#no concluding paragraph we spent all our budget on the dress dialogue

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

These are awesome thoughts and I've likewise been rotating them in my head for the past couple weeks (uh, closer to a month now). Gonna try to answer this point by point.

Very long post under the cut

How does fem!Bertie end up developing gender-nonconforming tendencies?

Does a fem!Bertie who is easily overpowered by more dominant people and predisposed to anxiety even end up developing a penchant for drinking, misdemeanour, and betting on horses if she would be more punished for it and have less opportunities for it than canon Bertie?

This I think is actually quite easy to resolve. There's a perfect solution ready made in canon and that solution's name is Aunt Dahlia. Aunt D doesn't give a shit whether Bertie ever gets married or how he spends his time as long as she can still strongarm him into performing the occasional spot of grand larceny for her. She isn’t especially proper or feminine herself; she’s brash, loud, and assertive. She drinks and steals and swears and bets on horses. Her motto in life is take no shit and listen to no reason. And from what we know of her younger days doing the British fox a bit of no good, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that she might feel a certain kinship with a free spirited, tomboyish young woman and take fem!Bertie under her wing. There’s one story where Tuppy and Angela are in an off-again stage and Tuppy falls for a country girl who Aunt Dahlia describes thusly:

“A dog-girl. One of these dashed open-air flappers in thick boots and tailor-made tweeds who infest the rural districts and go about the place followed by packs of assorted dogs. I used to be one of them myself in my younger days, so I know how dangerous they are.”

If we assume fem!Bertie grew up being passed around between various aunts after her parents died, Aunt Agatha is the one who kept her on a short leash and punished nonconforming behavior. This might have driven her closer to Aunt Dahlia, who served as both a model for less traditional femininity AND a safe haven who let Bertie do whatever. I don’t see Bertie going fox hunting or getting really into all the outdoorsy activities—she’s a city girl at heart—but I do think Aunt Dahlia was someone she looked up to and may have emulated to some extent.

What is her relationship to the stereotypically feminine activities she'd be expected to participate in?

This a bit tougher to answer-- in part because now that I think about it, what do the female characters in these books get up to? We know that Madeline likes to play the piano and sing old folk songs. Florence writes novels. Corky is an actress. Honoria plays tennis. Nobody ever really mentions needlepoint or... a second feminine activity that I'm blanking on right now, as far as I can remember. I'm not really sure how to google this.

[these next two paragraphs were originally written for the next section but I decided they fit better here so that's why I'm suddenly talking about schools] Google gave me a couple names of schools that would be the closest female equivalent to Eton: Cheltenham and Roedean. I found this rather interesting book with some wild tidbits. Apparently in the 1930s Roedean taught bridge and wine tasting? And by 1910 it also had compulsory sports, which is interesting. Upper class girls' schools emphasized charity work. There's a whole section about lesbian relationships between students, which were apparently very common. By the 1900s, many girls' schools were influenced by Cheltenham to adopt the philosophy that girls "should have the same standard and type of education as boys." "Free of the classics, [Cheltenham principal] Miss Beale at first put the emphasis on history and literature. But the curriculum rapidly widened to include all the main academic subjects."

However, "academic standards were much more vitiated by the knowledge that, in a more fundamental way, it was all a total waste of time. They were never going to use any of this knowledge, even if well taught, these rich middle and upper class girls. They were not going to have jobs but babies, husbands, houses. They would benefit a great deal more from needlework, domestic science, and dancing classes--and these were all taught." [ah, dancing, that's the second feminine activity]

Alright, so that's interesting! We've got a couple feminine activities here, and according to this source, at least, it does sound like even upper class girls would have learned some home ec type stuff. So it's possible that fem!Bertie might be slightly less incompetent around household tasks than m!Bertie. I personally don't see her being particularly good at domestic science stuff or needlepoint--too much ADHD, for one thing. Makes too many careless mistakes. Dancing (I assume they mean ballroom dancing) she's probably pretty good at, and m!Bertie took dancing classes as a child too, so that's universal.

Are there any historical figures or traditions she would see herself in or hold dear in the same way that the knightly tradition is vivid in the mind of a male Bertie?

