Abstract

This paper argues that there is a Romantic shift in the feminist and individualistic ideology of
Jane Austen's work as her career progresses, and Austen begins to admire different cognitive
qualities in her heroines. At the end of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth's confessed love for
Darcy is a carefully reasoned one - Darcy has righted the wrongs cited in Elizabeth's original
refusal and Elizabeth can justify her own acceptance of him by objective standards. Anne
Elliot of Persuasion, by contrast, accepts Wentworth ultimately not on the basis of anything
he has done differently, but merely by the realization of her own original emotions and
motives as valid. Throughout the novel, Anne develops as this individual on her own, and by
the time she finally marries Wentworth at the end of the novel, the marriage is not needed to
complete her because she has already made her emotional transformation independent of the
marriage proposal. The contextual frameworks for both of Jane Austen's novels Pride and
Prejudice and Persuasion are so similar that they demand side-by-side comparison, but the
heroines of these novels show a very different approach to characterizing the admirable
woman. The evocation of Elizabeth by means of Anne's character serves to elucidate and
cement this shift in Austen's tone and feminist worldview. The similarities juxtaposed with a
discernible shift in the qualities of the heroine strongly suggest that Anne Elliot is a reworking
of Elizabeth Bennet, and that the purpose of Persuasion is to reinvent Pride and Prejudice in
a way shows Austen's reconsideration of the value and motives of marriage and gives even
more intellectual and emotional credit to Persuasion's heroine. There exists a carefully crafted
language of allusion in Austen's works, and especially between these two bookends of her
career, which seem to serve almost as a privatized discourse for Austen's own benefit. In this
way, Austen is showing her own shift into Romanticism, valuing the emotional over the
reasonable, and how this shift should play out into the lives of women. Elizabeth is
representative of women being capable and worthy to reason in the world of men, whereas
Anne's individualism gives women something even more important in Austen's assertion of
the validity and worth of female emotions.

Jane Austen's final novel Persuasion remains the most critically neglected text in her canon.
At the time of its publication it was criticized for being a much less fortunate performance
than [her previous novels] and viewed as little more than a substandard version of her
practice of writing stories devoid of invention...obviously all drawn from experience (The
Critical Heritage, 80, 84). For years, critics did not challenge these unimpressed opinions that
served as the consensus on Austen's final and ultimate contribution to the world. A closer look
at Persuasion, however, reveals it to be Austen's most revolutionary and socially interesting
novel for the way that it portrays the role of the heroine in the world of 19 th century England.
Persuasion is Austen's most radical novel because it accounts for and endorses a philosophy
where action is based upon emotion, instinct and interest for one's own personal happiness.
Additionally, in Persuasion, Austen engages in a language of allusion through the situations
and characters that elicits her first novel, Pride and Prejudice. This evocation indicates that
Austen intends for these two bookends of her career to be in direct dialogue with one another,
and that Persuasion is a powerful revisioning of Pride and Prejudice.
In Persuasion, Austen dramatically shifts from creating her heroine as governed by propriety
and reason to being permitted and encouraged to respond and act based upon emotion and
instinct, an assertion virtually unheard of in the male-dominated sphere of polite society. This

shift is elucidated further by the contextual evocation of her first novel, Pride and Prejudice.
These first and last works share many of the same character and plot features, but the tone and
theme of each are startlingly different. The evocation of Elizabeth by means of Anne's
character and the parallel frameworks of the novels serve to elucidate and cement the shift
from valuing emotion over reason in Austen's tone and feminine worldview. While
Persuasion most resembles Pride and Prejudice in terms of a direct discourse, many of
Austen's other novels, especially Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey will provide
standards by which Austen's progression and the emotional development of the heroine can be
gauged. At the end of her career, Austen strives to define personal happiness and success by a
different rubric than has been demonstrated in her other novels, and in Persuasion, she offers
an argument for the right that a woman in Regency England has to pursue this happiness. The
novel Persuasion addresses the question of happiness and reveals many of Austen's
influences, primarily though the topics of social change in England, the role of the family, the
literature and poetry of Romanticism, and the comparison of the heroines Elizabeth Bennet
and Anne Elliot.
Ever unassuming of her own art, Austen describes her novels to her sister Cassandra as
rather too light and bright and sparkling, implying that because of their setting in the
aristocratic country they are not as serious or worldly as the efforts of her contemporaries
(Letters, 203). From a certain vantage point and on a very superficial level, her other novels
do occupy the same social and geographic space. Austen knew and did not apologize for this.
She famously described her novels as operating with the little bit (two inches) of ivory on
which I work with so fine a brush, a characterization which can seem diminutive if a reader
does not understand the magnitude, importance, and depth of understanding of the world that
lies behind Austen's details of gentlewomen and manners (323). Critics Gilbert and Gubar
assert in The Madwoman in the Attic that: Austen attempted through self-imposed novelistic
limitations to define a secure space, even as she seemed to admit the impossibility of actually
inhabiting such a small space with any degree of comfort (108). Such opinions hold that
Austen writes from such a specific perspective in order to ensure uniformity throughout her
canon. However, Persuasion, Austen's last novel, displays a distinct shift in the way that
Austen views the role of the heroine and her emotions within her small social sphere of
influence.
The contextual frameworks for both of Jane Austen's novels Pride and Prejudice and
Persuasion are so similar that they demand side-by-side comparison, but the heroines of these
novels show a very different approach to characterizing the admirable woman. While not
confined to the conclusions, the last chapters of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion help to
illustrate and encompass the magnitude of Austen's shift. At the end of Pride and Prejudice,
Elizabeth's confessed love for Darcy is a carefully reasoned one Darcy has righted the
wrongs cited in Elizabeth's original refusal and Elizabeth can justify her own acceptance of
him by objective standards. Anne Elliot of Persuasion, by contrast, accepts Wentworth
ultimately not on the basis of anything he has done differently, but merely by the realization
of her own original emotions and motives as valid. The similarities juxtaposed with a
discernible shift in the qualities of the heroine strongly suggest that Anne Elliot is a reworking
of Elizabeth Bennet, and that the purpose of Persuasion is to reinvent Pride and Prejudice.
This reinvention shows Austen's reconsideration of the value and motives of marriage and
gives even more intellectual and emotional credit to Persuasion's heroine.
There exists a carefully crafted language of allusion in Austen's works, and especially
between Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, the two bookends of her career which seem to

serve almost as a privatized discourse for Austen's own benefit. In this way, Austen is showing
her own shift of ideals, valuing the emotional over the reasonable, and how this transition
should play out into the lives of women. Elizabeth is representative of women being capable
and worthy to reason in the world of men, whereas Anne's individualism gives women
something even more important in Austen's assertion of the validity and worth of female
emotions.
Throughout the earlier part of Austen's canon it is clear to readers that her heroines and the
characters around them are judged by the principle of personal merit being ultimately
connected to their power and ability to discern general universal truths. By Persuasion,
however, Austen appears to have shifted to a perspective where she values the courage to
identify and act upon personal values and instincts. This means that the realities she admires
Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice for recognizing are vastly different from the things she holds
as true for Anne in Persuasion. Elizabeth is deft and quick to see through the haughtiness,
foolishness and misguided ideals of her society, and she is a genuinely kind individual who
admires the same in others. Anne, on the other hand, is eventually able to see the worth of her
own instincts and emotions, and to value her duty to herself and her own happiness above
what society says she owes to her family and her class.
In Persuasion, the reader is confronted with one of the most radical novels to focus on the
women's point of view to that date, challenged finally by Jane Eyre twenty-seven years later.
The narrative style of Persuasion is a much more interior narrative than any of Austen's other
novels, and the prose is also unique in the way that it follows and meanders with Anne's
thoughts and perceptions in a style that looks to be borderline stream of consciousness.
Compared to the impeccably plotted and shrewdly narrated linear form of Pride and
Prejudice or the prose of Sense and Sensibility where even the most personal and emotional
moments are imparted through the eyes of an objective narrator, even the narrative tone of
Anne's voice in Persuasion reveals a reassessment by Austen of the innate value of a heroine's
emotional life.

Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice- A

Framework of Allusion
More so than any of her other novels, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion resemble each
other in facts data and issues grappled with. For both of the novels, the original refusal of the
suitor by the heroine is a necessary plot feature for Austen to convey her final point. Further
these two refusals, Elizabeth's of Darcy and Anne's of Wentworth, are purposefully similar in
that they drive the final action of the novel and are important and tumultuous issues for the
heroine, yet these refusals are primarily interior issues for the heroine in the novel. In both the
case of Elizabeth and Anne, few other characters in the novel know that Darcy or Wentworth
have been rejected or consider that the issue significant or noteworthy. Austen is drawing the
comparison between the two situations and heroines by illustrating the refusals as personally
and insularly monumental, but not factors in the greater landscape or the other characters'
reality. Because these two refusals are so similar, but the events that spring from them so
different, Austen is trying to show her reconsideration of Elizabeth's value judgment and
situation. Elizabeth was lucky that despite her rude words to Darcy, his persistence and desire
to reform brought him back to Elizabeth rather quickly. Anne, on the other hand, had to wait
over ten years to rectify her mistake. Austen is specifically referencing Elizabeth's situation

with Anne's back-story, and showing the reader how she would write Pride and Prejudice
differently now at the end of her life. Persuasion is intended to be the story of what happens
when Darcy does not return with another proposal right away and its entire plot is a function
of Austen's reformed values and ideals.
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls Jane Austen the only counterpart to Hegel in literature for
the way that her novels employ dialectical progression as a tool for arriving at a pure truth
(62). Zizek provides many examples of different Austenian equivalents to Hegelian theories.
Additionally, he suggests that whether or not Austen was actually purposely utilizing and
referencing Hegel, she was still the only writer of her time to truly understand the philosophy
of human interaction and relationship. This assertion of Zizek's is connected to the language
of allusion between Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion because both novels use the same
Hegelian tool of misrecognition to allow the characters to arrive at a deeper understanding of
themselves and their relationships. The truth that eventually arises from the conflict and crisis
of misrecognition between the heroine and her suitor is more valuable in quality than the
relationships that would have arisen had the characters recognized and acted upon each others
innate qualities from the beginning. Elizabeth and Darcy misinterpret each others characters,
and while Anne and Wentworth do not suffer from a lack of understanding, Anne is not able to
recognize the value of and her own ability to choose for herself. Austen uses this
philosophical device in both Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion as a means to evoke the
former by the latter and show how her own misrecognition as a novelist was to portray the
ultimate virtue as reason, sense and reform, when really felicity is tied up in self-awareness
and the validation of one's own emotions.
Another allusory element that Pride and Prejudice shares with Persuasion is the presence of a
dastardly bounty-hunting suitor. Charming but corrupt George Wickham is obviously more
malicious in his intentions and actions than William Elliot, but both are similar in that their
primary aspirations in marriage are monetary which conflicts with the philosophy of the
heroine that marriage should be a commitment based upon love and mutual respect. Elizabeth
sees that Wickham could be her intellectual equal, but his poor conduct in relation to
Georgiana Darcy, Mary King, and Lydia Bennet make him morally unsuitable for the alliance
marriage requires. William Elliot, on the other hand, is not so immoral and wicked as
Wickham, but there is no doubt that his goal is after Kellynch Hall and the financial and social
boon that allying himself with Anne would bring. Austen is showing in Pride and Prejudice
how the rejection of a suitor has to be based upon serious moral and social qualms, - both
Wickham and Collins are clearly defective by Elizabeth's rigid standards but in Persuasion,
Austen is conceding that personal preferences and impressions are grounds enough for
rejecting a suitor deemed socially appropriate. This assertion on the part of Austen, and her
revised philosophy on the value of a character's instinct is closely related to the idea that the
working title of Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions. Pride and Prejudice shows how
Austen believed a character's first impression of another to be untrustworthy, as Elizabeth's
interactions with Wickham and Darcy show. Conversely, in Persuasion, the fact that Anne's
initial instincts about William Elliot and Wentworth do hold true at the end of the novel is
drastically revising the truism that Pride and Prejudice alleges to prove. Anne describes
William as: Rational, discreet, polished, not open, no burst of feeling, and this grounds for
dismissal shows how Austen's priorities for her heroine have shifted from what is reasonable
based on empirical evidence to what is desirable from an emotional and personal perspective
(106). The implicit comparison drawn between Wickham and Elliot is advanced even further
by the fact that both characters end up married to another prominent, but less desirable
character in the text. Wickham's folly results in his marriage to Lydia, and Elliot's rejection

leads to his elopement with Mrs. Clay, for the whole time he had been playing a double
game (167).
Letters serve as the cathartic event towards marriage in both novels. Both Darcy's defensive
epistle and Wentworth's furtive note are similar and implicitly in dialogue with one another.
They are viewed as imperative by male writers for voicing emotions and circumstances that
they feel can not be spoken out loud for fear of disgrace and humiliation. In this way, Austen
forces the male characters to act in an epistolatory sphere where they would normally be brash
and overbearing, and this is a radical gesture which serves a very different purpose in Pride
and Prejudice than it does in Persuasion. Darcy's letter to Elizabeth is the turning point in
Pride and Prejudice, the vehicle for change and personal reform in Elizabeth. Nevertheless,
Darcy's letter is also wildly problematic. The letter insults Elizabeth, her family, and her
station in life. Darcy admits to loving Elizabeth, but qualifies the admission with the deep
distaste he feels for his uncontrollable affection. Despite this, upon receipt of the missal,
Elizabeth begins the slow transformation to overcome her pride, and to become more acutely
and deliberately self-aware and finally reciprocate Darcy's love. In stark contrast to this,
Wentworth's letter to Anne is wholly affectionate and complimentary, but in terms of character
development is ineffectual and moot. By the time Wentworth delivers his letter to Anne, she
has already decided that she will take him back given the chance, and that is the true crux of
the novel. The crisis and tension in Persuasion is not whether or not Wentworth will return to
Anne, but whether Anne will reject the family and social ties which caused her to disown her
own happiness as a young woman. Therefore, while both the letters serve the practical
purpose of hastening the plot towards marriage, Elizabeth's receiving of Darcy's letter is
seminal in her progress towards becoming a self-reflective individual. Anne, in contrast, has
made that transformation on her own.
Both Anne and Elizabeth are middle daughters in mildly impoverished aristocratic families
who live in the country. Their fathers are strikingly similar in the crude essentials, as they are
men of good blood who have overspent their means and have little capital with which to make
their daughters attractive for marriage. The role of middle daughters is important for both
Elizabeth and Anne because it relieves them, to some extent, of the familial pressure to marry
early, and allows them the freedom to strike out on their own and defy what is expected for
them in marriage. Neither the trailblazing first child nor the coddled baby, the middle child in
these texts is able to buy some time and space for personal discovery before shoved into the
sphere of marriage. While they both use their small amount of freedom in different ways,
Elizabeth is openly beloved and her father's constant and favorite companion. Elizabeth is
frequently extolled by her father for her virtues and sense, whereas Anne is all but ignored by
her father, held in contempt for her practicality and seen as inferior. The fact that both
Elizabeth and Anne are middle daughters is important in these texts because their placement
in their families dictates much of the family politics that will be taken on in the novels and
ties them together as similar characters.
In lieu of strong parental support, Austen provides role models for happy marital relationships
in the immediate social circle. In Persuasion, the Crofts are openly affectionate and devoted
to one another, Mrs. Croft has found it very rewarding to be the wife of a sea captain,
traveling with him. Mrs. Croft says: We none of us want to be in calm waters all our life.
She provides a model for what happiness Anne could have attained if she had followed her
initial instincts. Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice, Austen places the relationship of the
Garners on a sort of narrative pedestal because they represent a new class of successful but
not aristocratic families. Also, as a part of this new class, they have managed to stay happy

