Custom essays on “Keeping up Appearances”

Keeping Up Appearances
The British situation comedy “Keeping up Appearances” depicts the influence of social classes in a British society. The main character of the comedy show Hyacinth Bucket is constantly trying to boost her position on the social ladder and makes everyone around her, including her relatives and neighbors, assist her in doing that. On the one hand this show has nothing to do with the real world, but on the other hand it lets us penetrate into the deep roots of the psychological prejudices among people of different social classes.
Evidently Hyacinth Bucket (who insists that her surname should be pronounced as “bouquet”) is a snobbish domineering woman who seems not to live for herself, but for giving the proper impression of herself to the upper social classes. She tries to be always viewed as perfectly bred, decent, delicate and full of virtue lady. But she inevitably fails trying to make her relatives meet her expectations. Her husband Richard somehow copes with his wife’s uneasy nature, but never complaints about it. In fact there are three more sisters of Hyacinth (named after the flowers just like she was): Violet (living a wealthy live with her husband), Daisy (living with her idle husband and old father) and Rose (a hunter for other women’s husbands). All of these people find Hyacinth a complete nightmare as she never listens to their opinions and always terrorizes them with her tyrannical, excess and selfish behavior.
Also Hyacinth has a beloved son Sheridan who lives far away and frequently asks for financial support. Hyacinth begins every talk of him with the words: “I am sure you’ve heard of Sheridan” and the listener responds: “Frequently”. Mrs. Bucket never misses an opportunity to boast of her son telling her relatives and neighbors how well he does at the university, not noticing his homosexual orientation.
There can be clearly seen particular differences between the working (the class where Mrs. Bucket comes from) and the middle class (where she tries to get to), concerning hobbies, features of interior and exterior, dressing and way of life on the whole. Hyacinth is always pretentiously dressed; her speech is always full of formal expressions usually combined with theatrical pronunciation. The only one of her sisters she is proud of is Violet. Hyacinth likes to tell her neighbors that the house of her sister is so large that there are a sauna and a room for a pony in it. The other two sisters are nothing else but a cause for Hyacinth’s shame. While she hopes to get involved in the middle-class life getting interested in yachting and learning local history and antiquities, her family prefers watching the TV and drinking beer. Therefore all the attempts of Mrs. Bucket to get closer to the activities and privileges of the middle class end up catastrophically.
Although the modeled life situations in “Keeping up Appearances” are mostly too exaggerated in order to reach ironical effect in the show, I suppose that they are sometimes very vivid examples of class aspirations. I wouldn’t tell that the vision of social classes in the show absolutely replicates my stereotypes of them, but the plot of the show is able to give the basic (though rough) items of differentiation of the social ladder.
Hyacinth Bucket – the main character of the show – is a snobbish representative of the working class who aims to get to the middle class at any cost. Nevertheless there are a lot of people she communicates with, most of them consider her a selfish, tyrannical and unbearable person. Although “Keeping up Appearances” is just a situation comedy show, class aspiration are depicted very vividly in it, though too exaggerated.