What I was actually looking for when I looked up all that stuff about girls' schools was whether they would have taught the same literature as the boys' schools. Bertie's knightly traditions seem to mostly come from Tennyson's Idylls of the King and various other classics he would have learned in school--but especially Idylls, which Wodehouse was a fan of also and references pretty frequently throughout the series. Perhaps if it wasn't taught in girls' schools, it's still possible that fem!Bertie might have had a brother and might have read HIS books.

In any case, I'm not super familiar with Arthurian legend, so I went to Google to try to dig up any information on whether there was a female character who might instill a comparable code to the code of the Woosters in fem!Bertie. From what I can find there doesn't really appear to be (if anybody with more expertise on the subject reads this, please correct me if I'm wrong). This article says that in some versions of the myths, there's a kind of "mutual chivalry" that emphasizes female agency and consent, where men and women help and support each other in the spirit of friendship, so there could be something in that. But I can't find any sort of general moral code for women directly equivalent to knightly chivalry for men.

Tangentially though, I did find a couple little interesting snippets on my travels. There was apparently one character, Nimue, who was sick of Merlin pursuing her despite her repeated rejections, so she got him to teach her magic and then trapped him in a tree. I could see fem!Bertie thinking about that story rather longingly. I also stumbled upon the fact that in Malory's version, Lancelot "states that he prefers to have no wife or paramours" because "sex with his wife would reduce his vigor in pursuing tournaments and combats." That's a sentiment I can imagine resonating with both m!Bertie AND fem!Bertie, though obviously relating to Lancelot would be more subversive in the latter.

So... in terms of the source of fem!Bertie's moral code, I'm still not really sure. One possibility I thought of just now was that there may be some female Bible characters she particularly looks up to? You might not know this, because he's very humble about it, but Bertie actually won the Scripture Knowledge Prize at his private school, and likes to sprinkle a lot of biblical allusions into his speech. There are a few prominent women in the Bible who are remembered for being kind and brave. Esther and Miriam, just to name the ones I used to LARP around my house as when I was five. Ruth is another-- actually, she might be a really good one. Blessed by God for her kindness AND had some highkey sapphic vibes (I was something of a Scripture Knowledge buff myself, in my day. If you can't tell. Not that my good friend Bertie or I would ever brag about it).

(this probably isn't an "instilling moral values" example, but canon!Bertie mentions Jael, the woman who drove a stake through that guy's head, a few times, and that might be a story that rises up in fem!Bertie's mind when a suitor is annoying her)

Would she have any strong feelings about being a Wooster if she wasn't the last of the Woosters in the patrilinear way?

This I'm not sure about. Seeing as neither version of Bertie wants to marry or have kids, maybe it doesn't really matter that much? The family name isn't getting passed down regardless of whether Bertie's a man or a woman.

Why does Bertie have some mild anxieties about appearing masculine/feminine?

m!Bertie's anxiety about appearing independent seems to me to be at least as much about the appearance of dignity as it is about gender roles. Perhaps fem!Bertie would be worried not just about about appearing traditionally feminine, but appearing feminine in a particular way. Rather than wanting to be seen as tough and commanding like m!Bertie does, maybe fem!Bertie wants to be perceived as elegant, poised, maybe even a little authoritative, a sort of grande dame "lady of the house" type figure with an air of mystique about her. Not aunt-like, but like, cool. You know. The 1920s equivalent of "cool girl." I figure a lady in "one of those historical novels" Bertie likes could just as easily laugh down from lazy eyelids and flick a speck of dust from from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at her wrists as a chap could, and that's a vibe any gender of Bertie would be enchanted with.

And it's also a vibe any gender of Bertie would struggle to cultivate because, I mean, we've met Bertie. S/he's a flailing awkward ADHD failwoman/man. fem!Bertie misses social cues and constantly forgets little details her finishing school would have taught as "proper" behavior. She speaks out of turn, not even really out of self-assuredness but because she's excited about whatever she has to say and forgets herself in the moment. That could lead to a lot of embarrassment.

