Classics Corner: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; Thackeray’s Satire of Ambition and Vanity Starring One of the Best Anti-Heroines from English Literature
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: It makes sense that one of William Makepeace Thackeray’s most important metaphors throughout his epic novel, Vanity Fair, is to compare his characters and their situations to a puppet show.
To explain the novel, I have to backtrack to Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Not too many modern Readers may be familiar with the work, but it was a Medieval allegory in which a man named Christian (Subtlety was not in a Medieval writer's repertoire) travels through various locations with names like the Valley of Humility, the Palace Beautiful, and the Slough of Respond before he reached the Celestial City (i.e. Heaven). One of those locations is Vanity Fair, a fair in which unwary travelers buy medals, gowns, fancy decorations, and sinisterly enough spouses and children all to increase their pride and vanity.
Now Pilgrim's Progress is mostly recalled by readers of Little Women who associate that book with the role playing game the March Sisters play as they wait for their father to return from the Civil War. There is even a chapter called Vanity Fair in which Meg, the eldest sister, visits some rich friends, flirts, and is the recipient of gossip.
Also the title Vanity Fair calls to mind the famous Conde Nast magazine which still features provocative fashion spreads and articles. Vanity Fair is often seen as a place where the rich, famous, and fashionable show off their wealth and style. The people who long to be a part of that world are often drawn in by their fascination with the high life and interest in material objects, wealth, and success. Sometimes they feel those obsessions control them rather than the other way around.
Thackeray took the idea of vanity controlling others by treating all of his characters like puppets on a string. They are just dangling about and have no control over their words and actions. Instead their desires to move ahead, to gain wealth, and to be loved lead them instead.
This is not a puppet show for kids that Thackeray envisioned. He saw Life as a puppet show in which people's greed, pride, selfishness, and obsession are laid out for the public to see.
By far the most interesting character in Vanity Fair is Becky Sharp. When she enters the book, she is already a saucy young lady. She leaves boarding school along with her impoverished background behind.
She told other students that she was from a wealthy family that had fallen because of hard times. In reality, she is the daughter of an “opera girl” i.e. a courtesan and an artist. Her mother died young and her father was an abusive alcoholic who left her destitute.
Becky's background gives her a creative edge to see the world differently and reshape her world to fit her needs, but it also isolates her from others. In school, she was looked upon as a charity case and was not held in as high regard as the other students. Her only friend was Amelia Sedley, a sweet naive heiress who leaves school with her.
The teachers looked down on Becky because of her background. This disregard for a childhood that downgraded her is symbolized in the moment when she is given a religious treatise as a parting gift and she responds by throwing the book out of the carriage on the way out.
Becky has no solid background, no reliance or support from institutions, and no basis for ethics and morals so she can only rely on herself. Her maxim is that she could be a better person if she had a few thousand pounds. She is willing to do anything to get money, including marry it.
Becky stays with Amelia's family temporarily until she begins work as a governess, something that she is not looking forward to. While Amelia becomes romantically involved with George Osborne and his friend, William Dobbin bears an unrequited crush on her, Becky finds a possible means into wealth through Amelia’s brother, Jos.
Jos Sedley is not a catch by any means. He is overweight, a slob, and a big drinker. But he has also arrived from India with a fortune behind him and will inherit a large sum when his father dies. So Becky is willing to overlook his flaws to wed the big green. That is, until Jos makes a fool of himself at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens by getting drunk and making ridiculous loud emotional declarations towards Becky. The scene humiliates both Becky and Jos. A shamed hung over Jos breaks his engagement with Becky, sending her to the governess position much to her chagrin.
Becky however makes lemonade with the sour lemons in the governess job. She befriends the wealthy Crawley family, becoming an eventual confidant to their feisty opinionated and very rich aunt and catching the eye of Sir Pitt Crawley, the paterfamilias. When Sir Pitt manages to work up the courage to finally propose to Becky, Becky turns him down because well you see... she's already married to Pitt's dashing handsome son, Rawdon.
Thus continues the pattern in Becky's life where she uses her charms, style, and charisma to become the center of attention, obtain prestige, money, or romance, becomes embroiled in scandal and controversy, and is ostracized or criticized by others, but bounces back by gaining powerful acquaintances. This is noticeable for the first time when she befriends the elderly Miss Crawley, who admires her forthright humor, sauciness, and tales of scandals as long as they don't affect her family. Of course Miss Crawley's view changes when Rawdon, who was once her favorite nephew, marries Becky then Miss Crawley cuts the elopers out of her will.
Becky realizes that she made a major miscalculation when the elderly Sir Pitt dies and his older son, also named Pitt, inherits the lot. While the elder Pitt might have been crude, uncouth, and no gentleman even though he had the title of one, at least Becky could have been set for life. Instead she married Rawdon and has to get by living (as one of the chapter titles can attest) “on nothing a year.”
