The Code of the Woosters

The unsightly “MacGuffin” that sends Jeeves and Wooster to the country, Sir Watkyn’s cow creamer symbolizes the frivolous, if not inane, values of the super-rich and the pettiness of their personal rivalries. A small cream jug fashioned from silver in the shape of a cow, the creamer is described by several characters (including Wooster and Stiffy) as grotesquely ugly. Nevertheless—perhaps only because others want it—two wealthy families (the Traverses and the Bassetts) grapple over it as if it were Helen of Troy. Tom Travers so covets it that he’s willing to trade a member of his own household, the incomparable chef Anatole, for it, and his wife (Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia) tries to inveigle her own nephew into multiple dishonesties, including theft, to secure it for him and thereby retain her prized chef. At the novel’s start, an antique store is holding the creamer for Tom, but Sir Watkyn outmaneuvers his rival in a cruel, underhanded way, by feeding him lobster that makes him too sick to collect it. Watkyn’s own interest seems less in the object itself than in others’ high opinions of it; the surest way to anger him, Wooster and Gussie learn, is to describe it as “Modern Dutch.” It’s a status symbol with little intrinsic value for him—beyond the opinion of connoisseurs and the fact that Tom Travers wants it.

As a symbol of the callous superficiality of the aristocracy—who would, P. G. Wodehouse suggests, trade away a beloved employee, poison a friend, or send a relative to prison for an ugly piece of silver—the creamer also seems quintessentially British, since it’s meant to be used at tea, England’s national ritual. In addition, its cow shape evokes “pastoral comedies” (such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It), which The Code of the Woosters, with its country setting, “happy ending,” and multiple betrothals, gently lampoons. As such, the cow creamer is a subversive symbol, masking an emblem of avarice, hypocrisy, and upper-class rivalry behind a homely semblance of bucolic simplicity.