I guess if you actually plotted the plot of Vanity Fair on one of those charts--you know, rising action, climax, falling action/denouement--we have reached the climax of the two parallel stories we've been following throughout the novel.
I did read the introduction to this book by Amanpal Garcha called From Sketch to Novel, where he argues that Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell all started their careers writing journalistic sketches, and that the static, non-plotted qualities of the sketch became important features of their novels. He talks about how in the twentieth century we've come to consider plot the most important element in a novel: we value tightly-plotted books over implausible, digressive, shoddily-constructed ones, and we're confused and amused when Mervyn Peake presents us with a series of bizarre characters seemingly just for the pleasure of inventing them rather than to advance the plot (the Mervyn Peake reference, of course, is mine & not Garcha's). And I guess twentieth-century critics have looked askance at Dickens's plots and wondered why anybody liked him. I don't know who these critics are, because it seems pretty obvious why people would like Dickens, but it's a useful reminder that even though we think of the Victorian period as the time when the Novel as we know & love it today, or rather as we knew & loved it in the twentieth century, was fully established as a form, that didn't happen (if it happened at all) until later in the century.
Anyway, although there have been a number of climaxes or crises so far in Vanity Fair--the discovery of Becky's secret marriage; the failure of the Sedley family; George's death at Waterloo; Sir Pitt Crawley's death--at three-quarters through the novel both Amelia and Becky seem to hit rock bottom. Now I'm mixing AA terminology with literary analysis: on the diagram, the climax is at the apex, the culmination of all that rising action and tension, rather than rock bottom. And maybe the climax is really what makes all this rock-bottomness inevitable? But with somebody like Becky (as I think we'll see) nothing is inevitable; she's always a toss of the dice away from everything changing completely. At any rate! Rock bottom.
As I suspected in my last post (and remembered from the movie), once Old Mr. Osborne spots his grandson in the park, he wants little Georgy to come live with him. Georgy can visit Amelia, and Amelia and her impoverished parents can have an annuity EVEN IF Amelia gets remarried, but Amelia can't come to the Osborne house because she's still the awful beggar who married his awful son. Amelia is like HOW DARE YOU especially about the remarriage stuff, but then her dad does a bunch of idiotic, cringe-inducing stuff that's just like all the idiotic, cringe-inducing stuff ruined people always do in nineteenth-century novels: he sinks all his money into terrible investments and schemes, and he trades the annuity he gets from his son Jos in India for a lump sum to use in a terrible scheme, so all the family has left is the little annuity that Amelia thinks she got from her useless husband George Osborne, but really got from his executor, the faithful William Dobbin. (Note to self: NEVER TRADE AN ANNUITY FOR A LUMP SUM. Except if you are the Madden girls in The Odd Women, in which case you should stop scrupulously refusing to touch the capital because you are dying and becoming alcoholics living on the capital, while if you just used some of the capital to get started in a sensible business like typing you would not become an alcoholic or die or make a terrible marriage. I guess because I am a Madden girl I should totally touch my capital. Oh dear.) So Amelia is forced to relent and send her son to his grandfather and spend all her time stalking her son and taking care of her terrible, ungrateful, querulous old parents. Georgy, of course, thinks it's great to be rich and have all these dandyish clothes and drink champagne at age 11, and having been raised by a ladylike and worshipful mother, he has become a true gentleman and lords it over his terrible oafish pretentious grandfather and everyone else he meets, and I guess that's good for Georgy but it's depressing for Amelia. He does get a miniature made of himself and presents it to Amelia, which is nice because Amelia LOVES it, but is also the vainest possible way in which you may be nice to your mom.
Becky Sharp, on the other hand, seems to be doing great: she's made up with her brother-in-law's family and has introduced her brother-in-law to high society in the form of her creepy patron Lord Steyne, and between Steyne & the new Sir Pitt Crawley she manages to get presented at Court; thanks also to both those guys, she gets to be presented wearing diamonds (a diamond clasp from the Crawley family jewels, to her sister-in-law's horror, and a whole extravagantly dripping set from Lord Steyne, which she pretends she borrowed from a jeweler, like actresses do at the Oscars.) Now everybody has to acknowledge her as respectable even though she's clearly a terrible little adventuress. At the same time, Lord Steyne seems to be chipping away at her respectability, systematically removing everyone in her household, I guess so he can be alone with her? It seems like it would be less scandalous, and therefore smarter, to conduct a clandestine affair with a lady who was always hanging around with her husband, kid, and lady's companion than it would be to always go to the house of a lady who lived completely alone. I guess Lord Steyne doesn't care, because he sends Becky's kid to a charity school, gets her companion Miss Briggs a job as a housekeeper at his country estate, and has her husband Rawdon Crawley arrested for debts. On the night of Rawdon's arrest, he and Becky participate in some charades at Lord Steyne's house: tellingly, Becky plays the part of Clytemnestra and mimes stabbing Agamemnon/Rawdon to death, while Lord Steyne is like, "ha ha ha, she'd do it, too!" Becky also dresses up like a little marquise and sings a charming song. She does not, however, bare her midriff and do an Indian dance like she does in the movie, but it amounts to the same thing: exoticism, exposure, sexual availability. Everyone is either very charmed or very shocked.
