Lord Emsworth’s Pumpkin Symbol Analysis

Wodehouse uses Lord Emsworth’s pumpkin to explore ideas of aristocracy, power, and the shifting cultural dynamics of the British class system. To Emsworth, the pumpkin represents the continuation of his noble lineage. In ensuring the vegetable’s success, he feels that he is making an important addition to his family’s legacy, thus justifying his own place in the social hierarchy. Emsworth’s intense anxiety over the pumpkin’s welfare highlights the character’s traditional sensibilities, as well as the reduced responsibilities of 20th-century aristocrats—while his ancestors were fighting in great battles, Emsworth is in charge of overseeing a pumpkin. By contrast, Emsworth’s son, Freddie, cares little for the pumpkin and finds his father’s attachment to it laughable. Freddie’s dismissive attitude towards the pumpkin implies a disregard for his upper-class heritage, and it shows a shifting generational attitude towards the aristocracy of old. Freddie views the pumpkin not as a respectable and noble pursuit, but a trivial quirk of his father’s. The story concludes with the pumpkin winning first place at the Shrewsbury Show, and Lord Emsworth’s rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, offering his congratulations. This is in spite of the fact that McAllister—not Emsworth—raised the vegetable. The two nobles praising one another for the achievement of a working-class man shows the self-congratulatory nature of aristocracy, and it calls the fairness of the existing class system into question.