Note: 3:AM Magazine recently published my review of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, available to read here.
A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don’t know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.
Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, whom he will call without sincerity the “heroine” of his novel Vanity Fair, has fair opportunities, and fine, humpless proportions, and does marry whom she likes (whom she likes to marry, not simply whom she likes). But she also knows herself and her charms, and to be married is not enough for her. Vanity Fair is in part about that domestic tyranny which Thackeray fears while mocking. Becky is the daughter of an obscure painter and an opera dancer. Through charity, she is schooled at Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies on Chiswick Mall. Upon leaving school and on her way to serve as governess to the daughters of the baronet Sir Pitt Crawley, she stays with the family of her friend, the guileless Amelia Sedley. Amelia’s brother Joseph (to most everyone Jos) is smitten by lively, green eyed Becky, and this is what prompts Thackeray’s comments above, the first of many digressive discourses on the sexes and their dealings with each other. Jos does not propose, to Becky’s frustration. At Queen’s Crawley, though, the little governess wins the favor of both Sir Pitt and his son Colonel Rawdon Crawley. The old man’s second wife dies and he proposes to Becky very shortly thereafter, but she has already married Rawdon in secret. A very wealthy elder half-sister, Miss Crawley, had favored Rawdon for the inheritance, but she disapproves of the upstart Becky. In the meantime, Amelia has been all but betrothed to Captain George Osborne, gallant son of the merchant Mr. Osborne. Napoleon’s escape from Elba upsets the markets, leaving Amelia’s father John Sedley ruined, and Mr. Osborne no longer approves the match, but George, spurred by his friend Captain William Dobbin, marries her, and his father disowns him. Rawdon and George, both of the “—th regiment”, are deployed to Brussels, taking their brides and Jos Sedley with them; the Battle of Waterloo approaches.
Waterloo has significant bearing on the plot of Vanity Fair, but Thackeray does not narrate it. There are scenes of military life in London and Brussels, and a sense of the pomp and patriotism which most beguiles vain, mustachio-ed Jos, but there is very little of history and strategy. This design becomes a statement in itself. Thackeray acknowledges Napoleon’s influence thus: “so it is that the French Emperor comes in to perform a part in this domestic comedy of Vanity Fair which we are now playing, and which would never have been enacted without the intervention of this august mute personage.” Amelia and Becky are the two main characters here, and to them, war is not really a concern in itself. Amelia’s dedication to George is a different world orientation: “The fate of Europe was Lieutenant George Osborne to her. His dangers being over, she sang to Heaven. He was her Europe: her emperor: her allied monarchs and august Prince-regent.” The end of the Napoleonic Wars is the beginning of the story which rivals Becky’s in the second half, that of Amelia and her newborn son, named after his father who at sundown on Waterloo “was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.”
George’s death is without grandeur, and Thackeray’s delivery of the news is surprisingly stark. This may be partly because George’s last thoughts and words need to be withheld, as they would betray a plot development involving a letter. There as with Becky’s marriage to Rawdon, Thackeray has concealed, or at least omitted information, and then revealed the trick. And the narration of Vanity Fair is a tricky thing. There is a preface dated June 28th, 1848, from after the serialization of the novel. Titled “Before the Curtain”, it presents the story as a puppet show managed by Thackeray, and this as but one of many entertainments at a fair named “Vanity Fair”. Thus it seems the story takes place within a world conceived of as a vanity fair, but the title Thackeray has given it confuses that distinction between that specific place and the world. (Thackeray’s many references to “Vanity Fair” in the novel proper will seem to refer to life itself, or certainly modern life.) Thackeray thanks the audiences in other towns through which this show has passed for receiving it with favor, for praising the “famous little Becky Puppet” and the “Amelia Doll”. Then “the Manager retires, and the curtain rises”, and the story begins. Thackeray will end everything with a sort of very short coda involving the puppet show analogy, but it seems he only thought to frame the entire story that way when it came time to publish Vanity Fair as a novel. Within the story, he calls himself the “present writer” and addresses writerly concerns, acknowledging the way he contrives the plot for certain effects or exigencies. He seems an omniscient narrator, but in Chapter LXII, in which Amelia and others make a tour of the Rhineland, he rather abruptly enters the story: “It was on this very tour that I, the present writer of a history of which every word is true, had the pleasure to see them first, and to make their acquaintance.” Amelia settles for a stay in the playfully fictional and “little comfortable Grand Ducal town of Pumpernickel”, yet Thackeray is committing to the supposed reality of these events. He sees her at the opera there and speculates that “it was because it was predestined that I was to write this particular lady’s memoirs that I remarked her.” The frame changes, and Thackeray’s designs are unclear, perhaps even to him.
Thackeray is at his most ingenious writing Becky; clever characters require clever authors. She and Rawdon exploit the hospitality and patience of the blue bloods, running out of credit in Paris and returning to London, where her wrongdoings are worse even than he can narrate. The very worst thing she may have done is only implied, and supported by her dazzling turn as Clytemnestra in a game of charades at a fashionable house. She is certainly no beast of the field, but she may yet not be human. Thackeray moves into the grotesque while taking pride in his discretion:
In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses
Thackeray’s slippery narration lets him have it both ways. Some of Becky’s activities he knows through Tapeworm, a British diplomat in Pumpernickel, some presumably through Amelia and others who knew her better, and some from the other side of the keyhole, the author’s privileged post. We can very nearly forget that he’s given her all her features and all that thrashing motion, that every line she sings or speaks is his.