I bet if we wanted, we could really ramp up the class-based conflict/subversion because of this, because an upper class woman's power primarily comes from being upper class. Short story and early novel Bertie occasionally has moments of "who does Jeeves think he is, bossing me around, I'm not going to be a serf to my valet." He more or less entirely drops this in later novels, but maybe fem!Bertie takes a bit more time getting over it.

Gender subversion in canon

Regarding canon gender subversion, I think you're quite right. On my reread of the books, I've noticed a lot more of that than I remembered. For example, I've noted a lot of jokes where the comedy is derived from Bertie being scandalized by a woman saying saying something he considers to be inappropriate for "mixed company," where the conventional expectation is that you'd find a woman being scandalized by a man making such comments. Here are some of them:

In the Inimitable Jeeves, Aunt A starts talking about how Bertie should be "breeding children" and Bertie complains that she "keeps forgetting she isn't in the smoking-room" of one of her women's clubs.

In CotW, where Madeline starts expounding on Geoffrey Rudel, who was in love with the Lord of Tripoli's wife, and Bertie hopes she's going to keep it clean.

Also in CotW, Aunt Dahlia "fortunately" cuts herself off before using a verb which, "had she given it utterance, might have proved a bit too fruity for mixed company."

In Joy in the Morning, Nobby ticks Boko off using expressions Boko couldn't repeat "with gentlemen present. I suppose they learn them at their finishing schools."

This is one type of joke that definitely wouldn't work as well in a gender-flipped universe, because "not in front of the ladies" isn't subversive in the way that "not in front of the gentlemen" is, it's just the normal expectation.

Expanding on this, and calling back to previous musings about possibly genderbending other characters, I found something really interesting in an article by William Vesterman: x (this article draws some conclusions I find questionable, but also provides some bits of interesting historical context). Basically, Bertie's three most persistent fiancees are actually based on stereotypical male archetypes that were common in Wodehouse's areas of literature.

"The three fiancees here (the roster is very far from complete) present versions in female form of male types long known to public school and university fiction: what the British used to call the "hearty" (Honoria Glossop) and the two forms of the "aesthete"—the emotional (Madeline Bassett) and the intellectual (Florence Craye). Part of the comedy is their lack of any resemblance to the actual stock fictive females within such boys' books. Another aspect of the joke is the forced recollection of the equivalent male stereotypes who do appear in Wodehouse's stories. The main point is that by defining himself through distaste against a range of extreme personalities, male and female, Bertie maintains his own identity all the more fully as normal in his own eyes."

So it might actually be easier to flip Florence, Madeline, etc. than we think.

The point that Bertie considers his own identity to be "normal" is interesting and I think it checks out. We do find many cases of his insisting that he likes the way he is and resents others' attempts to change him. "Defining [her]self through distaste against a range of extreme personalities, male and female" is probably another trait we could just directly transfer to fem!Bertie.

Genderbending Jeeves

Fem!Jeeves would have to be gender non-conforming in a different manner than fem!Bertie, and the challenge in her genderbent characterisation, much like the Code poses a challenge for coming up with a genderbent Bertie, would be to maintain Jeeves's hidebound ways.

Alright, I think we can do this. Let's start by applying the same system as before.

These are what I would name as Jeeves's core character traits: high intelligence, class consciousness, "feudal spirit", desire for stability/uneasiness with change, emotional unexpressiveness, eclectic collection of intense interests, Weird About Clothes, and willingness to manipulate to obtain desired results

For Bertie, I said that the key core trait that makes most of fem!Bertie's personality fall into place is "fun-loving." For Jeeves, I think it's class consciousness. Let's look first at how this trait shapes the original Jeeves's personality, and then at the way it might interact with his/her gender and gender expression.

Jeeves's personality

Jeeves has been a walking anachronism since the moment he was created, something Wodehouse himself has readily admitted (preface to Joy in the Morning). He belongs to the era of big country houses staffed with dozens of servants, before post-WWI tax hikes and later post-WWII social revolution made the upper class' position much less secure. The Jeeves books (other than Ring for Jeeves, which is a topic for another day) take place take place in an idyllic, anodyne version of Edwardian England that never really existed and never changes. Wodehouse seems to find that static, picture-perfect setting comforting and, in my opinion, so too does Jeeves.

