LET US SHUT UP THE BOX AND THE PUPPETS: VANITY FAIR 3

So! that was Vanity Fair. I seemed to remember that the Mira Nair movie ended delightfully, with Becky riding away on an elephant, so I wasn't too worried when everybody hit those crises. But! as I read the last 10% of the novel, I realized that sometimes movies change endings, especially when they are movies intent on highlighting the Indian/colonial aspects of Victorian novels, so I became genuinely worried about everyone. Which only goes to show that even movies and miniseries can't entirely ruin the pleasures of suspense.

After Rawdon goes off to be a governor of that unwholesome island (they say its name; I just can't remember it) and Becky disappears into oblivion or myth, we go back to Amelia & Georgy & the Osbornes. Amelia is continuing to languish in the suburbs with her querulous parents while her son is becoming a spoiled-brat replica of his dad at Grandfather Osborne's. We--not Amelia--are expecting Dobbin from Madras every day, and finally he shows up at Georgy's school, along with a mysterious fat fellow whom the narrator insists on not naming.

Thackery has used this device at least once before, when he segued from some Amelia-plot stuff to tell us about Miss Crawley's return from her brother's country estate to London, accompanied by "a young lady" who has usurped Miss Crawley's paid companions and has clandestine meetings with Rawdon Crawley. "Who could this young woman be, I wonder?" the narrator asked us, and then a few pages later reveals her identity "Miss Rebecca Sharp (for such, astonishing to state, is the name of her who has been described ingeniously as 'the person' hitherto.)" Thackeray's obviously having fun with some already-established goofy literary conventions, but it's hard to say why he picks the moments he does to use this one. I guess Becky's move to Miss Crawley's London house as her nurse is the first move she makes that isn't quite authorized by the boarding-school-genteel-but-impoverished-governess system she's been a part of for most of the novel: she went from school to Amelia's, and from Amelia's to Queen's Crawley to be a governess, and all that was planned from the beginning, and now she's starting to make her own way and we're supposed to be pleased and surprised and shocked? But I can't figure out why the identity of the fat man with Dobbin needs to create suspense, because it's so obvious that it's Amelia's brother Jos, also coming from India.

We find out eventually that Dobbin was so upset by the thought of Amelia getting married that he traveled toward England at a feverish pace, and so contracted a fever, and almost died at Jos's house in Bombay or whatever, but that they both got on a ship bound for Southampton (Jos needed to leave India for a while because of liver complaints, and too much pale ale and tiffin, which I'm starting to relate to since I've been eating nothing but pasta and pizza and gelato and red wine for a week), and on board Jos revealed that Amelia wasn't getting married after all (I think?) and Dobbin got a lot better. Dobbin meanwhile convinced Jos that he should go take care of his family, even though Jos was mad at Mr Sedley for always sending him bills and so on.

They both eventually show up in London and they save the day for the Sedleys (or what's left of the Sedleys, the mom having died at some point--it's the part of the novel where all the old people conveniently or pathetically die.) Dobbin effects a reconciliation between old Mr Osborne & Amelia, or good enough of one that when Mr Osborne dies he leaves a nice annuity to Amelia & half his property to Georgy, and now Amelia is a respected matron of property and she and Jos and Georgy have a nice house and nice dinners and all kinds of people come to see them. Then Mr Sedley dies and there is some stuff about is it better to die a failure or a man of property leaving lots of money to your dependents. I don't know, probably man of property? but Thackeray has some point that's like, "well, if you're a failure it's kind of nice to slip into death and be like, none of that matters anymore."

Dobbin the whole time is loving Amelia faithfully, but she's irritatingly faithful to her dead cad of a husband George, and the narrator's like, she knows Dobbin loves her but she's not going to bother saying anything about it unless he says something, because girls like to be admired and taken care of. Dobbin is at least a huge success with & a good influence on Georgy, who can tell that Dobbin is a _real_ gentleman and not to be bossed around like he bosses around everyone else. So those guys are all having a good time, and then for some reason they decide to go abroad, and everyone has fun on the ship and there are lots of hilarious German guys with hilarious accents, and it's very hard to figure out what they're saying because Thackeray has them speaking French with hilarious German accents, but this is not something the modern reader is accustomed to, since English is now the diplomatic language, not French, so we just hear German guys being like, "I vish to vash and vipe the vinders" and not being like, "bardonneh-moi" or whatever.

Hilarious German accents are necessarily accompanied by hilarious accounts of German spa-towns and duchies and "transparencies," which are either magic lanterns or a political unit in central Europe. Oh Mr Thackeray I am not getting your jokes. Lots of spoofs of court life at a tiny "transparency" and diplomatic foibles. We find out that the narrator was at the same German town as the Sedley-Osborne family, and that that's how he knows this story. So we get some stuff from the perspective of the narrator seeing the Sedleys at the opera, and participating in various festivities, but it's all kind of weird.

