Rebecca started back, a picture of consternation. In the course of this history we have never seen her lose her presence of mind, but she did now and wept some of the most genuine tears that ever fell from her eyes.
“Oh, Sir Pitt!” she said. “Oh, Sir—I am married already.”
A chapter intervenes before we learn about the marriage to Rawdon.
How they were married is not of the slightest consequence to anyone. What is to hinder a Captain who is a major, and a young woman who is of age, from purchasing a license and uniting themselves at any church in this town? Who needs to be told, that if a woman has a will, she will assuredly find a way. My belief is, that one day, when Miss Sharp had gone to pass the forenoon with her dear friend, Miss Amelia Sedley in Russell Square, a lady very like her might have been seen entering a church in the city, in company with a gentleman with dyed mustachios. . . .
And so the passage continues. I find quoting it irresistible, forcing myself to break off with ellipses that at least might suggest its continuing build-up and gusto. The prose conveys Thackeray’s irony, his techniques of distancing, his clever coyness that is a way of telling us everything while seeming to withhold information, his tendency to resist the climactic, a contrast, of course, to Brontë, who builds to her earnest exclamation of “Reader, I married him.”
Perhaps a cynicism I have come by almost as an inheritance inoculates me against the charms of the unironic marriage plot. “I do hope Wendy will be happy in her marriages,” my mother once proclaimed to a friend. We laughed at her telling slip. Into my sixties I’d had only one marriage, yet I feel my choice as a young woman of a husband, as good a person as he was, seemed on some level arbitrary. In the early years of that marriage, I kept having a dream in which I knew I had married someone but couldn’t remember who this was. Various candidates flashed before me as my anxiety mounted. I knew it wasn’t x and I knew it wasn’t y. When I woke up, I was vastly relieved to remember I had married Donald Fairey. The marriage lasted quite a while though not forever.
Thackeray understands the arbitrariness of the heroine’s choice. If Becky can’t marry Jos, she’ll try for a Crawley. She settles for the son, but she could have had the old baronet. In social terms that would have been preferable. What’s love got to do with it? Amelia loves; her choice seems sacred. Yet the reader knows George Osborne is not bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Even the marriage to Dobbin, which the least tender-hearted reader is hard pressed not to cheer, has no merging of bones and flesh. “Farewell, dear Amelia,” writes Thackeray sentimentally—and cynically. “Grow green again, tender little parasite, round the rugged old oak to which you cling.”
But if Thackeray is cynical about love and marriage and Brontë is not, on another key point they come back together: the curtailing of licentious male energy. In an essay I have always found very suggestive and useful, “The Brontës or Myth Domesticated,” Richard Chase argues that in Heathcliff and Rochester, Emily and Charlotte have created passionate, sexual, lawless Byronic heroes who mesmerize the heroines but at the same time must be tamed to achieve a socially and morally acceptable outcome for Victorian England. Hence, the story of Wuthering Heights replays in a second generation that is ultimately gentler and more malleable than the first (at the end of the book the second Cathy is teaching the unlettered Hareton to read). In Jane Eyre it’s Rochester himself who gets tamed. The man who enters the novel bearing down on Jane on his horse (and is unhorsed in prefiguring of change to come) ends up maimed and blind. Even regaining enough sight literally to recognize his son, he is a reformed, domesticated, some would say emasculated husband.
Extending Chase’s paradigm to Vanity Fair, I see a parallel domestication of the unruly male in Rawdon Crawley’s change from dashing gambling captain of the Guards to underemployed father trotting his son around on a pony in Regents Park. But if I can appreciate the need to curb the sexual license of a Rochester, I have to wonder about Thackeray’s good-hearted booby. Does the Captain really need this marital castration?
Nina Auerbach says yes in her chapter on “Incarnations of the Orphan” in Romantic Imprisonment. For Auerbach, the mythic force in these mid-century works is not the Romantic male but the female orphan/governess—an “angel/demon,” using her powers not just to reform and domesticate men but also to effect a revolutionary change in society. Here is Auerbach on Jane:
Throughout the novel she [Jane] talks oddly about her “powers.” She conquers every environment she enters, but her powers are most dramatically evident at Thornfield, one of the great bleak houses of English fiction, bastion of feudal authority and of nineteenth-century English fiction. . . . When Rochester’s opulent estate is reduced to rubble and his opulent body to a charred shell, Jane can return to him as little wife, rather than little witch, tending the ruins of the house she has passed through, cleaned up, and helped bring down.
Becky, too, for Auerbach has extraordinary salutary powers. Reviewing how Becky’s marriage to Rawdon loses him his inheritance which passes to his brother who uses it to renovate their ancestral estate King’s Crawley, and how she accomplishes a similar destruction and renovation in the house of Sedley, weaning Amelia away from the dandified George and encouraging her union with the
