My first afternoon in Australia, fresh, or not so fresh, off the plane, I set out on a walk from our motel. I meant only to get a little exercise after the nineteen-hour confinement of the flight from New York to Sydney. With no set destination in mind, I found myself heading towards the ocean, not stopping until, three miles farther, I descended a hill to the expanse of water. The coast was reminiscent of California’s arid cliffs swooping down towards crescent beaches. I walked onto the sand and stood gazing out to sea, on the opposite side of the ocean I had known and loved as a child. Australia seemed a lot like Southern California before it got so built up and crowded.
When I was a child, David Copperfield had figuratively transported me across a continent and an ocean to the green pastoral landscape of England. Now I had literally traveled across a continent and an ocean to read a paper about that green landscape in a contrasting one of dry hills, rustling eucalyptus trees, and sheer cliffs sweeping down to the Pacific. Dickens himself never traveled to Australia, though a number of his characters do, including the cluster in David Copperfield. Now I had come to the country and continent that had been a remote land of real exile for the British government and for Dickens a place to send characters he didn’t want to kill off but needed to get out of the way, a convenient land of last resort. Yet Australia is also where poor Mr. Mell and improvident Mr. Micawber get to thrive. I felt I was thriving, too. A few years short of sixty and happy in many aspects of my life, I seemed, like David Copperfield, to have come out on the safe side of harm. It was nice to linger a moment with that sparkling seascape before turning from it to move on.
Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp
Reliably popular with students and, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes, “moist with meaning,” Jane Eyre is a convenient book to teach. First at the University of Hawaii in the early seventies, and then as I have moved in my life and career to England, Maine, New York, Virginia, and New York a second time, I have turned to it again and again, finding students of all ages, mostly women but men, too, ready to suffer and exult with Brontë’s small, plain heroine, hating those she hates, forgiving those she loves, keeping company with her in her evolution from unloved orphan to charity student, governess, fiancée, schoolteacher, and finally wife. They have applauded her in her defiance of Mrs. Reed, rooted for her in gaining the love of Mr. Rochester, and supported her in her decision to leave him, a would-be bigamist. They have understood why she cannot marry the icy St. John Rivers and then rejoiced at her return to her chastened and symbolically castrated true love. “Reader, I married him” must rank as one of the most deeply satisfying sentences in English literature. I teach the book because it is an important canonical, feminist, and even colonial text, serving to raise questions of narrative, the status of women, realism versus romance, the loneliness and hardiness of the individual, and sexual and cultural politics, to name just some of the inviting topics of discussion; I teach it because I can count on my students’ engagement with it, whether they are English majors or accountants, graduate students or freshmen. Yet Jane Eyre is a novel that has never moved me. It left me cold when I first read it at age ten or eleven, and my interest in it up to this present day has never risen above the academic. It’s a great book for the classroom, but I have never loved it—not it and not its heroine.
The text I counterpose to Jane Erye is Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. “Panoramic,” according to the critic Percy Lubbock, a “large, loose baggy monster” for Henry James, it includes in its extensive cast of characters the other most renowned female orphan-turned-governess in English literature, the pointedly named Becky Sharp. Vanity Fair is a much less serviceable book to slip into syllabi than Jane Eyre. Too lengthy for any general education course, too ironic for a course in women’s studies—Thackeray’s wry, ambiguous humor seems not especially compatible with feminist approaches—the novel might be a good choice for a course in postcolonialism, a vehicle to consider the reaches of Empire since the East India Company more than hovers in the background of the text. But in the final analysis this book works best for students of the nineteenth-century novel. And even with these, whatever their presumed tolerance for the genre, experience has prepared me to brace for the complaints.
“Too many words,” said one bold older woman, a former nurse and returning student, referring perhaps less to the length of Vanity Fair than to its pace and chattiness. The intrusive—and elusive—narrator bothers some. Others are troubled by the characters’ flawed nature in this novel, as its subtitle announces, “without a hero.” George Osborne is a cad, who but for dying on the battlefield at Waterloo would have deserted his young wife; that innocent wife, Amelia, is a simpering nitwit, grieving all those years over the dead George and failing to see what’s real around her; William Dobbin is a fool—a “spooney,” as Thackeray calls him—for his thankless loyalty to Amelia; and Becky Sharp, from beginning to end of the ploys that we follow over nearly two decades, is a conniving, some would say heartless, social climber.
I’m grateful for those students who do appreciate Vanity Fair, for I am a committed enthusiast. My love of this novel goes back to that annus mirabilis of my reading life, sixth grade—the year I also
