Xingu

This is a very amusing satire of cultural pretensions and snobbery amongst middle and upper class ladies as they attempt to keep abreast of intellectual life. A group of middle class ladies are members of a lunch club. The outsider Mrs. Roby is considered unfashionable because she reads the works of Anthony Trollope; and it is a breach of club etiquette when she asks Mrs. Plinth for her opinion of Osric Dane’s novel The Wings of Death. The book of Appropriate Allusions which Mrs. Leveret carries everywhere is another example of undigested culture. The most sustained and amusing thing about the story is Mrs. Roby’s faux naive challenge to Osric Dane in claiming that the club have recently been absorbed in a study of Xingu. Neither the club members nor Osric Dane herself have the slightest idea what this means, yet they are obliged by their snobbish protocols to discuss it as if they were fully informed. Even after Mrs. Roby and Osric Dane have left the gathering, the club members continue to maintain the pretense between each other that they have all been absorbed in this fascinating subject – though they are unsure if it is a language, a philosophy, a book, or some primitive rite.