A third possibility, however, is to read Vanity Fair as altering the very ways in which we think of the “historical” in its relation to everyday life. Take, for instance, the following description of Amelia’s tense despair in the period of her father’s bankruptcy and her fiancé’s disinterest: “So imprisoned and tortured was this gentle little heart, when in the month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and Louis XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell, and old John Sedley was ruined” (p.171).The sentence begins and ends in the minor key of Bloomsbury affairs, but turns in its middle to encompass “all Europe”—a Europe that, we are reminded, includes the Sedley family. We are given a wonderfully terse description of vast historical causality in this procession of “ands”: The dramatic return of Napoleon to power causes a financial panic that ruins John Sedley’s risky investments, leading to his family’s disgrace and, of course, to the potential destruction of Amelia’s romantic hopes. The endpoint of this historical catastrophe is not, however, Waterloo—it is the Sedley family’s ruin. The description of History, that is, is bracketed by the private life of minor individuals, not the other way around. Such a history must be multiple, of course; the destruction of the Sedley family as a result of Napoleon’s return is complemented by the gradual embourgeoisement of the Dobbin family, who become wealthy City aristocracy. What Thackeray invents for the novel is not, as in Sir Walter Scott’s novels, the way in which the individual enters history, but the way in which history—accidentally, fortuitously, calamitously, and unpredictably—enters the individual. With typically Thackerayan self-mockery, the narrator will later inform us of the landing at Cannes 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” (p. 175). The task of the novel, for Thackeray, is not to show the individual enlarging to fit history, but to show history narrowing in multiple channels to impact the individuals who can only experience it through its particular effects on their private lives. In this sense the distinction between pre-Waterloo and post-Waterloo halves of the novel is of less importance; in each half, the personal is the realm in which every historical moment is judged and described.
Many of Vanity Fair’s readers have noted this element of its relation to history, and some have found in it grounds to reject the novel. The important Marxist critic Georg Lukács accused Thackeray of trivializing historical processes by relentlessly bringing them down to the level of the individual, thereby betraying the tradition of Scott, who saw the individual as a representative of a class, a movement, a historical force. To this we might respond that Thackeray’s version of history is far more pessimistic than Lukács seems to admit. History is a shock from above in Vanity Fair, and the novel’s characters are powerless to stop or divert these shocks; the best they can do is absorb them. Financial ruin and the death of a husband are the legacies of the Napoleonic Wars for Amelia; no victory for her, the great period of British peace and security is only an introduction to privation. Far from experiencing a triumphant entrance into a period of prosperity, Vanity Fair’s characters seem to spend much of the novel’s second half in a traumatized state, hiding from whatever new shocks may come. History, for Thackeray’s characters, is a wound, and the novel’s second half seems to show us the process whereby this wound heals or festers.
Napoleon will not come again to disrupt the world of the novel once Waterloo is over, but that does not mean all is safe. As the novel reaches its final chapters, dangerous things start to occur: Becky reappears in a more sordid and desperate guise, charming little George Osborne and once again leading Jos Sedley into trouble—except this time the trouble may be more than romantic. Becky’s wit and ambition have hardened into criminal malice, and it is evident she will not let this last chance for success slip. We would do well to remember that as the last numbers of Vanity Fair ran off the Punch presses, the European revolutions of 1848 were breaking out: The French Second Republic had been proclaimed in February, March saw revolution sweep through Bavaria, central Germany, Vienna, northern Italy, and Hungary, while working-class revolt in Paris was crushed with bloody efficiency in June. Only a week prior to the number in which Becky has her greatest success acting in the Gaunt House charades—when she has infiltrated British society to the greatest extent, when even royalty is captivated—an anonymous pamphlet entitled Mani festo of the Communist Party was published in London. Might it not be significant that the novel’s final number, in July 1848, opens with an illustration of Becky dressed as Bonaparte, looking ominously out over the British channel from the French shore, a small telescope in her hand?
