his wife Trish are weekending at their cottage, but when Stanhope beings tentatively to tell his wife about his latest fling (they have an open marriage) she gets cross and shouts that she’s not his Mother Confessor. She decides to invite ‘the Dixons’ over although this requires a complex set of instructions as they’re two hours from London. In counterpoint to Trish’s directions Stanhope draws an imaginary maze which would lead Trish to discovering him, Stanhope, in bed with his latest floozy.
  • Angles of incidence Stanhope is in the lift with his mother when he starts making eyes at a pretty young thing who makes eyes back at him. Stanhope’s mother spots it and treads in his feet interrupting the flow of sexual enticement, saying as she helps him limp from the lift: ‘I thought we’d had quite enough of ETERNAL TRIANGLES, Stanhope.’
  • The conversation piece Jocasta and her dad, Stanhope, are hanging out in the airport departure lounge because the plane to take them on their skiing holiday is delayed. Stanhope, as is his wont, starts chatting up another middle-aged woman, which Jocasta listens to for a bit and then suddenly stands up and announces to the entire lounge that she is his mistress which leads to a massive picture showing all the passengers in the lounge commenting on this revelation in a rich mix of European languages.
  • Bitter sweets Trish is shopping at the supermarket when little Willy spots sweets at the checkout counter and starts wailing, crying, screaming for them. The mum she’s with sympathises and a chorus of other women all give their opinions about how to manage – when Trish just smacks Willy, he stops crying in surprise, and she buys him the sweets anyway.
  • Peaceful twilight years George’s Aunt Weber comes to stay and is sitting comfortably in front of the television when she starts saying ’89’, repeatedly. George and Wendy look at each other and then have a sotto voce conversation about how the old lady’s going gaga, and Wendy very patronisingly asks if that’s her age. To which Winny shocks her and the reader by replying that, No, 89 is the number of violent TV deaths she’s seen so far this month. ‘They say today’s children see over 10,000 TV murders by the time they’re 15… I’ve seen over 120,000.’ Now that is quite funny.
  • Perspectives Over dinner George, Wendy and a beardy socialist friend discuss the issues of the day – the arms race, collapse of detente, nuclear war, the economy, nationalism, pollution, destruction of the ozone layer, unemployment… Later than night George has a nightmare but, in ironic counterpoint to all these big weighty subjects, his subconscious is harassed by worries that his library books are three weeks overdue, he might be getting Wendy’s cold, and that something’s dropped off the car.
  • A dog’s life A split screen narrative in which a colleague of George’s at the Poly – Pierce – goes through a typical day, nicking George’s parking space, trying it on with a secretary, criticising George and the other lefties for being so soft, nicking the office projector and so on. In the parallel set of pictures we see the adventures of Pierce’s dog during the day, the doggy equivalent of all Pierce’s actions. Except that at the end of the day Pierce gets home late to a chilly reception from his wife, while the dog gets home to be embraced and rewarded.
  • Sharing George gets home from a draining day to find that Wendy has done all the chores even though it’s ‘his’ turn .He gets quite cross, explaining that he wanted to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning and washing up and her having done it has left him feeling deprived. ‘It was MY TURN to feel really OPPRESSED.’
  • No smoking George takes the train and is driven mad by the loud sounds all the other passengers make, listening to the radio, eating an apple, slurping a cup of tea etc.
  • Bon brush George is cleaning the toilet while Wendy goes out to night class, but his cleaning  conjures up a genii, a middle-aged woman of a genii who proceeds to be shocked that he’s doing the housework and insists a woman’s place is in the home and a load of other sexist cant, so that George pushes her back into the toilet, rams the lid down and flushes it.
  • Il Fondo George and Wendy go to the cinema to see an Italian movie. George drifts off and is thinking about new sheets for the bed, when the characters proceed to strip off and (presumably) have sex, at which George goes all red in the face and… notices Wendy looking at him. Oops, quick, time to hide that male sex drive. So he readjusts his thoughts until he is condemning the film as ‘appalling, horribly sexist, revolting and exploitative.’ When he hurriedly tells Wendy all this as they leave the cinema she smiles and agrees. Phew.
