My colleague, who also teaches the nineteenth-century novel course, argues that we are allowed to love Becky because the balance tilts towards the good in her morally complex nature—after all, she helps Amelia in the end to give up her illusions about George and marry Dobbin. I’m not so sure of my colleague’s judgment; I’m not sure the good in Becky Sharp prevails over her amorality, some would say over her wickedness. Doesn’t Thackeray stack the deck against her by making her an uncaring mother? It may be amusing that “whenever Mrs Rawdon wished to be particularly humble and virtuous,” she hems the little shirt “for her dear little boy” that “had got to be too small for Rawdon long before it was finished.” But when she boxes his ears after she catches the boy listening rapt on the staircase as she sings to her aristocratic “benefactor,” Lord Steyne, and Thackeray tells us that “after this incident the mother’s dislike turned to hatred,” it’s hard as a reader not to shudder and condemn her. But despite my maternal scruples, I don’t let this damning incident tip the scales. Becky has already won me. Perhaps I side with her all the more readily because she’s not aspiring to be good. She’s a rogue who plays the game of life, uncomplaining when she loses a hand, just anteing up again. I love her zest and resilience, her wit and irreverence. Even in the face of my better judgment, I forgive her everything.
AS I look back on myself as a girl reader of these novels, I see someone who was herself more a Jane Eyre but who admired and wanted to be like Becky Sharp.
To begin with appearance, Jane is small and plain. Mrs. Gaskell, Brontë’s first biographer, tells us that “Jane Eyre was naturally and universally thought to be Charlotte herself, but she always denied it, calmly, cheerfully, with the obvious sincerity which characterized all she said,” asserting “the basis was no more than thus: she determined to take in defiance of convention a heroine as small and plain as herself who should nonetheless be interesting.”
I was small and, in ways I shall explain, plain as well. After sizing up my seventeen-and-a-half-inch length and head of dark hair at birth, my mother decided I wasn’t a Penelope, the name she had reserved for an imagined long-legged blond. Maybe my mother would have named baby Blanche Ingram Penelope, even though Blanche, Jane’s seeming rival, is a brunette. Growing up in Southern California, I was surrounded by Blanche Ingram types, at least in terms of their stature—long-legged California girls, who always stood in the rows behind me in class photographs. At one point, I remember worrying if I was going to be a midget, a concern I’m happy to report that proved unfounded—by fifteen, I had reached my adult 5’3 ¾” height. Still, I remained permanently shorter than most of my friends and classmates, and shorter, too, than my mother who was 5’5”. Long-legged as well, she loved to show she could still do the high kicks she had performed in the twenties as a chorus girl on the London stage.
I wasn’t an unattractive child, but I felt myself to be plain. Not ugly, just plain. And plain is also what I sought to be. From age six or seven, for a stretch of years, I insisted on a daily uniform of jeans, a checked flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and brown oxfords—with cowboy boots reserved for special occasions. These clothes couldn’t be worn to school–skirts were required there—but my skirts were always as plain as possible. When I was in sixth grade, my mother tried to upgrade my wardrobe by taking me off to the Saks on Wiltshire Boulevard and helping me choose two outfits—one red and one yellow. The red outfit had a flared skirt to be worn with a crinoline; the skirt of the yellow outfit was straight with a pleat in the back. Both had color-coordinated cotton print blouses and cardigans. When I wore the red outfit to school, classmates asked me if I was dressed for something special. Their assumption mortified me. I was only trying to be more like them. But anything at all fancy seemed a betrayal of my true self.
Jane Eyre, as I did, feels violated in being adorned. In the period of their engagement, Rochester tries to shower her with jewels and dress her in satin and lace. “And then you won’t know me, sir,” retorts Jane. “And I shall not be your Jane Eyre any longer but an ape in a harlequin’s jacket—a jay in borrowed plumes.” I don’t know if I paused over this exchange as a child reader, but, thinking now about both Jane and myself, I find it telling. Jane