and satisfied with each other despite their many children and years of marriage. This is
important because were Elizabeth only exposed to her own parents' flawed relationship, she
would have little experience with which to pin her own high matrimonial ideals upon.
Like Elizabeth, Anne is described as having been beautiful when she was younger, but of the
kind of beauty that fades with age. Austen takes advantage of the fact that the reader never has
to wonder if Elizabeth will maintain her fine eyes, and Anne, could very easily be an older
version of an unmarried Elizabeth. Both heroines are second daughters known for their
sensible natures, thus Austen is showing the reader that perhaps sense and reason are not the
best ways to ensure one's own happiness after all. The allusion is corroborated further by
Anne's sisters, who are named Elizabeth and Mary, both names present in the daughters of the
Bennet family. Granted the possibility of the coincidence being a matter merely of stock
English names, it seems unlikely that Austen, who had a penchant and a skill for employing
the most loaded and crafty of titles would not be equally careful in naming the characters in
her heroines' families. Everything in the naming of the two novels harkens the other to
memory, including the alliteration of the p's in both titles, and the fact that Pride and
Prejudice was originally titled First Impressions. The notion of first impressions is
tremendously loaded and nuanced concept in relation to Pride and Prejudice, but takes on a
deliberately different slant in Persuasion. Despite the similarity between Persuasion and
Pride and Prejudice and the situations presented therein, the heroines are two very different
women portrayed at two very dissimilar points in their lives. Elizabeth is widely regarded by
everyone around her as charming, beautiful, witty, and the favorite, while Anne is
marginalized for her plainness in the shadow of her more beloved older sister. The internal
difference between the two heroines is that Elizabeth starts Pride and Prejudice as a proud
character who must overcome that defect to find love with Mr. Darcy. In contrast, Anne is
introduced to the reader as already regretful she knows she has made a mistake in rejecting
Wentworth and has matured enough to admit this before the novel even begins.
In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne is scolded and looked down upon for indulging in an
impulsive and emotionally exciting relationship with Willoughby, and it is only when she
finally concedes to marry Colonel Brandon, a man almost twice her age, that she is praised for
being reasonable and proper. In her book, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary
Poovey argues that the novel Sense and Sensibility shows how Jane Austen's ethical
pronouncements are keeping with the 18 th century moralists who denounce emotion and
excess. Austen is careful to structure the novel so that the reader identifies with the sensible
Elinor rather than the passionate Marianne, and to further ensure this reaction from her
readership, all the most passionate and exciting moments, such as Willoughby rescuing
Marianne from the storm, are conveyed through indirect narration to keep the reader at a safe
and disapproving distance. This stands in stark contrast to the narrative style of Persuasion,
which is decidedly interior and personal throughout, which helps the reader to identify and
sympathize with how Anne has been denied the opportunity for emotion and passion by the
expectations placed upon her. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne is cured of her dangerous
excess of passion by the end of the novel. Other female characters who are not cured, like
Lucy Steele, are definitively punished for their impropriety. Austen's final judgment on Lucy
is that she displays: an earnest, an unceasing attention to self interest (376). This explicit
condemnation is interesting in terms of looking at Anne's actions in Persuasion, because
while Austen states that Lucy's unabashed self-interest is indicative of her wanton ill-nature,
Anne is not held to the same moralistic standard. Instead, Anne's bravery in ignoring her
family's wishes is rewarded, and she acts based entirely and exclusively upon what she
perceives will make her happiest.

Anne Elliot and Her Pursuit of Happiness

Austen's comparison of Elizabeth and Anne is meant to show that Anne is representative of a
different personal philosophy on the part of Austen. Further, the comparison serves to show
that Austen has reconsidered what happiness should constitute in Regency England and what
rights a woman has to pursue that happiness and fate. Much of the rhetoric and philosophy of
this time that will influence Austen to make a case for Anne Elliot's right to pursue her own
personal and emotional happiness is the same rhetoric being used to justify the American and
French Revolutions. Austen clearly clings to the idea of humankind not being defined by the
conventional indicators of their social class or political system. An earlier contemporary of
Austen's, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote an extended defense of the causes and influences for the
French Revolution. In it, Wollstonecraft writes:
a new spirit has gone forth, to organize the body politic; and where is this criterion to be
found, to estimate the means by which the influence of this spirit can be confined, now
enthroned in the hearts of half the inhabitants of the globe? Reason has, at last, shown her
captivating face. . . The image of God implanted in our nature is now more rapidly expanding;
and, as it opens, liberty with maternal wing seems to be soaring to regions far above vulgar
annoyance, promising shelter to all mankind (Wollstencraft, 19).
In this passage, Wollstencraft is not only assigning a female gender to liberty, reason, and
God, but she also reveals that the ideal social model is built upon an ethic of care and respect
for the rights of individuals. Overall, Wollstonecraft condemns severely the violent outcome
of the Revolution, yet staunchly maintains that more good was accomplished than ill by the
revolt (Mellor, 68). This idea of liberty being found under the wing of maternal shelter will
become important later in this paper when the theme and implications of the missing
mother is discussed. The connection between a philosophical treatise on the justification for
the French Revolution and the story of Anne Elliot deciding to marry a ship captain may not
seem immediately evident, but in Persuasion, Austen is implementing the radical theory of
Wollstonecraft's social commentary within the microcosm of Anne's life.
The beginning of the 19 th century was time of great unease and unrest among the aristocracy
of England for two main reasons. The first revolves around the French Revolution taking
place just across the English Channel. Civil unrest in France had very quickly morphed from a
reasoned social movement to a bloody reign of terror, and the aristocracy of England was all
too aware how rapidly the movement had taken hold and how close in proximity France really
was. All of Austen's heroines are of the landed gentry, so the quiet dis-ease of a potential
proletariat uprising necessarily pervades all her novels. Social revolution proves to be a topic
that Austen is highly ambivalent about because the philosophy underlying the recent
revolutions in France and America embody the same ideals that allow Anne to pursue her own
happiness at the conclusion of Persuasion. The Declaration of Independence written by the
Americans in 1776 could just as easily have read as a mission statement for Anne in her move
to reject English societal and familial constraints and embrace her own ideals. When the
Founding Fathers wrote that all men were equal and: endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness they
probably did not have the disempowered female class in England specifically in mind. But the
same rhetoric would protect English women as well as American colonists.