However, Becky is able to seduce army officials so Rawdon can get higher positions and use her looks as a mark to distract other gamblers while Rawdon cheats at card games. When they end up living in Paris and London, Becky becomes the toast of the towns wowing the gentry and nobility with her wit, beauty, and sharp intelligent, traits the increasingly dull and dim Rawdon lacks.
That is what makes Becky so alluring: her resourcefulness and cunning ability to survive any situation. During the Napoleonic Wars when Brussels is left in a panic, Becky, who lives there with Amelia and other soldier's wives, makes plans to escape.
If she gets caught when the French Army arrives, then she reasons that she will just cozy up to a French soldier to ensure her survival. This doesn't happen and she manages to flee, but not before she fleeces Jos, who is tasked with protecting his sister but leaves to save his own skin, of her horse and carriage.
Even when she is at her lowest point, Becky is never at a loss for a plan. Long after the war is over, she is caught red handed with the Marquis Steyne by her husband, accepting jewelry and expensive gifts instead of trying to get Rawdon who is imprisoned for debt, released. She insists that she was not having an affair with Steyne, but she ends up disgraced and separated from her husband. Next we see Becky, she is living the high life on the Continent as a high priced courtesan once again charming the wealthy men with her various uh..talents and attributes. She eventually ends up as a companion and presumed lover to Jos (Rawdon is exiled to a governorship at a remote island where he dies of a fever.). Jos ultimately dies, under mysterious circumstances, leaving Becky his entire fortune.
No matter what Becky does, she is the actor the instigator in her life. She seizes a situation and takes control of it. She is in contrast to the more passive receptive, Amelia. Amelia never takes charge of a situation. Instead, she waits for someone to fix it for her.
While Becky is active, an agent of change, Amelia is dependent and has things happen to her rather than taking action for herself. When her father loses his money in risky speculation, Amelia waits for George Osborne to marry her. Then after she marries George, Amelia ignores his flirtations with other women holding him onto a pedestal, even after his death in the Napoleonic Wars.
George's death leaves Amelia destitute and rather than finding her way like Becky does, Amelia surrenders her son to be raised by her wealthy father-in-law. She also receives money secretly from Dobbin who has long loved her from afar.
She never breaks her heroic image of George's memory until Becky has to admit that she and George had an affair before he died. This news finally puts Amelia into the arms of William and they marry.
Amelia is always dependent upon a man to take care of her needs and others to make decisions for her. Unlike Becky, Amelia lives in the fragile passivity that is expected of a woman of her day.
Even the way that Amelia and Becky raise their sons is a marked contrast. Becky is a very distant and neglectful mother, disdainful of Rawdon's affection for their son, Rawdon. She leaves him in the care of relatives and housekeepers. Then when she is disgraced, she abandons him entirely. Amelia is a loving and devoted mother, doting on her son George's every word and action. Since he is born after his father's death, she holds him as a living memory of his father. When she surrenders him to his grandfather, it is a true moment of heartbreak for her.
While Amelia's relationship with her son, George is touching for the modern Reader, a Reader in Thackeray's time would have a difference of opinion. In fact most wealthy parents would have favored Becky's approach and had children less as beings of devotion than as little heirs of their fortune that were best not seen or heard. Children were held more as a status symbol than as individuals in their own right.
Status is what it's all about in Vanity Fair. While Becky is held under scrutiny by other characters, in truth she is no different than anyone else in the book. All of the characters are motivated by their drives for money or position. Many of the male characters like George and Rawdon seek positions of authority. The younger members of the Crawley family wait with baited breath for older members to die do they can inherit.
Even the seemingly good characters like Amelia and William are motivated by desires that are created from their vanity. Amelia continues to hold onto her romantic view of George, despite obvious evidence that he was not the hero of her dreams. She also strings William along, even after she learns of his affection for her.
William's view of her is as a divine goddess that is perfection herself. His unrealistic view of Amelia continues as he does favors for her such as buying an expensive piano in secret and giving her money so she can be reunited with her son. Amelia and he have a relationship where he needs to admire someone and Amelia needs to be admired.
The final pages even suggest that vanity hits them even after they finally marry, when Amelia sighs that William loves his daughter more than her. She is upset that her admirer has transferred his admiration to someone else, even if that someone else is her own daughter.
It's not a surprise Becky is the way she is. In a way, she is similar to Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run? By Budd Schulberg. Schulberg saw a pattern of behavior that created someone like Sammy: a second generation American immigrant who is a victim of poverty and prejudice so he schemes and hustles to get ahead because that's all he knows.
That's how Thackeray saw Becky. She is not a separate entity from the society around her. She is the society around her. All of the vanity, conceit, greed, class and social structure connived against her so she pushed back by being the most vain, the fastest, and the most infamous to get there.
The characters in Vanity Fair hang by their strings of pride and vanity controlling them. Some like Amelia continue to helplessly dangle, while some like Becky take the strings and control the show themselves.
