I have two answers.
One: Becky Sharp has a sense of humor, and Jane Eyre doesn’t. Imagine having tea with one or the other. “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,” Jane would confide, proudly straightening her posture as she raises her teacup to her lips. What could one say? “I’m very happy for you after all you’ve gone through.” But I’d feel ill at ease, as if I were intruding on something too private. I think I’d also feel a bit bored.
Becky, on the other hand, could be counted on to amuse me with gossip and practical good sense. Leaning forward confidentially, she’d call a cad we both knew “that selfish humbug, that low bred cockney dandy, that padded booby. . . .” and I’d delight in her description. Perhaps she’d relate her woes, dramatizing herself as a “poor castaway scorned for being miserable.” I’d sympathize while at the same time seeing through her schemes and her poses. I’d have fun with Becky, even if I couldn’t trust her. It would be hard to have fun with Jane.
Two: more than finding Becky a lot more fun than Jane, I also judge her as ultimately the less self-referential, the less selfish of the two characters. To put this differently, Jane’s finest moments are ones of self-assertion—“I love, I hate, I suffer.” I claim my due; Becky’s, on the other hand, are ones of surprising disinterestedness.
In the scene in which Rawdon, released from prison through the kind intervention of his sister-in-law, Lady Jane, returns home to shock a glittering, bejeweled Becky dining à deux with Lord Steyne, Becky gives a “faint scream,” musters a “horrid smile,” and protests her innocence, all to no avail. Steyne accuses Rawdon of complicity with Becky, then moves to make his exit. At that point Rawdon rips the brilliant from her breast, twice strikes the peer with his open hand, and flings him bleeding to the ground. “It was all done,” writes Thackeray, “before Rebecca could interpose. She admired her husband, strong, brave, and victorious.” Steyne slinks out. Rawdon makes Becky open her little desk and discovers how much she’s been hiding and hoarding. “You might have spared me a hundred pounds, Becky, out of all this—I have always shared with you,” he reproaches her. “I am innocent,” Becky repeats weakly as Rawdon leaves her without a word.
Everything in this enjoyably dramatic, even melodramatic scene strikes me as predictable except Becky’s admiration for Rawdon’s moral and physical bravery in the very moment of her own downfall. That feeling goes completely against her self-interest. It is an instance of aesthetic appreciation, the recognition of a supreme performance: Rawdon acting his best self in the exchange with the corrupt Lord Steyne. But it is also her acknowledgment of Rawdon’s moral superiority to Steyne and perhaps even to herself. I think this moment prepares the reader for the climactic exchange between Becky and Amelia at Pumpernickel (the two meet again by chance in the wonderfully named German ducal town), which brings the relations of the pair we have followed since their departure from Miss Pinkerton’s Academy to their final reckoning.
Not just spontaneously but with premeditated resolution Becky determines to rescue Amelia from the Pumpernickel riffraff. “She shall marry the bamboo cane [Dobbin]. I’ll settle it this very night,” she “reasons to herself.” Acting on her good intentions, she produces the letter George Osborne gave her seventeen years before, on the night of the Duke of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, the night before his death on the Waterloo battlefield, in which he asks her to run away with him. And she produces it, Thackeray tells us, “with provoking good humor.” One might argue that getting Amelia out of the way will allow Becky freer room at long last to ensnare Amelia’s brother, Jos Sedley. The cynical reader can make that connection, but Thackeray doesn’t. Without regard in that instance for herself, Becky urges Amelia to write Dobbin. “She treated Emmy like a child and patted her head,” this woman who hasn’t managed to love her own child. This is the closest Thackeray comes, not to redeeming Becky Sharp, for she certainly doesn’t stay redeemed, but to giving her a moment of transcendence. Then learning that Amelia has already written to Dobbin, Becky, ever the actress, ends the scene “screaming and singing.” “‘Un biglietto’ she sang out with Rosina. ‘Eccolo qua.’” In Rossini’s Il Barbiero di Seviglia when Figoro proposes Rosina should write a letter to Count Almaviva, she produces after some hesitation the letter she has already written. Uppermost in Becky’s response to Amelia’s admission is the understanding not that her self-exposure was unnecessary but that she finds herself in a recognizable opera buffa. “The whole house,” writes Thackeray, “echoed with her shrill singing.” Presumably Mrs. Crawley’s voice is not now what it was of yore. But her zestful sense of the game is undiminished.
ii
I ADMIT TO ZEST of my own in championing Becky Sharp over Jane Eyre, in taking sides with the witty rogue against her poor plain foil. A friend expressed her reservations. “I don’t think you’ve resolved this yet,”