None of Austen's novels explicitly or frankly discuss the goods or evils of revolution, and
Austen is clearly physically bound to the class system in England so thoroughly that she can
not conceive to create a heroine outside of her own station and class. Yet, at the same time,
intellectually she obviously sympathizes with and implements the rhetoric used to overthrow
those same systems in France and America. The character of Anne in Persuasion shows this
tension, and even at the conclusion of the novel when she has liberated herself from the
familial and social constraints which fettered her in her youth, she remains tied to the
financial realities which remind us of her economic class.
By the time Persuasion is written, France had begun to instigate the Napoleonic wars across
Europe which also affected England emotionally and militarily. Austen references this issue of
the aggressive Napoleon and social issues in France more explicitly in Persuasion than any of
her other novels with the many soldier characters who speak to their experiences at war.
However, the true social issue Persuasion is the rise of the English trading class and the social
ramifications upon the impoverished landed aristocracy. The idea that the not nobly born
trading class could raise themselves to and above the economic and social status of the
aristocracy was in many ways more radical and terrifying than anything that the French were
threatening, militarily or socially. Of course, Persuasion is not the first time where Austen
struggles with this idea of British class in a novel. In Pride and Prejudice, it is eluded to that
Mr. Bingley's wealth is not as noble as Mr. Darcy's because his family acquired the wealth in
trade. There is a sharp sense of irony that follows Caroline Bingley wherever she goes,
because for all her haughtiness and nasty comments about Cheapside, the reader of Austen's
day would have known that her wealth was not aristocratic, which would have made it
inferior. Mr. Darcy, in contrast, is treated by Austen as the redeemed aristocracy: at first he
seems arrogant and representative of everything wrong with the current social system, but by
the end of the novel, he has proven his generosity and ultimate goodness.
While the success of Pride and Prejudice rests on the fact that the reader truly believes that
Darcy and Elizabeth are genuinely in love and will live a happy life together, it is certainly
convenient that Elizabeth happens to fall in love with the richest, most aristocratic man
introduced in the book, and her older, simpler sister marries the man whose money was
acquired through trade. In Persuasion, Austen is treating the issue of the class system in
England very differently than ever before, because it is her first novel where the happy
conclusion does not include the reformation of any member of the gentry to prove the social
and innate value of the aristocracy. At Persuasion's conclusion, instead of a confirmation of
the world being at peace the way it was with inherited wealth reigning supreme over
England's economy, we see Austen giving her readership an assertion that money and power
are indeed shifting away from the impotent aristocracy and instead to this class of self-made
individuals. The radicality of this social statement is easy for a modern audience to overlook
and underestimate, but at the time, power and class shift would have been very troubling and
controversial issues.
Persuasion is also the first novel where Austen portrays genuinely impoverished and lower
class characters like Mrs. Smith and her nurse. Mrs. Smith used to be a member of the gentry,
but lost everything after her husbands death and became destitute in her widowhood.
Considering that the bulk of Austen's canon is made up of heroines who are gentlewomen
teetering on the brink of poverty, this is a very interesting and loaded character for Anne to
befriend. Essentially, in this last novel, Austen finally shows her readership the darker side of
the social and economic issue that she has been tiptoeing around for her entire career. Women
can not own or inherit property, and so without advocacy and support, they can easily fall into

destitution. In regard to Anne's visits to Mrs. Smith, Anne's father says that: everything that
revolts other people, low company, paltry rooms, foul air, disgusting associations, are inviting
to you (125). And indeed, Anne does not shy away from her visits with the lower class which
serves just as much to show a critique of gentle society's response to fallen gentry as it does to
showcase Anne's personal and revolutionary goodness. Upon the story's conclusion, Mrs.
Smith's livelihood has been restored to her because Wentworth is convinced to act upon her
behalf. The presence of Mrs. Smith and the frank discussion of her financial and social
troubles is a statement of and testament to the need for a reevaluation of the value and
applicability of traditional class distinctions in 19 th century England.
This class issue is complicated by the fact that even while Wentworth remains the same in
personal merit and essentials, his situation has changed. Though Anne marries him for the
same reasons she loved him before the novel started, the reader is left with the problem that
Wentworth is not exactly the same as he was before by the time he proposes to Anne the
second time, he has become very rich. The whole point of the novel is Anne's remorse about
her rejection of Wentworth, and she recognizes her mistake before she learns of his greatly
increased fortune, yet that serendipity just doesn't quite ring true. Austen has clearly made a
class shift, with the qualities she is valuing in Anne and the people that surround her.
Nevertheless, at the end of her life, Austen is still not willing to say that a couple who loves
each other would be happy without abundant fortune and prestige.

Poetry and Moderation: Vices and Virtues

Most of Austen's heroines are readers, at least in the most casual sense, and often the books
and authors these heroines are reading affect the plot and theme of the novel. For example, in
Northanger Abbey, Catherine Mooreland is greatly influenced by the Anne Radcliffe's Gothic
novels, which were hugely popular during the time in which the novel is set. It is because of
Catherine's obsession with the imaginative and fanciful aspects of these Gothic novels that the
novel is centered upon her transformation from a woman seeking guidance disproportionately
from fiction to someone who can trust her own rational perceptions (Mekler, 29). This use of
outside literature as a plot device in Northanger Abbey differs greatly from its function in
Persuasion, because in the latter novel, Austen is using poetry as justification for Anne's
emotional maturity, whereas in Northanger Abbey Catherine must move away from the gothic
novels to prove her maturation. Anne, by contrast, is not compelled by trendy pulp literature,
but instead is deeply affected by the poetry of the Romantics. Indeed, the notion of Romantic
poetry in Persuasion is used as an important instructive device in Anne's development to
individuality, and as a thematic touchstone for helping to elucidate Austen's intentions and
thesis. In the passage where Anne and Benwick discuss poetry, Anne says:
He was evidently a young man of considerable taste in reading, although principally in poetry;
and besides the persuasion of having given him at least an evening's indulgence in the
discussion of subjects, which his usual companions had probably no concern in, she had the
hope of being of real use to him in some suggestions as to the duty and benefit of struggling
against affliction, which had naturally grown out of their conversation (italics mine, 76).
Obviously Persuasion is a loaded title given the way Anne had been persuaded against her
own happiness in the beginning of her life. But this quotation also shows how Austen is
implicitly referencing the persuasion that coerced Anne into rejecting Wentworth initially, and
her persuasion towards Romantic poetry which eventually leads her to be able to embrace the

ideology that necessitates her rejection of the social and familial pressures upon her in favor
of an enlightened emotional life. The book's title embodies dual meaning: firstly of Anne's
unhappiness in her family and station in life being attributed to her being persuaded away
from her original affections towards Wentworth, and secondly the ultimately redemptive
power of her interest in and persuasion towards the poetry that influences the theme of this
novel.
Through Anne's conversations, primarily those held with Captain Benewick about poetry and
Romanticism, Austen references several poems specifically, all written by Sir Walter Scott
and Lord Byron. The poems in Persuasion are Marmion and The Lady of the Lake by
Scott and The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Giaour written by Byron, whom Anne
calls the one poet. Byron was wildly popular and widely read at the time of Persuasion's
writing, so it is not unusual that Austen would have Anne reading him. Instead, what is radical
and surprising is that Austen has Anne able to see past the sensationalism that was Byron's
public persona and intelligently discuss his dark blue seas with Captain Benwick on the
seashore at Lyme (109). Austen has literature serving a very different purpose in Persuasion
than in her other novels, because it is something to be considered, treasured and used as a
moral and emotional guide. As an example of the high voltage and power held by Austen's
interesting selection of poems in Persuasion, Marmion, published by Scott in 1808 is still
the most famous poetic treatment of the Battle of Flodden Field. This battle took place under
Henry XIII in 1513 while the English were at war with the French yet again, but the actual
fight was between the British and the oppressed Scots who had been armed by the French. By
the end of the poem, the hero Marmion has died, the lovers have been reunited, and a nun is
walled up in a fort as punishment for breaking her vows. In the context of Persuasion, written
at a time when England was still at war with France, the Scots were still oppressed, and
women could still be walled up literally and metaphorically for abusing their chastity, this
poem has explosive significance for its treatment of political, social, religious and women's
issues. 1
In this way, the reader can see why Austen would assert the alluring danger of poetry,
especially in the aristocratic sector that was supposed to maintain and support the status quo,
at home and abroad. Anne says: it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed
by those who enjoyed it completely In labeling poetry as a dynamic force, Austen references
the explosive and virulent nature of Romanticism and how it both shocked and allured the
world's literate population. All the treacherous things about the poems Anne loves so much
are the same aspects that made the literary movement of the time so revolutionary and intense.
In the end, Austen sanctions this intensity because she says that Anne, herself, had been
eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would bear ill examination (97).
Austen's espousement of Romantic poetry in the plot and context of Persuasion also becomes
significant in relation to her other novels. As mentioned before, Catherine in Northanger
Abbey is fascinated by Gothic novels but realizes by the end of the novel that she must reject
them to fully mature. Similarly, Marianne in Sense and Sensibility is drawn to the poetry of
William Cowper, but finally learns to leave such imprudent passion behind when she
begrudgingly embraces propriety at the end of the novel. This is not surprising, because the
idealism of literature is frankly not conducive to remaining resigned to one's place in place as
a female in society. In all these previous instances, Austen reveals her literary sympathies, but
is not optimistic enough to believe that their liberalism will honestly serve her heroines well
in their practical lives. In these instances, Austen's espousement of reason over the emotion of
Radcliffe and Cowper sets the narrative of Persuasion in stark contrast to her earlier novels.