Becky is finally vanity Fair’s most Napoleonic figure: its locus of energy, its principle of dynamism, its element of danger. There is much that Thackeray ostentatiously withholds from us in the course of the novel, such as the details of Waterloo fighting or Amelia’s immediate reaction to George’s death; Thackeray’s frequently advertised “omniscience” is really beside the point, since this well-informed narrator chooses to keep to himself, temptingly, all that he knows. Becky, however, is the figure who is most persistently unknowable, the person in whom all the novel’s mysteries concentrate. As the novel proceeds, questions about her ramify: Who exactly was her mother? What is the nature of her relationship with the Marquis of Steyne? And most centrally, does she in fact murder Jos Sedley?
In one of the novel’s most complex images, we hear of Becky the mermaid:
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; but above the water line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? (pp. 629—630)
The game of playing with readerly delicacy and readerly interest is here carried to fairly dizzying heights. Of course we want to know Becky’s secrets; of course we feel afraid of what we will find out, perhaps out of moral objections, perhaps out of a desire to remain entranced by her. But in bowing elaborately to Victorian codes of respectability, Thackeray turns them into structures of prurience. The more ignorant we keep ourselves, Thackeray implies, the more free we are to indulge our fantasies. And as the darkly sexualized images here suggest, those fantasies may be a rather curious compound of fear and desire. Thackeray’s voice here even registers an awareness that those collective fantasies are in large part the appeal of his novel, that in selling Vanity Fair he is, to some extent, selling Becky Sharp, and that he is entirely complicit in the cultural charade that averts its eyes from what it most wants to hear. This may be a satire of the Victorian audience, but if so, the satirist himself is part of the target.
Becky does have a heritage, although it is—as her parentage indicates—an Anglo-French amalgam. She is partly a descendant of the genial, not-too-moral picaresque heroes of eighteenth-century fiction, of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones or Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, orphaned figures of dauntless social energy whose likability protects them from any closer scrutiny. Yet she is also a French transplant, a figure who, in her restless desire for advancement, tactical imagination, and lack of conscience, seems to step directly out of the novels of Honoré de Balzac, as if Lucien de Rubempré or Eugène Rastignac had crossed the Channel. Like so many Balzacian heroes (and like Bonaparte himself), she has a tendency to carry her victories one step too far, risking everything she has gained. Although she at one point voices a desire for a secure bank account and a regular income from the interest, we feel sure that Becky cannot rest content with any partial, middle-class success. But the central problem, of course, is that she is a woman. What V
ictorian society could forgive in the ambitious male it found harder to countenance in a friendless, cynical, opportunistic female. We are never sure where Thackeray stands in relation to his most engaging creation, but we do know that, finally, we are offered two options.
Those two options are dramatically provided by the death of Jos at the novel’s end. Thackeray refuses to say if Becky had a hand in the death that gains her so much income, but the hints are broad: her lawyers (“Burke, Thurtell, and Hayes”) are named after celebrated early nineteenth-century murderers, while the famous illustration “Becky’s Second Appearance in the Character of Clytemnestra” shows us a most diabolical Becky holding what could be a vial of poison. She is, however, never convicted. If we refuse to believe the sly winks of the narrator, we have a maligned, but finally very lucky, woman; if we take those offered hints, we have a Becky Sharp who accelerates rapidly from small deceits to murder, and every moment in the novel’s past where she charms the reader takes on a darker hue. Either Becky’s always-renewable energy has finally failed to provide for her as well as sheer luck, or—more probably—her energy has finally turned murderous.
The moral alternative, if there is one, lies only in a code of gentlemanliness that lacks all the energy Becky had demonstrated. Dobbin’s final capture of Amelia’s affection is accomplished only by his withdrawal (with some unexpected help from Becky herself), and is felt more as a capitulation, or a disappointment, than a victory. Amelia may cling to him as a “parasite” clings to a “rugged old oak,” but neither parasite nor oak has much capacity for movement. When Jos implores Dobbin to save him from some unnamed fear that Becky presents, all Dobbin can do is walk away and decline to have anything to do with it—a far cry from the rush to engage the enemy that greeted news of Napoleon’s return to France. The energy of the Fair has turned sinister, and the geniality of the Fair has become ineffective. It is a far from sanguine conclusion to such a panoramic vision of society, and the novel’s narrative voice suddenly becomes less capacious, more radically split; its antic forces become more purely sensationalistic, and its sophistication retreats into disgusted belittlement, as the “puppets” are put back into their box. It was perhaps the great, characteristic genius of the Victorian novel to find a via media between threatening but attractive individual energy and dull but decorous social respectability. Thackeray’s novel cannot find this middle way, and instead leaves us caught in an evacuated middle, our hands still smarting from having the box shut upon them.