  • Cheers In a pub some leery businessman spends the entire strip chatting up the young woman they’ve promoted to management, patronising and insulting her about how pretty she is, until the woman throws her drink over the guy and storms out, leaving him spluttering: ‘There! See! What have I always said – they’re IRRATIONAL… EMOTIONAL… & completely UNPREDICTABLE.’
  • Uneasy riders George and Wendy’s daughter is a stunningly sexy teenager who wears tight clothes, low tops and is going out with a motorcycle courier. Off she zooms and George and Wendy tut tut and reminisce about their heady days in the 1950s, going by scooter to a cool coffee bar and onto the Royal Court theatre.
  • The natural order Wendy drops little Benji off with one of her neighbours and is appalled to hear the mum telling her boy that he has to be a doctor and the daughters that they have to be nurses. Sexist stereotyping! In fact as soon as the adults have gone this is exactly what the little girls do, playing with their dolly and not letting Benji get a look in. But when they hear the grown-ups returning, the girls give the doll to Benji and tell the admiring Wendy that he’s been a nurse while one of the girls has been acting a mother and brain surgeon. In other words, they know how to play Wendy’s politically correct prejudices. And this is 1979, 40 years ago!
  • Well known facts Another split strip concept, where the children are walking back from school telling each other things their mums have told them like, if you step on the cracks a bear will get you, or if you swallow apple pips a tree will grow in your tummy. This is ironically counterpointed by the mums’ conversations which are all about ‘my mum says’ and ‘my doctor told me’ and ‘my architect friend said’ and so on. Moral: we never really grow up.
  • Art gallery George takes his kids to an art gallery and delivers long high-falutin lectures about the politico-historical realities behind each painting, while the kids yawn and want to leave. I think the joke is that their regular Sunday morning visits, complete with lecture, are identical in format to the kind of preachy sermonising George and Wendy hated about the church their parents took them to.
  • Temptation’s way Belinda Weber goes into town on the tube wearing an extraordinarily sexy black leather figure-hugging outfit and thinks she’s being touched up in the tube carriage. Instead it is a feminist who has covered her with stickers saying ‘This garment exploits women’.
  • Daily dose Jocasta Wright catches the tube and looks at all the images and stories about women in the papers and magazines the commuters are reading, leading to a large cartoon of ‘the Seven Ages of Media Women’
  • A Messy Business Jocasta is walking down the street when she steps in some dog poo, then catches up with a dog on a leash and stares daggers at it, imagines killing it, imagines it dead, imagines the newspaper headlines about herself being a dog killer, and so walks past the dog, smiling cheesily at it. The dog says ‘Chicken’ to her.
  • Promises, promises A female friend insists on showing Wendy the photos from Sue’s wedding. Every single one involves someone who is divorced or splitting up or remarrying. By the time they get to the photo of the happy bride, and her friend comments that they’re getting married rather young, Wendy sardonically comments, don’t worry: ‘It’s just a PHASE she’s going through.’
  • L’après-midi d’une divorcée A divorced mum is waiting for her husband to come and collect the kids. The delay allows her to work herself into a frenzy of anger and frustration at him so that when he finally knocks on the door, she opens it holding her child dressed as a cowboy who demands, ‘Your money or your life, Daddy.’
  • Theory and practice is another split screen, on one side the successive stages of a happy and equable divorce, on the other side a set of mathematical equations depicting an extremely fractious and rancorous divorce.
  • How the other half lives A divorced woman phones her ex-husband imagining him snug in a big bed with his dishy new girlfriend. In fact he is living in a sad bedsit surrounded by rubbish, and is imagining her living in domestic bliss with happy kids stroking the pet labrador. They’re both angry and deluded.
  • Company loves misery At a smart house party a group of women bill and coo over a male friend of theirs who’s recently got divorced. But when he turns up in the company of the stunning young fox, Belinda Weber, their giggly fondness turns to bitterness and spite.
  • Going solo Wendy phones a friend of hers who’s recently got divorced, Ellen, a creator of hand-crafted wooden house signs. Ellen goes to great lengths to tell Wendy how happy she is to be single, to be living by herself, to be free, not to be dominated by some man. But after Wendy hangs up. Ellen bursts into bitter tears.
