Vanity Fair: The Actual Book

So, Vanity Fair begins with some allegorical nonsense about how we are going to be watching this very exciting and depressing performance--"Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy"--with WMT as "the manager of the Performance" who "sits before the curtain on the boards" where "a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him." I'm kind of confused about whether the Fair is a play taking place on a stage in a theater, which is suggested by all this manager stuff, or, like, a Fair where they sell stuff, which is what it seems to be in Pilgrim's Progress. I guess it's a performance OF the Vanity Fair, put on by Thackeray for our amusement? But also the Fair is maybe always a performance, because all the people selling things in it are such two-faced jerks? There is a difference between the way the actors behave when they're in the Fair and when they're at home:

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?”


Well, that doesn't seem so bad. We all go act like buffoons in the Fair (which is society, right? That's what you're talking about WMT?) and then we go home to our nice little family and have a pretty good time? The narrator says "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." So it's like this novel is going to amuse and shock us for  a while, like the Fair itself, and then we'll go back to our regular old lives? But then sometimes in the book it seems like the Fair encompasses everything, from the Smedley's domestic lives to Becky's schoolroom to the barracks or whatever. Maybe I will figure this out as I go along.


Anyway, it's great when he talks about the "famous little Becky Puppet" who has been "pronounced to be uncommonly flexible in the joints" (yowza!) and the "Amelia Doll," which, "though it has had a smaller circle of admirers, has yet been carved and dressed by the greatest care by the artist." So now it's a puppet show, not a live-action play (maybe puppet shows are more usual entertainments at fairs?) It's clear that this "before the curtain" part was written after the rest of the novel was serialized, since WMT's clearly responding to everyone loving Becky and thinking Amelia is a drip (as we learn later, the girls in particular think Amelia is a drip.) He's always defending Amelia to everyone, and she seems perfectly nice and you sympathize with her and remember how in the movie she was played by the actress who was Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, showing quite a bit of range! (Question: How many Victorian novels have you read BEFORE watching the BBC miniseries? In my case it may only be all the Bronte novels, and, like, The Moonstone? Wait, it's possible I saw Daniel Deronda first, because I remember being in tremendous suspense about it on the subway, and in 2005 or whatever you didn't watch BBC miniseries on the subway like you do now, you crazy technologists.) But you're like, Mr. Thackeray, do you REALLY like Amelia better than Becky Sharp? That is hard to believe. Like, he clearly thinks Becky is a bad little girl, but is he not delighted by her? 


This brings me to the novel's subtitle: A Novel Without a Hero. Thackeray makes a lot of jokes about this throughout, and he's like, "oh, Amelia is as close to a heroine as we get in this novel without a hero," but clearly Becky is the hero, right? And it's a novel without a hero because she's a girl? Except like 50% of novels are about girls, so I guess he really means Becky is no kind of heroine because she's so amoral. In Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies this tension within female protagonists of 19th-century novels, where they're always both a "female hero" enacting a quest plot and a "heroine" enacting a marriage plot. The female hero is all gutsy and resourceful, while the heroine is carefully folded in to the embrace of an emerging romantic male hero at the end, and all her pluckiness, which helped her get married in the first place, is now useless and needs to be sublimated in some way. It's interesting to think about whether Becky fits in this paradigm: her quest plot is her marriage plot, more frankly than it is Jane Eyre's or whatever, and she's more ruthless and hilarious than an Austen heroine would be. So she really seems to be a genuine female hero, also because (although I haven't read this far yet) her struggles do go on beyond the ending (I seem to remember an excerpt where WMT extends his curtain metaphor and talks about writing after the curtain of matrimony has fallen), since she has all kinds of problems after her secret marriage. Even though WMT thinks she's so awful, she seems to be more like the hero of an 18th-century novel, like Tom Jones or Moll Flanders or somebody.


