Audrey's Reviews > Wigs on the Green

In the preface, Charlotte Mosley quotes Nancy Mitford's opinion on whether or not Wigs on the Green should be reprinted in the 1950s: "Too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as funny...."

Mosley goes on to argue that this is no longer true, and that the historical interest of the book makes it worthwhile. I can't agree. I also can't agree that the book is in any way a "send-up" of fascism or even vaguely anti-fascist. P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode is a send-up of fascism--a character that makes both himself and his movement look ridiculous. When it comes to Wigs on the Green, I have to agree with Nancy Mitford's own assessment, written in a letter to her virulently pro-fascist sister: "I still maintain that it is far more in favour of fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist, and the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up."

Mitford may not have been a fascist, but she clearly had some sympathy with fascism at the time she wrote the novel. Her novel doesn't ridicule fascism itself; it ridicules people who happen to be fascists. It has an enormous amount of sympathy for their views and treats the truly ugly sides of fascism as though they were harmless idiosyncrasies (as when Eugenia gives a speech urging newly married characters to begin filling their spare rooms with "healthy Aryan babies"). Even in 1936, it would have made me squirm. In 2018, it's well nigh unreadable. If this were a serious treatment of fascism and the reasons people are seduced by it, I would feel differently about the novel overall. But it isn't. It's a comedy of manners starring fascists. I'd say it does more to normalize fascism than to satirize it.