When Rawdon gets arrested, he confidently expects Becky to bail him out, but she comes up with some crazy excuses and he has to rely on his pious, nice sister-in-law. He comes home to find Becky dripping with diamonds and entertaining Lord Steyne tete-a-tete in their home. Rawdon flips out and thrashes Lord Steyne and throws all Becky's diamonds in a pile, and then he ransacks the house and finds Becky's secret nest-egg: thousands and thousands of pounds in bank-notes, the most recent a thousand-pound note she got from Lord Steyne by claiming she needed it to pay off Miss Briggs. Rawdon is like, "really? You couldn't spare a hundred pounds of this to get me out of the spunging-house?" and she's like, "I'm innocent, I'm innocent!" and Rawdon is like, bullshit, and he goes off to challenge Lord Steyne to a duel. But part of Becky's plan with Lord Steyne was to get Rawdon a cushy government job, and the news of Rawdon's appointment as governor of some swampy little island with an unwholesome climate, combined with the toadiness of Lord Steyne's toadies, convinces Rawdon's second and his brother-in-law that Rawdon should call off the duel, and Rawdon is like, whatever, fine, I never want to see any of those jerks again, and he goes to the island and may or may not die of swampiness. Little Rawdon goes to live with his aunt and uncle in the country and is perfectly happy, and Becky is totally ruined socially and financially: she wakes up to find all her servants demanding payment, her landlord kicking her out of the house, and all her hidden money and piles of diamonds missing, stolen by her Steyne-appointed French maid. So Becky disappears; no one knows where, although mythical stories are told about her.
One of the questions that keeps coming up in this last episode is whether Becky is "innocent," meaning whether she's slept with Steyne or not. Thackeray tells us that she may well have been innocent, and I think we're supposed to believe him; like Lady Audley in Lady Audley's Secret, I don't think Becky is interested in sex in and of itself, and if she could get what she wanted out of Lord Steyne without sleeping with him, she probably would. But of course "innocent" doesn't only mean "hasn't cheated on her husband." Several characters point out that, if Rawdon is basing his claim against Lord Steyne on the fact that Steyne and Becky were dining alone together, they have been alone in the house "a hundred times" before; this struck me as kind of a weak argument, since who's to say they haven't just had sex a hundred times? But the mention of "a hundred times" raises the question of real versus perceived innocence: Becky's behavior with Lord Steyne could be perceived as guilty by society, which might be the only guilt that matters in Vanity Fair; and on the other hand, if society allows her to dine "a hundred times" alone with a man who isn't her husband, maybe that behavior is innocent after all.
Then there's the thousand-pound note, which brings the question of prostitution to the table: "this don't look very innocent," Rawdon says as he shows it to his second, and when Becky begs him to defend her innocence, Lord Steyne rages, "You innocent! Why every trinket you have on your body is paid for by me. I have given you thousands of pounds, which this fellow has spent and for which he has sold you. Innocent, by --! You're as innocent as your mother, the ballet-girl, and your husband the bully." For Steyne, money equals sex, and by accepting the money Becky has entered into a contract that, even if she hasn't fulfilled her part of it, renders her un-innocent. Or rather Rawdon has entered into the contract: it's interesting how Steyne in this passage takes away Becky's agency even as he rails against her guilt. He thinks Rawdon has been calling the shots this whole time, and so he turns Becky's crafty manipulation into a contract "between men" with Becky as currency; his reference to Becky's mother, meanwhile, suggests that her character was predetermined and not a result of her own choices.
And of course Thackeray wants us to think about the non-sexual connotations of "innocent." Even though sexual innocence sometimes seems to be the only kind of innocence the Victorians valued in women, characters like Becky and Lady Audley suggest that sexual peccadilloes are unforgivable but more natural, and maybe more womanly, than greed and manipulation and calculation. Becky may not have slept with Lord Steyne, and she may actually have been acting in the interest of her husband (although Steyne was probably trying to get rid of Rawdon with the governorship on the unwholesome island, it's unclear whether Becky was angling for that too, or whether she thought she could help herself and Rawdon at the same time by getting him out of the way, or what), but she's a liar and a cheat and a terrible mother. Is this revision of the sexual double standard--this suggestion that the bad women are the hypocrites who don't sleep around but do scheme for social advancement and diamonds and country houses--good for women or bad? Thackeray isn't saying that all women are like this, and he seems interested in the specific problems women encounter as they try to make their way through Vanity Fair. But it seems to me that demonizing the scheming woman is as dangerous as demonizing the sexually fallen woman. I think Thackeray might know this, and he might know that that's why Becky's so appealing: it's hard to be a self-made Victorian woman, and you seem to have to get your hands dirty (or diamond-y) to do it. And even then, those crummy lords won't give you the credit you deserve.
Next: denouements, or the Becky puppet continues to astonish us with her flexibility? I think?
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