If anything, we might feel that the solutions for the novel’s characters lie in the novel’s past: in a past where Becky could have made more tactically wise decisions, where Amelia could have kept her heart more guarded, where the Sedley family might still be untouched by the disaster that it can never quite cope with, where Dobbin’s forbearance has not been so unduly tested, where the rambunctious feudal world of Sir Pitt Crawley has not yet been supplanted by the canting, calculating Evangelicalism of his son. Having finished the novel, we might very well look back to its opening moment—Becky and Amelia leaving the academy in Chiswick Mall—as a sort of refuge; subsequent events have been more surprising, but much less gratifying, than either of those two schoolgirls (or we) could have imagined. As a result, vanity Fair might be among the finest nostalgic productions of the English novel. It carries with it no faith in the future, but its affection for the past—before Waterloo, before the mistakes of experience—is abiding.
Nicholas Dames is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870, published by Oxford University Press in 2001. A scholar of nineteenth-century British and French fiction, he is also the author of articles on Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Stendhal, Anthony Trollope, and W M. Thackeray. He is currently working on a book about the nineteenth-century novel reader.
TO
B. W. PROCTER
THIS STORY IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BEFORE THE CURTAIN
As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (other quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying ‘How are you?’
A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people’s hilarity. An episode of humour or kindness touches and amuses him here and there;—a pretty child looking at a gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her fairing;—poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the wagon, mumbling his bone with the honest family which lives by his tumbling;—but the general impression is one more melancholy than mirthful. When you come home, you sit down, in a sober, contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your books or your business.
I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story of Vanity Fair. Some people consider Fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their servants and families: very likely they are right. But persons who think otherwise, and are of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour, and look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business; the whole accompanied by appropriate scenery, and brilliantly illuminated with the Author’s own candles.
What more has the Manager of the Performance to say?—To acknowledge the kindness with which it has been received in all the principal towns of England through which the Show has passed, and where it has been most favourably noticed by the respected conductors of the Public Press, and by the Nobility and Gentry. He is proud to think that his Puppets have given satisfaction to the very best company in this empire. The famous little Becky Puppet has been pronounced to be uncommonly flexible in the joints, and lively on the wire: the Amelia Doll, though it has had a smaller circle of admirers, has yet been carved and dressed with the greatest care by the artist: the Dobbin Figure, though apparently clumsy, yet dances in a very amusing and natural manner: the Little Boys’ Dance has been liked by some; and please to remark the richly-dressed figure of the Wicked Nobleman, on which no expense has been spared, and which Old Nick will fetch away at the end of this singular performance.
And with this, and a profound bow to his patrons, the Manager retires, and the curtain rises.
LONDON, June 28,1848.
CHAPTER I
Chiswick Mall
While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black servant, who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinkerton’s shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell, at least a score of young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of the stately old brick house. Nay, the acute observer might have recognized
the little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima Pinkerton herself, rising over some geranium-pots in the window of that lady’s own drawing-room.
‘It is Mrs. Sedley’s coach, sister,’ said Miss Jemima. ‘Sambo, the black servant, has just rung the bell; and the coachman has a new red waistcoat.’
‘Have you completed all the necessary preparations incident to Miss Sedley’s departure, Miss Jemima?’ asked Miss Pinkerton herself, that majestic lady; the Semiramisa of Hammersmith, the friend of Doctor Johnson, the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone herself.
‘The girls were up at four this morning, packing her trunks, sister,’ replied Miss Jemima; ‘we have made her a bow-pot.’
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