Thackeray has been playing with these kinds of truth claims throughout the novel; obviously framing stories and weird truth claims were important for earlier novelists--I should reread Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or at least the chapter I read, to get a better handle on epistemological uncertainty and "naive empiricism" in the 18th century, because all these truth claims are vestiges of that. And of course Wilkie Collins (I'm reading Woman in White next) loves the idea that the novel is a document, an assemblage of real evidence. But Thackeray's truth claims are pretty vague--"oh, I looked at this note myself the other day"--and don't really add up: he claims, for instance, to have gotten all of Becky's history from a British diplomat abroad who tells everyone Becky's whole shocking story at dinner, while the story Thackeray tells is much more detailed and sympathetic and close to Becky's consciousness than the British ambassador's account would have been. Also there's all the stuff about puppets and theatres and so on, which suggests fiction and artifice rather than biography and evidence. My suspicion is that the truth claims really are only vestigial, a conventional gesture you make in a novel even if you aren't really going with the conceit that this is a true story.

Anyway, everyone's having fun in the "transparency" with Thackeray and the English and French ambassadors, who are flattering Amelia and Jos and inviting them to court and so on. Then Georgy sneaks out to a gambling party and there is a mysterious masked, rouged lady in shabby clothes and she gets Georgy to bet for her (just like the high-roller in Venice!) and Georgy wins (unlike Rory and Alison in Venice! at least when the high-roller was betting on them) and then Jos shows up either to find Georgy or to gamble himself (I think the latter) and of course we find out the masked lady is Becky Sharp! putting on an absurd European accent, which she occasionally drops. She tells Jos a tale of woe and insinuates that she's always loved him, and he goes home determined to help Becky and get Amelia to be her friend and so on.

Then we find out what Becky's been up to all this time. Sort of. Thackeray's like, "I don't want to upset you with how terrible and wicked Becky has been; so far I've been able to disguise it, but this is going to be hard." Becky's been drinking and gambling and probably prostituting herself, but of course that's not explicitly said, and Thackeray's comment that so far he's been able to disguise how bad she is makes you think maybe she wasn't sexually "innocent" before after all, but I also still think that maybe Thackeray thinks that's beside the point. Her husband arranged for her to have an annuity and for a while she was trying to live on that, but then she kept getting kicked out of town for her bad reputation and she started getting up to her old tricks. At one point she runs into the Marquis of Steyne and he gets his agent to find her in the park and threaten her with assassination if she doesn't leave town, and imply that the reason she keeps getting kicked out of places is that he is going around ruining her reputation. He is very mad at her! So she keeps slinking around gambling and drinking, and sometimes giving concerts but her voice has been ruined by gin so they are disasters, but they are maybe just fraudulent concerts anyway to trick people out of money.

So Jos gets Amelia to go to see Becky and Amelia forgives her for all her tricky ways & for flirting with George when he was alive, because Becky tells Amelia about how her child was ripped crying from her arms, and that's the way to get to Amelia. Of course Becky has no pictures or locks of hair or anything belonging to Rawdon Jr., but she says that's because her luggage got lost at Baden or somewhere. Then the Sedleys invite her to live with them and Dobbin is like, "What? She's a monster!" and Amelia is like, "Dobbin, you don't own me; I don't love you anyway!" and Dobbin is like, "I've had enough of this; if you were a really strong person you'd get over George and love me" which seems harsh, but George was a tool. But also why should you love anybody if you don't want to, you know? So Dobbin leaves and Georgy is like, "what?" and Becky gloms on to Jos and starts introducing an undesirable element to their society.

BUT Becky seems worried about the influence the undesirable element will have on Amelia, and she tries to get Amelia to realize how great Dobbin is. It's hard to tell here whether Becky is genuinely concerned about Amelia and trying to help out, or whether she wants Amelia out of the way so she can totally take advantage of Jos. But she shows Amelia this note that she's kept since before Waterloo, which George Osborne put into Becky's bouquet at a ball, that is like "Becky let's run away together!" Amelia is horrified, but it actually makes her reverence for her stupid dead husband dissolve so now she can love Dobbin. And Dobbin comes back and he and Amelia and Georgy all go live with the Crawleys in the countryside, and Becky's son Rawdon and Georgy become best friends, and Rawdon inherits the estate when his uncle dies (his dad dies of malaria at Unwholesome Island around the same time, natch) and everyone is getting along great. And Becky is free to leech off of Jos, who takes out a life insurance policy on himself to benefit her, and Dobbin is like, "what! don't do that, Jos!" and Jos is like, "I'm scared of Becky, so I have to" and then he dies and Becky gets like a thousand pounds from that, who cares. Because she's already getting an annuity from her kid who wants her to stay away. And she ends up hanging out in Bath for the rest of her life being a Lady Bountiful.

Not quite as charming and adventurous as riding away with Jos on an elephant, and Becky comes off much worse--did she really kill Jos? Yikes! Probably she just let him tiffin himself to death. Interestingly, she makes the claim that she's innocent again after his death. So I'm starting to think the whole "innocent" theme is JUST ironic, and not interestingly subtle like I thought in the last post, but maybe this will bear more thinking about.

THE END! Maybe one more short, amusing post about Amelia & Becky as gossip girls.