While Austen grants that Romantic poetry is perilous to interact with in Persuasion, she never
requires that Anne discard the literature she loves to become content with her place in society.
Rather, she does quite the opposite when she allows Anne to maintain her passionate reading
and her sense: Austen also posits the unlikely and surprising union of Captain Benewick and
Louisa Musgrove as a result of their enjoying poetry together. Therefore, Austen diverges
from her earlier pronouncements that a woman must disown both knowledge and art to be at
peace with the order of society. Society is changing, power is shifting, and women should be
able to follow their happiness and instincts. Austen is giving very different and fresh message
that Romantic poetry will not only enlighten a large body of people, but perhaps even induce
them to act in a socially revolutionary manner.
The presence and celebration of Romantic poetry in Persuasion would be confusing if Austen
were not trying to make a genre shift with the novel Persuasion while also adapting her ideals
and values for the heroine. The barest and most precise tenets of the Romantic movement individualism, imagination, and emotion - are all present in Persuasion and viewed as
qualities in Anne to be admired, not character flaws that needed to be overcome as they are in
her other novels. In this way, the reader can see how if the argument can be made that
Romanticism gave individualism and the emotional life back to a human race bogged down in
reason and empiricism, then Austen is reacting to that literary movement by trying to give the
very same gift back to women who throughout history have been belittled and feared and
condescended to for their emotions. On this point, Austen is echoing Wollstencraft who says
that liberty is a feminine virtue, and that it is the maternal parts of society that will provide
care and respect for each person's individual rights.
In light of this reading of Austen's radicality and espousement of the emotional Romantics, it
is ironic that for so many years Austen has been interpreted primarily as a restrained
conformist of a subjugated body of female writers. Charlotte Bront, writing in 1848 accused
Austen of being a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate
flowers (Gaskell, 282). Most Janeites would take issue with this statement in relation to her
entire canon, but at the very least, Persuasion proves itself to be anything but neat and
reserved, rather it is full of the emotion, passion and revolutionary ideals of the Romantics.

The Heroine and Her Family

Another aspect of Austen's canon that is woven throughout many of her novels but finally
comes to a decisive head in Persuasion is the notion of the missing mother that leaves the
heroine bereft of maternal guidance. In Persuasion, the late Mrs. Elliot is recognized as
having not been the happiest woman in her choice of marriage partners despite her sensible
and amiable character (7). Even her daughters are aware of the fact or her unhappiness, so
perhaps Austen is implying that had Mrs. Elliot lived, she would have urged or least allowed
Anne to act differently in her own marriage choices. Gilbert and Gubar write that: The fact
that her mother's loss initiated [Anne's] invisibility and silence is important in a book that that
so closely associates the heroine's felicity with her ability to articulate her sense of herself as a
woman (178). At the same time, it is clear that Austen is advocating a new kind of woman,
with fresh concerns and ideals, and the role of the traditional mother is antiquated because
they no longer can teach their daughters how to best exist in the world. For Anne to have a
supportive and active mother in her life would most likely lead to her making the same
societal decisions that Austen is fighting against in this text.

Many scholars have noted and commented upon the recurrent theme of the missing mother in
19 th century British women's literature, especially in the novels of Jane Austen, the Bronts
and Mary Shelley. L. Adam Mekler, in his article Recovering the Absent Mother in Jane
Austen and Mary Shelley, suggests that: the missing' mothers ...provide opportunities for the
corrective' instruction of patriarchal figures whose teachings threaten the authority and
autonomy, and even the very lives, of different female characters in these novels (25).
Mekler advances this argument to illustrate the situation of Catherine Moreland in
Northanger Abbey, but one could see how it could perhaps also apply to Anne Elliot, who
because of her mother's death has been left to the manipulative influence of other social forces
around her. Gilbert and Gubar advance a similar interpretation when they say that Austen is:
aware that male superiority is far more than fiction, and she always defers to the economic,
social, and political power of men as she dramatizes how and why female survival depends on
gaining male approval and protection (154). In the absence of her mother, Lady Russell
assumes the role of Anne's advisor in matters of marriage and other smaller decisions for
personal happiness, but despite her best intentions advises Anne to act against her emotional
better judgment. As a woman, she can not be considered a traditional patriarchal force, but
as a purposely unmarried woman who manages her own affairs, Lady Russell has a very
masculine amount of control over her own life. For whatever reason, however, she does not
view Anne as capable or worthy of the same. Anne's father is the typical caricature of the
disinterested paternal figure who wants Anne to serve no other purpose than what will be the
most beneficial to him at any given moment in time. In contrast to Elizabeth in Pride and
Prejudice, who learns from the patriarchal figures around her by expecting honorability and
fiscal virtue from her suitor rather than traditional romance, Anne finally rejects the forces
that lead her astray from her initial intentions to marry Wentworth.
In her article, Jane Austen and the Tradition of the Absent Mother, Susan Peck MacDonald
takes a different stance on the recurring dearth of maternal influence. MacDonald allocates
this pervasive theme primarily to a narrative function when she says: if she is dead or absent,
the good mother can remain an ideal without her presence disrupting or preventing the
necessary drama of the novel (58-59). MacDonald goes on to stipulate that if the mother
insists on remaining present for her daughter's maturation, then she necessarily must be
flawed in a way that will not alleviate her daughter's trials but augment them. And though it is
true that a novel like Pride and Prejudice would suffer a crushing blow narratively if Mrs.
Bennet were an intelligent and sensitive mother rather than the comically atrocious maternal
figure that plagues Elizabeth and Jane in their attempts to secure genuine love, it seems as if
the pain suffered by the heroines without strong maternal support is both too frequent in the
genre and too devastating to be merely a functional corollary to the tale of a young woman
coming out into society.
When women are not given supportive and interested families, they are left to find themselves
and their place in the world on their own. Anne's absent and disinterested parents make it
easier for her to become individualistic and more acutely self-aware. The loss of the mother
specifically references the trend towards the idealization of the functional and effective
nuclear family in the latter part of the 18 th and early 19 th centuries, especially the nurturing
mother who remained in intimate proximity to her children throughout their childhood.
During this time, the visual image of the mother breastfeeding and nurturing her children
became very popular in British magazine illustrations and poetry (Mellor, 81). Austen's novels
contain none of these popular images of the nursing mother, and so Austen seems to negate or
challenge this cultural shift with the mother's gaping absence or moral defection. Rather than
portraying the mother through her biological ties to the infant, specifically through eroticized

and milk-filled breasts, Austen means to illustrate the different ways the role of mother can be
socially executed. In one way or another, the mother shows the responsibility a woman has to
be a moral guide to her daughter and how through either absence or impotence, the daughter
will be left without her natural instructor. This absence does not always result in the worst
case scenario, however, because in many ways, Austen is showing how the traditional mother
is obsolete to the new woman. Without a mother's stabilizing presence, a heroine is able to
propel herself forward to a consciousness that allows her to make decisions based upon her
own interpretation of what is good and desirable.
All this leads to the question of the contract of family versus duty to one's self. Must a heroine
remain loyal to her family if her family does not remain loyal to her? For women, especially
unmarried women in early 19 th century England, the family is the traditional and primary
means for economic support, happiness and safety. Through the character of Anne and the
undesirable position her family places her in Persuasion, Austen begins to suggest that these
systems are not infallible or universal. Finally, Anne finds the freedom and the courage to
reject the standards her family believes she owes them, and to act based wholly on her own
desires and vision of happiness. Not only is the role of the mother obsolete to the new woman
who is permitted passion and happiness, but the entire family is given an ethic of care and
support that they must adhere to or the heroine's social responsibilities to her family will be
null and void.