  • Putting the bootee in At a nice house party Nigel, married with two kids, deduces that single Avril earns three times what he does, and start chatting her up, without realising how patronising and sexist he is being. Finally, his heavily pregnant wife comes to collect him and he manages to really anger her by thoughtlessly remarking: ‘Y’know… I really admire women like that, who make something of their lives’, implying that his wife, by ‘merely having babies, has wasted hers.
  • Rich desserts Tow mums are visiting. Christine has a small baby. the other mums bills and coos and makes an enormous fuss over baby, talking horrible baby talk and putting her up on her shoulder where… the baby proceeds to be copiously sick, much to the first mums’ amusement.
  • Mother knows best Trish is taken out for tea by her mother-in-law, Stanhope’s mother, who proceeds to lecture her about how a mother ought to be at the beck and call of her children, nothing is too good for them… until she spies a mother across the restaurant breast-feeding her baby, at which point she is overcome with disgust and disapproval… much to Trish’s ill-concealed glee.
  • The shape of things to come A joke reveal strip – in which we meet George, Wendy and other parents in the kitchen catering to a raucous party, complaining about the guests, the gatecrashers, throwing up behind the flowers, dancing lasciviously and then… the final big picture reveals that they’re supervising a party not of adults but of 11-year-olds making themselves sick on fizzy drinks and chocolate and gyrating to pop music whose sexy lyrics they can’t possibly understand.
  • At Tobit’s fourth birthday party the well-dressed hostess explains that she simply couldn’t do without her wonderful au pair, Lizzie, who looks after the kids, arranges everything, makes it possible for swish mum to have a jet-setting career. But then she says wonderful Lizzie is leaving her to go and study in America at which all the other mums say, How awful, How dreadful, Oh poor you etc. And then, a second later, realise that they’re saying that the academic success of this woman Lizzie is dreadful… at which point they all rush to correct themselves, How simply wonderful for her etc.
  • Tres snub George and Wendy attend a party of appalling snobs and social climbers at Mrs Brinsley Bowe’s bijou residence, which George regards as excellent field work into ‘a discourse of totemic bricolage’.
  • An acid experience Old friend of George and Wendy’s, American ethno-botanist is staying and is thrilled to meet ferociously sexy Belinda and her cool, shaded boyfriend. Hair-banded, hairy old hippy Frisbee tries to co-opt them into his memories of rebellion and the summer of love, giving them a big bear hug and proclaiming Love, man – while the two youngsters have thought bubbles with KILL in big letters.
  • Sex’n’drugs Wendy worries that Belinda is going out in a very low-cut top which reveals her boobs, but Belinda tells her to calm down, she’s not having sex or taking drugs, like her old hippy parents did at her age.

  • Pupa power Wendy is round a fellow mum’s who begins criticising some fiml or TV programme for being sexist and her teenage kids start taking the mickey out of her: ‘Sexism! sexism! That’s all you talk about’ which sets the mum off ranting about how she’d hoped to bring up two kids to share her liberal values but appears to have raised ‘two SLUGS who lie about chewing holes in everything I stand for.’
  • The joke strip where Jocasta and another girl have gone for a day’s sketching in the countryside accompanied by two of their male tutors. When the old tutors criticise the cynicism of the t-shirts the girls are wearing Jocasta spontaneously takes hers off, and then her jeans (made in South Africa) and then her trainers (made in a Latin American dictatorship) and then her panties (made from multi-national man-made fibre) – until she is sitting naked next to the two clothed men in a pastiche of the famous Manet painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

 

  • Manners Friends go and stay at Stanhope and Trisha’s country cottage and at the end of the weekend tell him what a divine time they had, slept like logs, simply the best… then spend the entire drive back to London complaining how ghastly it was.
  • Loss and profit Benji steals George’s car keys and hides them in the garden. George gets angry with him at which point Wendy intervenes to coax Benji and offer him sweets. At which point Benji confesses where he hid them and is rewarded. So that he learns that crime really does pay.