I go into this in depth in my WIP analysis of Ring for Jeeves, and for the sake of brevity I won't explain it all again here, but the long and short of it is that Jeeves believes in the class system and wants it to be maintained indefinitely. He finds stability and comfort in a hereditary hierarchy where he knows exactly who he is and where his place is, where he fits in society. If you scratched the stuffed-frog face, I suspect you'd find a surprising amount of anxiety. When he exerts control, it's mainly in order to maintain his stability and keep everything the way he likes it in statu quo, and he does it in a way that works within the framework of maintaining class status. Jeeves's primary identity is "servant." He takes great pride in it and has molded his entire life around excelling in his work.

"He does have a very keen sense for what he can get away with (unless the poetry-or-other-interest-infodumping overrules it), but there are very set rules on what is appropriate, and what isn’t, and he keeps to it, because that’s How Things Are Done"

—tumblr user @noandnooneelse

I don't think this investment in remaining below his employers on the social hierarchy means he thinks the upper classes are like... superior to him necessarily (intellectually, morally, w/e). He obviously doesn't think the rich people he works for are always right or should be deferred to in all matters. (This part is a bit hard for me to explain because it's difficult to get into the mindset of someone who thinks class hierarchy is a good thing). It seems odd for something that's clearly a deeply held and important belief of his to be so surface-level, but it's almost like it's the performance of class that really matters to him. The appearance of it.

Jeeves’s strict view of How Things Are Done applies as much to his employers as it does to himself. Rich people can Perform Class Wrong as much as anyone else, and when that happens, they need to be policed back into "correct" behavior. When Jeeves corrects an employer's performance of class, he will do so in an outwardly polite and deferential manner, because that's How Servants Behave. He'll do anything he thinks he can get away with that doesn’t break the veneer of "proper servant behavior" to keep everyone performing their roles the way he wants them to, but it's all just theater.

Jeeves just wants to live in a world where he gets to perform the same duties for the same types of people in household staffs that are structured the same way and everyone dresses the same way he's always known them to and the conventions of propriety vis-a-vis interacting with people above or below you on the hierarchy remain rigid and precise so he can continue relying on the same scripts forever and ever because he is extremely, extremely autistic.

2. Jeeves and gender

Now, this raises obvious questions about how Jeeves would then view other power structures, like gender roles. Does he care about maintaining the gender hierarchy the way he does about maintaining the class hierarchy? To me, it doesn't really feel like he does. Does he exhibit any gendered behaviors that he seems to be performing for the sake of being masculine? The way he takes control of situations would probably be considered traditionally masculine behavior, but I'd argue he mainly does that a) out of a feudal desire to help his employer or employer's friends or b) to uphold The Way Things Should Be. (Though, it's worth noting that even if an idea of manliness doesn't enter into the why of what he does, Jeeves's maleness certainly DOES make it easier for him to assert dominance like this and be taken seriously. Let's put a pin in that)

Among the core traits I listed, emotional unexpressiveness is the one that's the most stereotypically masculine, so it's worth examining in more detail. Inasmuch as this is something Jeeves does deliberately (and I think it IS at least in part a trained behavior—in "Bertie Changes His Mind" he has to make a conscious effort not to let his disapproval show, for example), it's my opinion that this has much more to do with behaving properly as a servant than it does with behaving properly as a man. There are many times throughout the book where Bertie takes note that Jeeves is silently holding back from expressing emotion out of a sense of feudal propriety. Examples from off the top of my head:

Joy in the Morning: "There was concern in his eyes, and if it hadn't been that his views are rigid in the matter of the correct etiquette between employee and employer, I have an idea that he would have patted me on the shoulder."

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: "During the late give-and-take he had been standing in the background with that detached, stuffed-frog look on his face which it always wears when he is present at a free-for-all in which his sense of what is fitting does not allow him to take part."

Much Obliged, Jeeves: "whereas I sang a good deal as we buzzed along, he maintained, as is his custom, the silent reserve of a stuffed frog, never joining in the chorus, though cordially invited to."

