P.G. Wodehouse and "The Supercilious Stare"

In P.G. Wodehouse's memorable parody of the invasion story genre, The Swoop!, he writes that the German and Russian invaders and occupiers of London "had anticipated that when they had conquered the country they might meet with the Glare of Hatred." However, instead what they faced was what Wodehouse called "The Supercilious Stare" (capitalizing the term)--a "cold, contemptuous, patronising gaze" that "gave . . . a perpetual feeling of doing the wrong thing," with Wodehouse coming up with suitably petty cases in which one might meet that stare--like being "found travelling in a first-class carriage with a third-class ticket," or coming "to a strange dinner-party in a tweed suit when everybody else has dressed."

Wodehouse characterizes the Supercilious Stare as uniquely English, and "the highly-strung foreigner" among Englishmen like those invading soldiers especially sensitive to it. I suppose that most Americans would not disagree with his characterization, given American stereotypes about England, and especially of the sort of English person that was Wodehouse's point of reference. (It is not England's working-class folks who find themselves among people in evening wear at strange dinner parties in tweed suits.) Still, it seems to me that as with many of those things we think as being uniquely of one culture or another, we can easily find much the same thing elsewhere, and maybe all over the world--England's more privileged social strata having no monopoly on The Supercilious Stare, a thing frequently encountered by native and new arrival alike on the other side of the Atlantic as well, and for much the same reason, the enforcement of social norms protecting privilege. This is all the more the case in that it is so often deployed when anyone utters a protest of things as they are among mindless devotees of the status quo who, as the privileged have so often been known to do, regard the aggrieved as insane and therefore not worth bothering about.