  • L’Étranger George and Wendy are on the beach in the south of France, very white and pasty among the bronzed foreign bodies. Wendy begins to take her bikini off but then is overcome with doubts, prompting George to explain to the other beach occupiers, in his bad French, that they are not embarrassed about going naked, it’s just that the day before they got sunburn on their naughty bits.
  • A little turbulence The insufferably good-humoured drunk Edmund Heep is on a holiday flight which runs into really bad turbulence during which all the passengers beg God that they’ll mend their ways if only the plane survives.
  • Jocasta and friends are hitch-hiking through France and are eating at a seafood restaurant when they can’t helping the noisy Germans and (as usual) the braying confident upper middle class Brits telling their kids how to crack and eat lobster claws, leading Jocasta to bubble-think a parody of the poster for Jaws called Claws in which a giant lobster reaches upto munch the all-unwary swimmer.
  • Edmund and Jo Heep have gone on holiday to a hotel in England where they are embarrassed by their obnoxious punk teenage sons until… Julian gets the letter with his O-level results proclaiming that he’s got all nine, and his parents, the waitress and even the other guests are all full of approval and admiration.
  • All good gifts around us As the time of the Harvest Festival approaches the curate has been canvassing goods to display at the church and tells the vicar the middle classes have been most generous of all… but then reveals all the gifts are pies and cakes and quiches which come from their freezers. Quite why this is funny or satirical or has point eludes me.
  • The last days of peace A broad satirical strip which appears to take the Conservative Party election victory as the pretext for thinking that The Great War Against Inflation is coming in which creches and daycare centres and hostels for the old and so on will all close down, women will be forced back into the kitchen and men will go to the front to fight inflation. It seemed an arch, strained and unfunny allegory which ends with a pastiche of the famous poster with a child sitting on her father’s knee asking, ‘Daddy what did you do during the war?’
  • Zuppa Inglese George takes his two eldest daughters out for an Italian meal and grows increasingly irritated as the waiters hover round the two nubile glamour pusses like flies on poo, until he snaps and tells them to leave them alone. The comedy derives from the fact that George tries to explain that his daughters are not sex objects to be objectified, while the Italian maitre d’ entirely misinterprets him, rereading George’s anger as being like traditional Italian protectiveness towards his womenfolks’ ‘honour’ – and the more worked up George becomes, the more the Italian staff respect his machismo and old-fashioned sense of honour.
  • Facts of life At a summer dinner in the garden the kids innocently ask their parents where babies come from and George gives a factually accurate account of wombs and sperm while Wendy talks about love and romance – and then all the adults overhear the kids repeating this garbled version of misinformation.
  • Sweet sorrow Her mother is taking little Katya to nursery school for the first time and the little girl cries with apprehension while the mum reassures her about all the good things and games and friends she’ll meet. Having left her little girl there, the mum comes away upset and crying and Wendy repeats to her all the advantages and pluses which we have just heard the mum reassuring Katya with.
  • Listen with mother Wendy takes her smallest children to the local art gallery where she is in the middle of explaining what the Camden Town School of artists was trying to achieve when she looks up and realises she’s attracted quite a crowd of adult listeners.
  • A divided self At the offices of Beazeley and Buffin Jocasta shows Stanhope the artwork for a new beauty product which features an impossibly dishy model and, while Stanhope describes in words the numerous ‘feminine’ qualities the product is meant to symbolise, Jocasta does ironic dances and pirouettes round the office, ending up tied up in knots, almost as if… a sexist, patriarchal society places impossible demands on women.
  • Vigilance Jocasta is visting a friend and when it comes time to leave, the friend says she’ll accompany her to the busstop and on the way they discuss how ten years after Liberation women are still not safe to walk the streets at night, all the time aware that a sinister figure is following them through the dark alleys and slowly gaining on them who is… eventually revealed to be the friend’s dad who was concerned and has been following all the time to make sure they’re OK.
