male companion

I prefer marglerine.

A hundred years ago it was a master-servant companionship relationship w/o sex. It occurs to me that today we ware more understanding of this kind of relationship if it is OPENLY BASED ON sex. Have we grown or er shrunk?

Haven't read much Sayers, but did notice the oddness of the butler's presence in Busman's Honeymoon, plot of which is supposed to be funny becos the intimate honeymoon is interrupted by MURDER and then ensuing incursions of yokel-locals and prim clergy couples etc; but it was anyway 'interrupted' (to modern reader) by the constant presence of the butler (whose name I can't remember) and surely it had to be like that because a sexual relationship between Harriet and Peter is quite unimaginable, more so than between Peter and the butler, anyway.

Is the butling relationship really about the one-to-one? In The Remains of the Day or even Gosford Park, say, the butler seems to embody a more abstract and generalised idea of 'service' in relation to multiple others. Actually, I think I'm missing a distinction between butler and ?manservant here. In which case, is a lady's relationship to her maid less interesting (because close non-sexual female relationships remain, superficially at least, more ordinary than male ones) than a man's to his manservant?

― Ellie, Friday, 12 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

and again

butler = bunter (actually sayers should have gone the whole hog and just called him Butler)

(i haven't reread that one yet ellie: it is quite late and asi recall fairly boring)

It's the old homoerotic Achilles/Patroclus thing. Loyal companion. I think Bunter was a gentleman's gentleman, rather than a butler, so the relationship was more one-to-one. I rather fancied Bunter when I read the books - loyal subservience, repressed sexuality, does all the work and is grateful for a pull down seat in the back of Wimsey's little sporty number. I don't remeber much erotic tension, except when he used to calm down Lord Peter when he had the heebie-jeebies because of the war. There may have been some embracing in night- shirts then. Coo! The Servant, anyone?

Yeh, was disappointing to me also, mainly because my intro to Sayers was via Harriet Vane, more than Lord Peter (in Gaudy Night), who I am much fonder of (and not as a wife, particularly). The person who insisted I read Sayers is also the only person I know who has a living grandparent who was in service.

― Ellie, Friday, 12 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Pah.

i suppose what i'm getting at is that from our perspective now it seems the classic example of "what was wrong with society then", where the evident practical common sense is dwarfed by the emotional-social-political rubbishness of the set-up => and what you get in fictional representation is either comedy or weird stereotypical evasions of the issue (or in fact just not noticing that there IS an issue)

eg these are real actual people who are paid to be robots wtf!! (marx had a maid!! not only that, he got her pregnant!!)

He had a maid in more sense than one.

I suppose it comes down to the idea that certain people are too important (for which read privilged or posh) to do the mundane things in life for themselves. Tie this up with statusinvolved with having staff and we partially see why they existed. But why the bonds were the way they were. I suppose if the point of a butler is to remove the little tedious things in life, t=a good butler has got to know his master (?) intimately to know the things which make him irritated. Only other people who have that kind of intimacy are partners (perhaps parents).

Oh - and I hate you Butler.

so when did butlers/gentlemen's gentlemen get into fiction in a big way: did pg wodehouse kind of invent-and-destroy them? (it can't JUST be jeeves and bunter)

i suppose there are "difficult" or comical domestics in dickens (eg tattycoram = a resentful lesbian maid in hard times — or is it bleak house?) but it's really the ritualisation-into-stereotyped-invisilibity of the butler-bachelor rel'nship that struck me (which sayers sort of makes a joke of but then basically elides same as everyone else)

then i started thinking, well, whose great uncle on ile was a butler, and we could get the REAL LOWDOWN!?! => but maybe it was all fiction anyway, like all those ppl called smithers in the 30s and 40s

P Diddy has an authentic English butler. creepy.

The glut of butlers in fiction always struck me as having the same purpose as, say, the glut of television characters whose jobs involve writing a column every week: it's just incredibly convenient, both narratively and mechanically. You can do whatever you want with the butler. Plus everyone loves robots.