Conclusion
Jane Austen died of a degenerative illness in July of 1817 shortly after her final draft of
Persuasion was completed. Both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were to be published by
her brother posthumously, so Austen never had a chance to publicly defend or clarify the
ideals put forth by Persuasion's social and moral prescription. In fact, upon her death, Austen
was instantly beatified by her family members, her sister Cassandra severely edited and
destroyed many of Austen's letters in order to make them conform to her own sense of
propriety, and her brother wrote a preface to Persuasion that focused primarily upon Austen's
Christian goodness rather than her triumphs as a novelist. The effect of these actions still
reverberates through the literary world and public perceptions of Jane Austen. In a work titled
The Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, Kathleen Tillitson speaks to this simplification of
Austen's canon and how the majority of those acquainted with Austen's image entirely miss
the complexity of her worldview. Tillitson writes: A writer of the school of Miss Austen' is a
much-abused phrase, applied now-a-days by critics who, it is charitable to suppose, have
never read Miss Austen's works, to any female writer who composes dull stories without
incident, full of level conversation, and concerned with characters of middle life (Tillitson,
144).
In this way, it seems as if the public opinion on Austen since her death has been extremely
polarized between those who have understood her and hold her work beloved, and those who
can not get past the polished and proper image that Austen's family members very effectively
insisted would outlive her. Any member of the first group of people would hope that a
thorough and careful reading of Persuasion would cure the second group of their
misconceptions, because this final work is anything but a comedy of manners, neatly trimmed
and executed. Persuasion is a novel about revolution and a dying aristocracy. In Persuasion,
Austen renounces the notion that women should be forced to marry within their social class
and that class distinctions are worthwhile at all. Austen echoes Wollstencraft in insisting that

women be educated and well-read and allowed to hold emotional and subversive literature
close to their hearts, even if it complicates a gentlewoman's worldview. Anne Elliot's actions
show overbearing family influence to be an invalid force in a woman's life, and the maternal
figure to be an antiquated role model for a woman aspiring to find happiness from a 19 th
century world. Even more radical, all these ideals are placed directly against the backdrop and
in opposition to what is perhaps Austen's best known and revered novel, Pride and Prejudice.
This comparison serves to show how Jane Austen's life and ideals were not static and stony,
but that she was constantly questioning and amending what she knew and held true about the
world she lived in. Austen's final contribution to the literary world drastically amends the
virtues placed forth as ultimate in Pride and Prejudice, reason and propriety. Instead, in
Persuasion, Austen staunchly asserts that goodness and happiness lie in a woman's ability and
courage to act upon her passion, emotion and instinct.

Author information
Claire Tarlson is history and English major from Seattle University. Her primary academic
interests are the 19 th century novel and modern European history. Claire also enjoys karaoke
and knitting.

Pride and Prejudice Theme of Women and

Femininity
Although Pride and Prejudice begins with the anonymous figure of a rich, single man, the
novel is actually concerned with the plight of the poor (OK, middle-class), single woman.
Most of the women we see here (the Bennet girls, Charlotte Lucas) are caught in a bind.
These girls are too high class to get jobs (jobs aren't really an option for proper young ladies
in early 19th-century England), but not high class enough to inherit wealth to support
themselves. Basically these women have two options: wedding bells or penny-pinching old
maidhood. Pride and Prejudice offers us a look into this rather intensely feminine world of
courting, marriage decisions, and social realities.

Questions About Women and Femininity

1. How are the lives of the middle-class women (the Bennet girls, Charlotte) different
than the lives of the high-class women (Miss Bingley, Miss Darcy, etc.). How do their
options in life compare? How might their approaches to courtship and marriage
compare?
2. How are the male and female worlds separated? What do women have control over?
3. What are the various ways that women relate to each other in this novel? Does the
novel give us examples of female friendship, or does it mostly set women up as
competitors? What is the difference between sisterhood and friendship are portrayed?
4. What is education like for young women? How do we know?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devils advocate.

The novel offers a startlingly complete continuum of women's characters, with Lydia and Mrs.
Bennet on one side as the least responsible and capable, and with Lady de Bourgh on the
other as the most powerful and controlling. This range is much wider and more diverse than
the range of male characters.
Elizabeth is held up as an alternative role model for females. By providing a female character
who is bold, independent, honest, and forthright, Jane Austen is making a radical critique of
the social construction of female identity in early nineteenth-century England.
Jane Austen lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family on the lower fringes of
the English gentry.[2] Her family's steadfast support was critical to Austen's development as a
professional writer.[3] Austen read draft versions of all of her novels to her family, receiving
feedback and encouragement,[4] and it was her father who sent out her first publication bid.[5]
Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five.
During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary
novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major
novels and began a fourth. With the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and
Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a
published writer.
Novel-writing was a suspect occupation for women in the early 19th century, because it
imperiled their social reputation by bringing them publicity, viewed as unfeminine. Therefore,
like many other female writers, Austen published anonymously.[6] Eventually, though, her
novels' authorship became an open secret among the aristocracy.[7] During one of her visits to
London, the Prince Regent invited her, through his librarian, James Stanier Clarke,[8] to view
his library at Carlton House; his librarian mentioned that the Regent admired her novels and
that "if Miss Austen had any other Novel forthcoming, she was quite at liberty to dedicate it to
the Prince".[9] Austen, who disapproved of the prince's extravagant lifestyle, did not want to
follow this suggestion, but her friends convinced her otherwise: in short order, Emma was
dedicated to him. Austen turned down the librarian's further hint to write a historical romance
in honour of the prince's daughter's marriage.[10]

A watercolour sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra (c. 1804)

In the last year of her life, Austen revised Northanger Abbey (1817), wrote Persuasion (1817),
and began another novel, eventually titled Sanditon, which was left unfinished at her death.
Austen did not have time to see Northanger Abbey or Persuasion through the press, but her
family published them as one volume after her death and her brother Henry included a
"Biographical Notice of the Author".[11] This short biography sowed the seeds for the myth of
Austen as a quiet, retiring aunt who wrote during her spare time: "Neither the hope of fame
nor profit mixed with her early motives ... [S]o much did she shrink from notoriety, that no
accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any
productions of her pen ... in public she turned away from any allusion to the character of an
authoress."[12] However, this description is in direct contrast to the excitement Austen shows in
her letters regarding publication and profit: Austen was a professional writer.[13]
Austen's works are noted for their realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of free
indirect speech, burlesque and irony.[14] They critique the novels of sensibility of the second
half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.[15] As Susan
Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain, Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichs as love at first
sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of
the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to
financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents".[16] Austen's plots, though comic,[17]
highlight the way women of the gentry depended on marriage to secure social standing and
economic security.[18] Like the writings of Samuel Johnson, a strong influence on her, her
works are fundamentally concerned with moral issues.[19]

18121821: Individual reactions and contemporary

reviews

In 1816, the editors of The New Monthly Magazine noted Emma's publication but
did not see it as important enough to review.