On the other hand, aforementioned tumblr user noandnooneelse and I have discussed this matter at some length, and he was more inclined to see it as an aspect of Jeeves's fundamental Jeeves-ness (we ultimately agreed that it’s a little of both). He pointed out that although sometimes strict emotional regulation is expected of servants as a kind of emotional labor, Jeeves's TOTAL lack of emotional responsiveness can also be a liability on the job. How many times have Bertie and Aunt Dahlia ticked him off for saying "most disturbing" when they wanted sympathy for their tales of woe? I think there’s absolutely a lot in that as well, and find it very plausible that in addition to active emotion suppression, Jeeves just naturally tends toward flat affect. And if he's being censured rather than rewarded for the stereotypically masculine behavior, it's probably not something that's been enforced on him as a gender norm. It's also going to be a big problem for fem!Jeeves later. Let's put another pin in that.

Moving on, we never see Jeeves police anyone else's masculinity, either. Or anyone's femininity, for that matter. His issue with Bobbie Wickham wasn't that she had tomboyish tendencies, even though she did, it was that her personality was a bad match for Bertie and also she was a woman Bertie was romantically interested in. His problem with Bertie's purple socks and pink ties is never that they're unmanly, it's that they're garish and in poor taste. And actually, his interest in fashion is something that would stereotypically be considered a feminine trait—and he neither displays any self-consciousness about it nor seems to be deliberately rebelling against gender norms. I just don't get the impression that he really thinks much about gender at all.

I really think Jeeves' concerns about propriety pretty much entirely come down to class propriety. I mean, we know that aside from gender, there are other sets of social norms that Jeeves is fine with ignoring, like, for instance, the LAW. Some might count coshing a policeman in the fucking head as an act of impropriety (not me obviously, ACAB), but Jeeves doesn't give a fuck. Then for the purposes of this AU we are, I assume, taking it as read that Jeeves has no issue with homosexuality. I find that believable. The class system can accommodate gay people and it can accommodate gender equality and gender-nonconformity; two men or two women can live together without any more radical restructuring of the social order needing to take place. Gay is ok provided you're being gay in correct evening costume. As long as the signifiers of class are all present and correct, who carre.

3. Jeeves and gender (female version)

So, like fem!Bertie, I don't picture fem!Jeeves caring all that much about gender rules for their own sake. Seeing as she's presumably uninterested in the kind of lifestyle conservative antifeminist women typically espouse—i.e. woman is protected and provided for by husband whom she serves and obeys—traditional gender roles aren't providing her with a sense of identity or purpose in the way the class hierarchy does. They're just making it more difficult for her to control and stabilize her environment. So I don't think she would oppose advances in women's rights, unless for some reason she thought some specific advancement could destabilize the class system somehow. An extremely cursed thought that just popped into my head is "she wants to vote so she can vote Tory." That’s the vibe here. I'm sorry, but Jeeves just IS a Tory voter. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. It gives me no pleasure to say it, but acceptance is the first step towards healing.

I think fem!Jeeves wouldn't care about whether Bertie's behavior is appropriate for a woman so much as whether it's appropriate for an upper class woman specifically (and even more specifically, an upper class woman from the golden age of class dynamics in the picture-perfect idyllic version of England that Jeeves holds up as the ideal). As long as the gender-nonconforming behavior in question isn't particularly associated with the lower classes, go with god.

4. Jeeves's personality (female version)

She's going to have a tougher time of it than m!Jeeves for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it’s just harder to be a woman. Her situation is inherently less stable because women are expected to find stability through marriage primarily. She's paid less and taken less seriously. She might be more anxious than m!Jeeves about her job security and financial stability. Taking down our pin about Jeeves's maleness making it possible to assert dominance in a way a woman probably couldn't—we've discussed the potential ambiguity around m!Jeeves's supposed no-married-gentlemen policy, but fem!Jeeves DEFINITELY has a no-married-ladies policy. She cannot micromanage a household over which she doesn't have total control, and total control will be significantly more difficult to achieve in a household that has any men in it.