Note: discussion of the servant-character should probably go pre- Elizabethan -- if they weren't established as conventions before then they surely were afterward. Again, they're mechanically even better for the stage. And such uncomfortable foils by the time you get to your bawdier Restoration comedy, tiptoeing about being discreet and useful while everyone climbs on everyone else's wife.

P Diddy has an authentic English butler. creepy.

Inauthentic ones would be cheaper.

?the glut of television characters whose jobs involve writing a column every week?

er i can think of one

yes point taken re mechanix i suppose nitsuh but gimme some names/titles of earlier examples (and when did the convention of self-effacing efficiency = omnipresence-yet-invisibility establish itself, or is the jeeves archetype really wodehouse's own invention?) (i really think pgw MIGHT have invented that "i endeavour to give satisfaction" kind of language => sayers does it a bit but you can feel she is a teeny bit defensive about this, hence occasionally makes nervous jokes abt wooster-and-jeeves))

The family of my great-uncle Herban employed Geechee Gullahs, one of whom Herban was best friends with as a young boy; going on adventures in the woods, fishing, tying knots, repairing cars, and generally getting into trouble. However, any stock character I can think of based on this relationship seems doomed to Southern apologia or worse.

Eek well I am not well-read so who knows, but I think you're largely right: I don't really know of specific earlier examples of the Jeeves archetype in particular, previous man/maid- servants being quite heavily and unsubtly involved in the emotional mechanics of family life (or put forward as dim-witted good- hearted incompetents, like silly old aunts who can happily be put to work -- either way, none of this graceful "invisible hand" stuff). (See say Shakespeare e.g. R&J.) I think I remember some Wycherley, possibly, with a similar set-up but it's possible that the second man wasn't technically a servant, more of a legitimate sidekick.

Perhaps the thing with butlers possibly crops up as an Edwardian thing, based on staffs being large and regimented to the point where the butler is suddenly an impressive figure of authority. (I.e. the breakdown of outright aristocracy suddenly makes "service" diminish to a more specialized, more professional occupation, as opposed to a not-unexpected role for the "common.") Combining the concepts of servitude and authority messes with our brains until we stumble upon what becomes basically the professional cognitive model of the butler: this person is expertly, impressively, authoritatively skilled at serving you. (And thus as moderns we become more interested in the butler than his employers, who strike us as being ridiculous for not being constantly aware of the butler's amazingness.)

(Actually the R&J reference reminds me that the "invisible hand" was there, only it wasn't invisible -- it was outright agency and interference on the part of the servants. Only with the switch to seeing servants as professionals instead of almost family members does the invisibility come in.)

wooster and wimsey both say "bunter/jeeves = amazing" (wimsey also sometimes jokes: "bunter forces me to do this that and the other") => but that sort of proves yr point

anyway i am now going to include wodehouse in my canon of robot novels!!

Well, the whole literary sterotype of the clever servant involved with/ helping out the employers and their domestic situations goes all the way back to Greek and Roman comedy, the latter in particular, so you're talking pretty deep roots in ways.

Yes yes come to think of it I have vague memories of a particular Greek drama with a nearly Inspector Gadget-like level of servant invisibly tinkering plot to benefit of oblivious self-satisfied master. Mark here is another book for you to write: comprehensive canonical study of the roles of servants (if only so I can peruse some sort of chronology and remember everything I keep dimly recalling here).

Off topic as so often, I can't resist mentioning that Gore Vidal described Nabokov (if I remember rightly) as being "a writer's writer in the same way that a butler is a gentleman's gentleman". Vidal was far better at these put-downs than as a critic or novelist.

(vidal = bettah novelist than nabokov imo)

Mark, don't be sad! Get EVEN. Snort some mustard and drink some socks.

nathalie i meant "sad"as in "sorry losah" for getting my head caught up in rubb like wimsey => i am not sad as in :( at the moment esp.