Austen's novels quickly became fashionable among opinion-makers, namely, those aristocrats
who often dictated fashion and taste. Lady Bessborough, sister to the notorious Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, commented on Sense and Sensibility in a letter to a friend: "it is a
clever novel. ... tho' it ends stupidly, I was much amused by it."[20] The fifteen-year-old
daughter of the Prince Regent, Princess Charlotte Augusta, compared herself to one of the
book's heroines: "I think Marianne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so
good, the same imprudence, &tc".[21] After reading Pride and Prejudice, playwright Richard
Sheridan advised a friend to "[b]uy it immediately" for it "was one of the cleverest things" he
had ever read.[22] Anne Milbanke, future wife of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, wrote that "I
have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior work." She
commented that the novel "is the most probable fiction I have ever read" and had become "at

present the fashionable novel".[23] The Dowager Lady Vernon told a friend that Mansfield
Park was "[n]ot much of a novel, more the history of a family party in the country, very
natural"as if, comments one Austen scholar, "Lady Vernon's parties mostly featured
adultery."[24] Lady Anne Romilly told her friend, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, that
"[Mansfield Park] has been pretty generally admired here" and Edgeworth commented later
that "we have been much entertained with Mansfield Park".[24]
Despite these positive reactions from the elite, Austen's novels received relatively few reviews
during her lifetime:[25] two for Sense and Sensibility, three for Pride and Prejudice, none for
Mansfield Park, and seven for Emma. Most of the reviews were short and on balance
favourable, although superficial and cautious.[26] They most often focused on the moral
lessons of the novels.[27] Moreover, as Brian Southam, who has edited the definitive volumes
on Austen's reception, writes in his description of these reviewers, "their job was merely to
provide brief notices, extended with quotations, for the benefit of women readers compiling
their library lists and interested only in knowing whether they would like a book for its story,
its characters and moral".[28] Asked by publisher John Murray to review Emma, famed
historical novelist Walter Scott wrote the longest and most thoughtful of these reviews, which
was published anonymously in the March 1816 issue of the Quarterly Review. Using the
review as a platform from which to defend the then disreputable genre of the novel, Scott
praised Austen's works, celebrating her ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the
common walks of life, and presenting to the reader ... a correct and striking representation of
that which is daily taking place around him".[29] Modern Austen scholar William Galperin has
noted that "unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence from realistic
practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been
the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence".[30] Scott wrote in his private journal in
1826, in what later became a widely quoted comparison:
Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written
novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the
involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most
wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now
going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and
characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is
denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early! [31][32]

Novelist Walter Scott praised Austen's "exquisite touch which renders ordinary
commonplace things ... interesting".[31]

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published together posthumously in December 1817, were
reviewed in the British Critic in March 1818 and in the Edinburgh Review and Literary
Miscellany in May 1818. The reviewer for the British Critic felt that Austen's exclusive
dependence on realism was evidence of a deficient imagination. The reviewer for the
Edinburgh Review disagreed, praising Austen for her "exhaustless invention" and the
combination of the familiar and the surprising in her plots.[33] Overall, Austen scholars have
pointed out that these early reviewers did not know what to make of her novelsfor example,
they misunderstood her use of irony. Reviewers reduced Sense and Sensibility and Pride and
Prejudice to didactic tales of virtue prevailing over vice.[34]
In the Quarterly Review in 1821, the English writer and theologian Richard Whately
published the most serious and enthusiastic early posthumous review of Austen's work.
Whately drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as
Homer and Shakespeare, praising the dramatic qualities of her narrative. He also affirmed the
respectability and legitimacy of the novel as a genre, arguing that imaginative literature,
especially narrative, was more valuable than history or biography. When it was properly done,
as in Austen, Whately said, imaginative literature concerned itself with generalised human
experience from which the reader could gain important insights into human nature; in other
words, it was moral.[35] Whately also addressed Austen's position as a female writer, writing:
"we suspect one of Miss Austin's [sic] great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us
into the peculiarities of female characters. ... Her heroines are what one knows women must
be, though one never can get them to acknowledge it."[36] No more significant, original Austen
criticism was published until the late 19th century: Whately and Scott had set the tone for the
Victorian era's view of Austen.[35]

18211870: Cultured few

George Henry Lewes, partner of George Eliot, compared Austen to Shakespeare.

Austen had many admiring readers during the 19th century, who, according to critic Ian Watt,
appreciated her "scrupulous ... fidelity to ordinary social experience".[37] However, Austen's
novels did not conform to certain strong Romantic and Victorian British preferences, which
required that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and color
in the writing".[38] Victorian critics and audiences were drawn to the work of authors such as
Charles Dickens and George Eliot; by comparison, Austen's novels seemed provincial and
quiet.[39] Although Austen's works were republished beginning in late 1832 or early 1833 by
Richard Bentley in the Standard Novels series, and remained in print continuously thereafter,
they were not bestsellers.[40] Southam describes her "reading public between 1821 and 1870"
as "minute beside the known audience for Dickens and his contemporaries".[41]
Those who did read Austen saw themselves as discriminating readersthey were a cultured
few. This became a common theme of Austen criticism during the 19th and early 20th
centuries.[42] Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes articulated this theme in a
series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. In "The Novels of Jane Austen",
published anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, Lewes praised Austen's novels for
"the economy of art ... the easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid from superfluous
elements" and compared her to Shakespeare.[43] Arguing that Austen lacked the ability to
construct a plot, he still celebrated her dramatisations: "The reader's pulse never throbs, his
curiosity is never intense; but his interest never wanes for a moment. The action begins; the
people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the
entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors as well as
spectators of the little drama."[44]
Reacting against Lewes's essays and his personal communications with her, novelist Charlotte
Bront admired Austen's fidelity to everyday life but described her as "only shrewd and
observant" and criticised the absence of visible passion in her work.[45] To Bront, Austen's
work appeared formal and constrained, "a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with
neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open
country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck".[46]

19th-century European translations

Isabelle de Montolieu translated Austen's works into French.

Austen's novels appeared in some European countries soon after their publication in Britain,
beginning in 1813 with a French translation of Pride and Prejudice, quickly followed by
German, Danish, and Swedish editions.[47] Their availability in Europe was not universal.
Austen was not well known in Russia and the first Russian translation of an Austen novel did
not appear until 1967.[47] Despite the fact that Austen's novels were translated into many
European languages, Europeans did not recognise her works as part of the English novel
tradition. This perception was reinforced by the changes made by translators who injected
sentimentalism into Austen's novels and eliminated their humour and irony. European readers
therefore more readily associated Walter Scott's style with the English novel.[48]
Because of the significant changes made by her translators, Austen was received as a different
kind of novelist on the Continent than in Britain.[49] For example, the French novelist Isabelle
de Montolieu translated several of Austen's novels into a genre in which Montolieu herself
wrote: the French sentimental novel. In Montolieu's Pride and Prejudice, for example,
vivacious conversations between Elizabeth and Darcy were replaced by decorous ones.[50]
Elizabeth's claim that she has "always seen a great similarity in the turn of [their] minds" (her
and Darcy's) because they are "unwilling to speak, unless [they] expect to say something that
will amaze the whole room" becomes "Moi, je garde le silence, parce que je ne sais que dire,
et vous, parce que vous aiguisez vos traits pour parler avec effet." ("Me, I keep silent, because
I don't know what to say, and you, because you excite your features for effect when
speaking.") As Cossy and Saglia explain in their essay on Austen translations, "the equality of
mind which Elizabeth takes for granted is denied and gender distinction introduced".[50]
Because Austen's works were seen in France as part of a sentimental tradition, they were
overshadowed by the works of French realists such as Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert.[51]
German translations and reviews of those translations also placed Austen in a line of
sentimental writers, particularly late Romantic women writers.[52] However, a study of other
important dimensions of the French translations, such as free indirect discourse (FID) do
much to nuance our understanding of Austen's initial "aesthetic" reception with her first
French readership.[53] Austen uses a narrative technique known as free indirect discourse (FID)
to represent Anne Elliot's consciousness in Persuasion. Indeed, the portrayal of the heroine's
subjective experience is central to its narration.[54] The frequent use of FID imbues
Perusasion's narrative discourse with a high degree of subtlety, placing a huge burden of
interpretation on Austen's first translators. Recent studies demonstrate that FID from
Persuasion was translated extensively in Montolieu's La Famille Elliot.[55] Indeed, Montolieu
was aware of the propensity of Austen's narrator to delve into the heroine's psychology in
Persuasion as she comments on this in the Preface to La Famille Elliot. She characterises it as
"almost imperceptible, delicate nuances that come from the heart": des nuances dlicates
presque imperceptibles qui partent du fond du cur, et dont miss JANE AUSTEN avait le
secret plus qu'aucun autre romancier.[56] Montolieu's extensive translations of Austen's FID
demonstrate that she was in fact one of Austen's first critical readers, whose own finely
nuanced reading of Austen's narrative technique meant that her first French readers could also
share in Anne Elliot's psychological drama in much the same way that her English readership
could.[57]

18701930: Explosion in popularity

Family biographies

An idealised portrait of Austen engraved by Richard Bentley, (1870) appears as

the frontispiece of Memoir.