Now let's take down our other pin about emotional expressiveness. m!Jeeves's flat affect is received with annoyance sometimes, but ultimately tolerated because of his otherwise irreproachable performance at his job and ability to solve everyone's problems. I imagine it's a much bigger hindrance to fem!Jeeves, as seems very likely to me that a maid would have a higher expectation on her to be comforting and warm and sympathetic toward her employers' woes than a manservant would. Failure to do this would draw greater censure than an irritable "Could you say something other than 'most disturbing?'" even if she's otherwise outstanding at her job. Possibly when she's working for a single woman she can get away with it, but Jeeves is a lifelong career servant, and you don't get to be the sole servant to a rich gentleman or lady without making a good impression working in larger household staffs first.

I therefore think that unlike m!Jeeves, fem!Jeeves has at least a limited ability to smile and kind of emote and project the impression of warmth and sympathy. She neither likes nor is comfortable with it, but she wouldn't have risen through the ranks of servants without it. m!Jeeves already has a quiet, polite demeanor and an ability to melt into the background, but fem!Jeeves exaggerates this even more, cultivating a service persona that's not just polite and quiet but maybe even outright demure in an effort to come across as humble rather than cold (and in the hopes of simply being overlooked when the mistress needs a shoulder to cry on).

(It's worth noting, though, that manufacturing warmth isn't the same thing as manufacturing caring. Feudal spirit is a core character trait too, and there isn't time to get into all the things "feudal spirit" can mean right now, but my point here is that she wants to help! She likes helping! She's just going to be an autistic weirdo while doing it!)

5. Employers: management of

As a result of all this, fem!Jeeves is necessarily more covert in the way she operates than her canon counterpart, and leans even more on loopholes and subtle manipulation to work around the restrictions imposed on her. She definitely knows how to weaponize sexist stereotypes to make people underestimate her. She's better and more consistent about playing fake-deferential and working behind the curtain than m!Jeeves is. Most of the targets of her manipulation never find out what hit them.

I'm reminded of this story I found once (screenreader-friendly version here) when I wanted to find out more about Arthur Conan Doyle's views on women's rights (the answer is that they were mixed, if you were wondering). Basically, a woman has made up her mind to buy a new gray dress, but she wants to make her husband feel like she cares about his opinion on the matter, even though she doesn't. So she guides him through this whole back-and-forth where she asks him what color dress she should buy, and shoots down all his suggestions while saying stuff like "oh, you're so smart and full of good taste and impeccable opinions, it's just that..." They eventually agree that she should buy a gray dress, and it was ALL his idea!! Canon Jeeves does quite a bit of this sort of thing already, but fem!Jeeves is the master of it.

Or at least, she WAS the master of it until she met Bertie's special blend of stubbornness and cluelessness.

"What color would you like for your new dress, miss?" "Any color but gray. I can't bear gray." "What would you suggest, miss? I should like to provide the tailor with your exact specifications." "A cheerful pink, I should think. Say, that rhymed! I always say there's no color like a nice bright pink to herald in the spring with vim and vigor. What was that gag of yours? The rainbow comes and goes and lovely is the rose, what?" "What taste you have, miss. Of course it shall be pink if you wish it. Only, do you not suppose it may draw a little too much attention? One does not like to be so conspicuous." "I shouldn't worry about that, old thing! What’s the purpose of wearing a new dress if not to be noticed?" "..." "I say, Reg, do you suppose you could ask the tailor to sew the hemline a little higher this time? I saw a moving picture last night where the girl was wearing the most corking short skirt. Nobby says they're all the rage in Hollywood now, and I dare say she would know.” "...Very good, miss." "Rummy how the tailor keeps forgetting that part. Do you fancy I'd better write it down?"

I think this slightly altered dynamic might help with the problem of whether it would be as funny to see fem!Bertie, who already has to hide her independent streak, submit to her servant's whims and scheming. If we're looking at a Jeeves whose habitual methods of scheming are more covert and hidden, we'll probably see fewer head-to-head clashes and more cases of Jeeves grinding her teeth as Bertie blithely blows past multiple attempts to corral her behavior and forces Jeeves to resort to increasingly less subtle tactics than she would prefer.

sopping wet bertie wednesday