With the midwinter party season in full swing, I thought it might be useful to consult some of the recent crop of etiquette books for advice on how better to deport myself through the social minefield of a drunken Christmas party. Mindful of how shy and socially inept writers tend to be, I was looking especially for advice on making an small talk with people you don't know.
So I took up Debrett's Etiquette for Girls by Fleur Britten. (Debrett's, ah, that name! It sounds like an amalgamation of everything posh - add another apostrophe and it could almost be French: how sophisticated!) As well as books on how to behave, Debrett's have been publishing guides to the peerage and pictures of Liz Hurley since 1769. Well, jolly good for them: they should know a thing or two about deportment and small talk, and all the applied ethics they never taught us at my local comprehensive.
Emily Post, the grandmother of American etiquette, says "manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life". Or as Fleur Britten would have it in 2006: "You are your own brand." And people are watching you.
Frankly I should have stopped there, before I even got into pages about matching personal stationery. The intelligent and chatty style comes across like a sophisticated older sister, full of "you should" and "it's important to remember that" - this is filly-training extraordinaire. The cover photo gives it away: a woman's torso and half her head showing plunging cleavage inside a bustier dress, her hand raised off the plate with a viscous oyster poised at her lips. There is a phantom woman trapped in the pages of this book, a sort of perfect storm of feminine behaviour - well-groomed, discreet, charming, seductive, self-obsessed - but you never really get to see her. The slick fashion photography is all of bits - hands, feet, cheeks, nails - there are very few heads or eyes. It's all about being seen but not heard.
The current plethora of books about manners are mostly aimed at women, from Dora the Explorer's book of manners for two-year-olds right up to Trinny and Susannah - which suggests that, for women, the etiquette of self-presentation has never been more important, or more pressurised. In a world in which money divides, etiquette is way for a woman to put herself on the right side of that divide. And this problem has generated an entire genre of literature in which women wonder how it can be possible to juggle the realities of kids and husbands and careers and live up to the phantom of perfection that has been sold like an ethical reality. I'm sure Jane Austen would have seen the irony.
I started off wondering if, like Lauren, I was bovvered about manners at all - the lazy liberal in me assuming that it would be nice if we all said please and thank you a bit more, and didn't talk with our mouths full - but now I can see that in fact manners matter far too much, and we should all be very bothered indeed.
As an aside, perhaps readers can recommend some recent novels of modern manners - that aren't just Bridget Jones or Sex in the City.