So the plot so far: Becky Sharp and Amelia Smedley leave school, where Amelia is beloved and where Becky is hated for being a sarcastic French-speaking minx who insists on getting paid for any work she does, to go hang out at Amelia's house in London before Becky  has to go be the governess for a baronet's family in Hampshire. Becky finds out Amelia's brother Joseph, who is home from his tax collector job in India with a liver complaint, is unmarried and rich, and she decides she will marry him and get all his elephants and saris, even though he's gluttonous and fat and stupid. Becky does a pretty good job seducing Joseph, despite his bashfulness, and they go on a fun outing to Vauxhall with Amelia and her childhood sweetheart Lt. George Osborne and Osborne's best friend Captain William Dobbin (Dobbin's deal is that Osborne exposed him as a grocer's son at school, and everyone was mean to him, but one day for some reason he saved Osborne from being thrashed by the First Cock at the school by thrashing the Cock himself and now they are fast friends and also Dobbin totally outranks him and is obviously great, although bashful and gawky), and Joseph is all ready to propose but he gets drunk on rack punch and then has a hangover the next day and Osborne somehow convinces him not to propose to Becky so Joseph goes away and Becky has to go and be a governess for the Crawley family. Becky is like, "rrgh, it's all George's fault" and Sir Crawley is this filthy ridiculous guy who is always going to law and cooks his own dinner in a saucepan and Becky is like, sheesh, but she does her best to ingratiate herself to everyone in the family, which includes: 1) greedy old dirty friendly-but-mean Sir Crawley; 2) sheepish ignored Lady Crawley, who is the 2nd Lady Crawley and who was an ironmonger's daughter so no one respects her; 3) Mr Pitt Crawley who is the son of the first wife and is like all into religion or something; 4) Captain Rawdon Crawley who is a dashing dragoon and loves to duel; 5) the two little girls, who are Lady Crawley's kids; 6) Mr Bute and 7) Mrs Bute Crawley, who are like a rector and his wife who are always scheming against Sir Crawley's family. Then there's Miss Crawley who is Sir Crawley's sister & her deal is she is super rich and likes to say shocking things and be entertained, so when she comes to visit of course she loves Becky and ends up taking Becky back to London with her to nurse her when she gets indigestion from eating too much lobster. This enrages Miss Crawley's usual retainers, as well as Mrs Bute Crawley who, despite her affection for Becky, has been trying to get Captain Rawdon Crawley to sleep with Becky so that Becky can't someday marry his dad and become Lady Crawley and cause more trouble and babies that will take money away from the Bute Crawleys, but Becky is like who cares I am such a charming and lively nurse. Then Lady Crawley, who was way sicker than Miss Crawley the whole time, but no one cared because she was a stupid ironmonger's daughter, dies, and Sir Crawley comes to London and proposes to Becky. Becky sheds something like "some of the only natural tears" she will ever shed, because she didn't think there was much of a chance of Lady Crawley dying and herself becoming the next Lady Crawley, and she knows she would be super good at managing Sir Crawley, BUT she already played her hand and it was to SECRETLY MARRY RAWDON CRAWLEY. Sir Crawley's son, remember? This is not immediately revealed but if you are smart you have figured it out, so I'll spare you all the little hints & so on. But all the Crawleys are like, this is very strange, why would she say no to such a great offer, and Miss Crawley is like, she must have another attachment, like to a grocer or something, HOW ROMANTIC I will set them up in a little shop. Becky decides the smartest thing to do is to run off with Rawdon & set up a little house and send a letter to Miss Crawley via one of the lackeys, asking for her forgiveness and blessing. This is a stupid move, because the lackeys hate Becky and Rawdon and now they're in the house with rich Miss Crawley and Becky & R aren't allowed in, and then Mrs Bute shows up and starts telling Miss Crawley all this stuff about how Becky's mom wasn't a Montmorency at all like she said, she was an OPERA singer and Becky herself has probably been on the stage and drank gin when she was a kid and so on. 


Meanwhile Amelia's dad has gone bankrupt because of Napoleon getting off Elba, and George's dad has forbidden him to have anything to do with Amelia, and Becky & Rawdon go to the estate sale and buy some of Amelia's stuff and Becky is pretty heartless about it. But Dobbin loves Amelia and buys her her piano back and sends it to the little suburban house where she's staying with her disgraced family, and they think it's from George and how romantic, and George is touched by the whole situation even though he had been being PRETTY AWFUL and neglectful of Amelia for most of the book, and so he showed up at her little suburban house and probably they're going to get married too.


So the main point of the book so far is DO NOT MARRY a stupid dragoon husband, they are jerks. Well, Rawdon hasn't been a jerk to Becky so far; he thinks she should be made the Pope or something, she is so great at everything she does. Rawdon has been a jerk to George and has cheated him at cards etc. and made him buy some lousy horses, but that's just what anyone would do to George, he is a miserable ponce.


What will happen next? Probably some misery. And some seeing behind the curtain after it drops on a happy couple. Also probably neglected babies, and near-prostitution? Also, like in the movie, Becky will sing a song based on a poem by Tennyson that he HAS NOT WRITTEN YET because Becky is so smart that she should be the pope.