I realize that while my interest in Jane Eyre is in large part how it has been interpreted, Vanity Fair, though subject, of course, as well to shifting critical trends, seems somehow more constant, and I find myself drawn back into the sheer pleasure of rereading it. Adrienne Rich calls Jane Eyre a “tale”—something “between realism and poetry.” A tale can exist in its outline. It can be summarized and can signify. Vanity Fair compels my attention in a different way. While absorbing the good work critics have done on it—Lubbock, Tillotson, Said, Auerbach, and others, I want to immerse myself in its words—never too many for me—and see their writerly construction. I want to savor Thackeray’s wit. I want to think about particular moments in the text: Becky throwing the dictionary out the window, Dobbin defending Georgie at school, Rawdon and Becky getting married, Becky selling her horses in Brussels in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Such moments proliferate to endow the novel for me with the “special force and survival value” Rich speaks of in connection with Jane Eyre. I can understand why one of my colleagues, a professor of religion, chooses to reread Vanity Fair every time she moves. It’s a book that gives me, too, the courage to launch myself anew upon the world, the courage, if you will, to go on.
And Becky Sharp goes on, even beyond the text. Thackeray himself plays cruelly with her future in a May 1848 letter to the Duke of Devonshire. Having espied her, he reports, “kicking up her petticoat in Kensington,” he dwells with some relish on her visible decline:
She has lost what little good looks she once possessed and wears fake hair and teeth (the latter give her a rather ghastly look when she smiles). . . .
P.S. The India mail just arrived announcing the utter ruin of the Union Bank of Calcutta, in which all Mrs. C’s money was. Will Fate never cease to persecute that suffering saint?
No, I say. That’s not in the book. You can’t do that to her. If one must take liberties, I prefer those of Mira Nair’s 2004 film version of Vanity Fair, in which Becky, now Reese Witherspoon, is last seen in India, essentially untouched by time, seated in an elephant howdah with Jos Sedley at her side. This ending, or new beginning, both honors and mocks the novel’s enmeshment with Empire. And what fun to set Becky loose in India. I am sure she will soon snag a maharaja.
One of the most astute assessments of Becky Sharp I have come upon is that of Thackeray’s contemporary George Henry Lewes, in his August 1848 review of Vanity Fair in the Athenium. “The character of Becky,” he writes, “is among the finest creations of modern fiction. She is perfectly unlike any heartless clever woman yet drawn . . . Profound immorality is made to seem consistent with unfailing good humor.”
What Lewes presents in this assessment might be seen as a formula for resilience—that quality in Becky Sharp that I have supremely prized. Becky is endowed with resilience, as was my mother. Resilience means picking yourself up no matter what difficulties or inconveniences befall you and proceeding undaunted with the business of your life. The undaunted part of this is important. Undaunted implies being undefeated. It also suggests being impervious to change. You may be older and you may have lost your singing voice. But your ebullient spirit remains intact. Perhaps your survival depends on your being a little heartless. Life hasn’t really touched you. You haven’t allowed that to happen. You are unchanged though ever adapting to changing circumstances.
Jane Eyre has another, more painful way of surviving. She holds onto her sense of herself, no matter what happens, no matter what blows she receives. She feels these blows acutely; she feels the morsel of bread snatched from her lips and the drop of living water dashed from her cup. But she is tenacious. She holds on.
When I was a child, I needed to believe that my mother was resilient, because she was all I had and she wanted her children to believe in her invulnerability. Surely, though, she must have suffered. When she was in that awful orphanage, when Scott Fitzgerald dropped dead in her living room, when Bow Wow tried to ruin her, when she aged and lost some of her great beauty, she, too, must have suffered and just held on. Probably she was both resilient and tenacious. And I am both of these things as well. I’m still plain Jane, however this disquiets me, doggedly caring for a tough little self. But I’m Becky, too. With zest for the game, whatever its vagaries. So Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre come together. Perhaps they both deserve our compassion.
Daniel Deronda
I am moved by the letter the widowed Gwendolyn Grandcourt writes to Daniel Deronda after the two have met for the last time. From the opening of the novel he has served as the moral compass for George Eliot’s fallible, engaging heroine: the young woman who believed she could “manage” Henleigh Grandcourt—one of English fiction’s most chilling husbands—who married to save her family from financial ruin, though knowing of Grandcourt’s illegitimate children, and has paid for her rash gamble with harrowing suffering that even her husband’s death does not assuage. Gwendolyn has turned eagerly, desperately to Deronda to help her to be “better.” But if all their encounters