  • This sporting life Relatives pop in to visit the Heep family who, we learn, live in a semi under the motorway flyover. The relatives try to make the most of Edmund’s two unprepossessing punk sons who cadge a fiver off them on the pretext that they’re going on a sponsored run. Five minutes later the punks walk back in and when the surprised relative asks why it was such a short run, the punks take off their leather jackets to reveal t-shirts with the slogan ‘Sponsored Motorway Dash’ – they run from one side to the other dodging the traffic.
  • Breath of a salesman TV reporter Gareth french pops into the castle and Ball for a quick one but is accosted by the unbearable Edmund Heep who proceeds to breathe foul pickled onion and scotch egg fumes all over him.
  • Piggy in the middle Benji has a cold so Belinda is reading him a storybook about rich pigs and poor pigs, but Wendy interrupts and criticises the book for having such appalling stereotypes in it such as the mummy pig being in the kitchen cooking all the time and – this being a cartoon – the piggy character start arguing back against Wendy’s political correctness during all of which bickering… Benji has happily fallen asleep.
  • A la recherche du temps perdu Rummaging in the attic Belinda uncovers a pair of fading hippy jeans which revolt her but Wendy explains how it was hand patched and festooned with logos and peace signs and so on, and lectures Belinda that they were the generation who cared… Yeah, and who ‘ROTTED the FABRIC of SOCIETY’ thinks Belinda, with her Lady Di haircut and Thatcherite values.
  • Sheep and goats Sitting on a crowded bus Wendy and a load of other passengers are forced to put up with the ranting of a scuzzy old bigot raving against immigrants, and reds, and long-haired scroungers, and bloody feminists taking our jobs… until the conductor tells him there’s no standing room and he’ll have to get off. At which point Wendy nervously says ‘what a horrible old man’ and then, in the dead silence, realises that everyone else on the bus agreed with him.
  • They’re never ever satisfied Wendy is buying presents for all the kids in a toyshop ad when she gets to the till the middle-aged teller is at first all sweetness and light about watching their little faces light up until… she suddenly lets her guard down and reveals how much she loathes Christmas and thinks modern children are spoiled, after all she never had a paint box, she was never given a brand new bike at Christmas, she…
  • Showing off Wendy is off studying while George looks after the kids who beg him to make robin costumes for the school’s Christmas play or they’ll be the only ones without a costume. George piously thinks that going that extra mile, doing those little extra tasks, is what true equality is all about and so dutifully runs up two beautiful robin costumes. Only to attend the performance and realise that his two kids are the only ones with robin outfits and overhear other mums in the audience tut-tutting that some parents really do have too much time on their hands.
  • Perquisites Jocasta goes to the office of her dad, Stanhope, hoping to cadge some Christmas money but instead marvelling at the array of luxury goods he’s been sent by various clients, which are listed in special folksy Christmas font as in the song the twelve days of Christmas. Jocasta points out how fattening or toxic (cigars) they are and ironically wishes her dad ‘a Merry Cholesterol’.
  • Jocasta gives us her view of Christmas, a jaded cynical view which appears to be Simmonds’s since it appears in all her books, a time of boozy pub goers, and cash till ringing up phenomenal sales, and she wishes all of her relatives captious or spiteful presents, for example a lizard-skin belt for her trendy stepmother, but a size too small… etc.
  • In the last strip George and Wendy are in bed when they’re woken by their youngest, Benji, who has a tummy ache and wants a story. Wendy dozes listening to George’s voice reading the story but… which suddenly gives a jolt, becomes very adult, and starts talking George’s characteristic pseudo-intellectual twaddle. Sneaking downstairs Wendy is astonished to find that Father Christmas is in the front room sharing a drink with her husband.

A lot of information, isn’t it, a lot of stories? Not many are funny, most spark. at most, a wry smile of recognition. Some puzzled me with their curious lack of purpose. But there is no doubt that having read all of them carefully, you do build up quite a deep sense of the Weber family and their children and friends and circle and a slightly mocking affection for their well-intentioned foibles.

I think little Benji is my favourite character. All things considered, I think I’d like a piece of chocolate cake, a balloon and a carry home.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images used are freely available on the internet.

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by Simon on June 13, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Cartoon, Comedy, Feminism
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Posted by Simon on June 13, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/13/pick-of-posy-posy-simmonds/

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