Book Review: Wasp Where Is Thy Sting

Title: Wasp Where Is Thy Sting

Author: Florence King

Date: 1977

Publisher: Stein and Day

ISBN: 0-8128-2166-1

Length: 214 pages

Quote: "The only thing more Wasp than owning horses is riding horses."

Ethnicity was "in" in the 1970s. "Ethnic" was sometimes used in opposition to "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" but, as King observed, Anglo-Saxons were an ethnic group too weren't they? So she set out to study them from within. The result was hilarious. It would have been even funnier if it hadn't started out with some short articles written for Cosmopolitan and Playgirl, where the dirty jokes were encouraged. As it is, readers should pick a place where they feel free to laugh out loud, especially as they may be asked to share the jokes.

The difficulty about studying Wasps was not that many of the Eastern States' "Waspiest" families are in fact of Irish and German descent. (Irish and German people who reached North America early enough were Protestants, often attracted to radical denominations, and registered English family names. You have to trace an individual family name like "Williams" back to find out whether it was originally Williams or Wilhelms or MacUlliam.) No, it was that those who immigrated from other countries were almost all from the working class, at least at the time of immigration, whereas Americans of English (and Scotch, and Native American) descent are a nice cross-section of every social class. Most immigrants from continental Europe, and those Irish Catholics who came during the potato famine, inherited one basic family story about being poor and oppressed in the old country and coming to America for the opportunity to get rich. With "Wasps," especially in the Southern States, there are family stories just like that, and then there are the stories about the ancestors who were rich but were banished from the peerage for political reasons, or became rich in the nation's early days but lost fortunes in the Great Depression and/or the Civil War and/or the collapse of the market for Great-Grandfather's product. You find rich Wasps, upwardly mobile Wasps, downwardly mobile Wasps, upper-middle-class Wasps, lower-middle-class wasps, and also welfare-class Wasps, although King doesn't seem to have studied them. She has, however, studied the financially viable Wasp types and written a little story about a few fictional Wasp families of different socioeconomic types. Being written to illustrate points in a nonfiction book, it's not a very dramatic story, but it's an entertaining read.

Wasps of different types don't always hate each other, as King suggests, but they don't understand or relate to each other very well either, because within a single culture they manage to maintain different family subcultures. If your British ancestors were aristocrats, there is a high probability that you wash with a rag, hang a roll of toilet paper on the wall, at least pay close attention to the studs or bitches with whom your pets breed, and will think people who object to those words are not very bright until they haul you away in a coffin. If they were servants or shopkeepers, you just might wash with a cloth, tuck your bathroom tissue under some sort of silly piece of "decor," have your male or female dog or cat fixed (and if you ever did own a mare and allow her to mate it'd be with a horse), and will think people who use the other words are not very nice until you're laid to rest in a casket. That's a starting point--referred to but not spelled out in this book, because the Mitfords had listed the most typical "U and Non-U" words in Britain and the subject was familiar to readers of this book.

We follow the typical different Wasp families through the different behaviors their word usage connotes: the Jonesboroughs don't have to belong to an Episcopal church, since they travel a good deal, but "Piscop" is where they're most at home; the Baileys are "Baptodisterians" (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or a similar denomination), and Sister Effie Lee Pringle steals Bibles from bookstores and donates them to Brother Bascom, the founder and sole minister of the Holier Than Thou Reformed Church, so he can give them to people he thinks need them. Mrs. Jonesborough, who did charitable work only, in the 1970s, drank a lot of alcohol and was a sloppy cook and housekeeper. Mrs. Bailey, who didn't think married women should work outside the home, made cooking and housekeeping into a full-time job but never learned to do them according to Mrs. Jonesborough's standard of taste.

These things have been elaborated further...for instance, in Deborah Tannen's elaborate study of how Mrs. Bailey's upwardly mobile daughter (Norma Dean, in the 1970s; Jennifer, in the 1980s; Brandi or Brytanni or Brooke, in the 1990s) could spend hours talking with other young women without stating a solid fact or dissenting opinion. Tannen went so far as to imagine that Norma's yuppie conformism reflected femininity, for pity's sake. Nobody who knew Mrs. Jonesborough would have made that mistake. Mrs. Jonesborough learned to swear, yell, argue, and very likely shoot ducks and play poker, from her father, and if, like Elaine Risley in Cat's Eye, she never quite fit in with a little group of girls, she tells herself her husband and (when she went back to work in the 1980s) the stockholders are more important than a lot of girl friends in any case. Mrs. Jonesborough is popular because she sponsors charities and throws expensive parties.

 Obviously the women Florence King knew and generalized about, in this book, belonged to the generation that's disappearing now. Baby-boomer Wasps, younger adult Wasps, and teen Wasps have their own subcultures. Cultural change had taken place between the years, 1600 to 1800, when most Wasps' ancestors were immigrating, and 1971, too. King knew her Wasp friends and, afaics, sketched them with great accuracy and elan. Similar generalizations about their baby-boomer children and Generation X grandchildren were published, mostly in the 1980s, as the "official handbooks" and "official style guides" that were marketed strictly as humor; the genre started with The Official Preppy Handbook and went on from there.I have seen a "Hipster Handbook" but, otherwise, the field for studies of distinctive millennial styles remains open.