For decades, Scott's and Whately's opinions dominated the reception of Austen's works and
few people read her novels. In 1870, this changed with the publication of the first significant
Austen biography, A Memoir of Jane Austen, which was written by Jane Austen's nephew,
James Edward Austen-Leigh.[58] With its release, Austen's popularity and critical standing
increased dramatically.[59] Readers of the Memoir were presented with the myth of the amateur
novelist who wrote masterpieces: the Memoir fixed in the public mind a sentimental picture of
Austen as a quiet, middle-aged maiden aunt and reassured them that her work was suitable for
a respectable Victorian family. James Edward Austen-Leigh had a portrait of Jane Austen
painted, based on the earlier watercolour, softening her image and making her presentable to
the Victorian public.[60] The engraving by Bentley which formed the frontispiece of Memoir is
based on the idealised image.
The publication of the Memoir spurred a major reissue of Austen's novels. The first popular
editions were released in 1883a cheap sixpenny series published by Routledge. This was
followed by a proliferation of elaborate illustrated editions, collectors' sets, and scholarly
editions.[61] However, contemporary critics continued to assert that her works were
sophisticated and only appropriate for those who could truly plumb their depths.[62] Yet, after
the publication of the Memoir, more criticism was published on Austen's novels in two years
than had appeared in the previous fifty.[63]
In 1913, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, descendants of the Austen
family, published the definitive family biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and LettersA
Family Record. Based primarily on family papers and letters, it is described by Austen

biographer Park Honan as "accurate, staid, reliable, and at times vivid and suggestive".[64]
Although the authors moved away from the sentimental tone of the Memoir, they made little
effort to go beyond the family records and traditions immediately available to them. Their
book therefore offers bare facts and little in the way of interpretation.[65]
Criticism

Mark Twain was one of Austen's most vocal American critics (c. 1907).

During the last quarter of the 19th century, the first books of critical analysis regarding
Austen's works were published. In 1890 Godwin Smith published the Life of Jane Austen,
initiating a "fresh phase in the critical heritage", in which Austen reviewers became critics.
This launched the beginning of "formal criticism", that is, a focus on Austen as a writer and an
analysis of the techniques that made her writing unique.[66] According to Southam, while
Austen criticism increased in amount and, to some degree, in quality after 1870, "a certain
uniformity" pervaded it:
We see the novels praised for their elegance of form and their surface 'finish'; for
the realism of their fictional world, the variety and vitality of their characters; for
their pervasive humour; and for their gentle and undogmatic morality and its
unsermonising delivery. The novels are prized for their 'perfection'. Yet it is seen
to be a narrow perfection, achieved within the bounds of domestic comedy. [67]

Among the most astute of these critics were Richard Simpson, Margaret Oliphant, and Leslie
Stephen. In a review of the Memoir, Simpson described Austen as a serious yet ironic critic of
English society. He introduced two interpretative themes which later became the basis for
modern literary criticism of Austen's works: humour as social critique and irony as a means of
moral evaluation. Continuing Lewes's comparison to Shakespeare, Simpson wrote that
Austen:
began by being an ironical critic; she manifested her judgment ... not by direct
censure, but by the indirect method of imitating and exaggerating the faults of

her models. ... Criticism, humour, irony, the judgment not of one that gives
sentence but of the mimic who quizzes while he mocks, are her characteristics. [68]

Simpson's essay was not well known and did not become influential until Lionel Trilling
quoted it in 1957.[69] Another prominent writer whose Austen criticism was ignored, novelist
Margaret Oliphant, described Austen in almost proto-feminist terms, as "armed with a 'fine
vein of feminine cynicism,' 'full of subtle power, keenness, finesse, and self-restraint,' blessed
with an 'exquisite sense' of the 'ridiculous,' 'a fine stinging yet soft-voiced contempt,' whose
novels are 'so calm and cold and keen'".[70] This line of criticism would not be fully explored
until the 1970s with the rise of feminist literary criticism.
Although Austen's novels had been published in the United States since 1832, albeit in
bowdlerised editions, it was not until after 1870 that there was a distinctive American
response to Austen.[71] As Southam explains, "for American literary nationalists Jane Austen's
cultivated scene was too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic".[72]
Austen was not democratic enough for American tastes and her canvas did not extend to the
frontier themes that had come to define American literature.[72] By the start of the 20th
century, the American response was represented by the debate between the American novelist
and critic William Dean Howells and the writer and humourist Mark Twain. In a series of
essays, Howells helped make Austen into a canonical figure for the populace whereas Twain
used Austen to argue against the Anglophile tradition in America. That is, Twain argued for
the distinctiveness of American literature by attacking English literature.[73] In his book
Following the Equator, Twain described the library on his ship: "Jane Austen's books ... are
absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of
a library that hadn't a book in it."[74]
Janeites
Might we not ... borrow from Miss Austen's biographer the title which the affection of a nephew bestows
upon her, and recognise her officially as 'dear aunt Jane'?
Richard Simpson[75]

The Encyclopdia Britannica's changing entries on Austen illustrate her increasing popularity
and status. The eighth edition (1854) described her as "an elegant novelist" while the ninth
edition (1875) lauded her as "one of the most distinguished modern British novelists".[76]
Around the start of the 20th century, Austen novels began to be studied at universities and
appear in histories of the English novel.[77] The image of her that dominated the popular
imagination was still that first presented in the Memoir and made famous by Howells in his
series of essays in Harper's Magazine, that of "dear aunt Jane".[78] Author and critic Leslie
Stephen described a mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry" [79]
it was only after the publication of the Memoir that readers developed a personal
connection with Austen.[80] However, around 1900, members of the literary elite, who had
claimed an appreciation of Austen as a mark of culture, reacted against this popularisation of
her work. They referred to themselves as Janeites to distinguish themselves from the masses
who, in their view, did not properly understand Austen.[81]
American novelist Henry James, one member of this literary elite, referred to Austen several
times with approval and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry
Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".[82] But, James thought Austen an "unconscious"

artist whom he described as "instinctive and charming".[83] In 1905, James responded

frustratingly to what he described as "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of
public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest". James attributed this rise
principally to "the stiff breeze of the commercial, ... the special bookselling spirits. ... the body
of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have
found their 'dear,' our dear, everybody's dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, so
amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what
seemingly proves to be salable, form."[84]
In an effort to avoid the sentimental image of the "Aunt Jane" tradition and approach Austen's
fiction from a fresh perspective, in 1917 British intellectual and travel writer Reginald Farrer
published a lengthy essay in the Quarterly Review which Austen scholar A. Walton Litz calls
the best single introduction to her fiction.[85] Southam describes it as a "Janeite" piece without
the worship.[86] Farrer denied that Austen's artistry was unconscious (contradicting James) and
described her as a writer of intense concentration and a severe critic of her society, "radiant
and remorseless", "dispassionate yet pitiless", with "the steely quality, the incurable rigor of
her judgment".[87] Farrer was one of the first critics who viewed Austen as a subversive writer.
[88]

19302000: Modern scholarship

Austen was the first English novelist whose works were published in a scholarly
edition.[89]

Several important early worksglimmers of brilliant Austen scholarshippaved the way for
Austen to become solidly entrenched within the academy. The first was Oxford
Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley's 1911 essay, "generally regarded as the starting-point
for the serious academic approach to Jane Austen".[90] Bradley emphasised Austen's ties to

18th-century critic and writer Samuel Johnson, arguing that she was a moralist as well as
humourist; in this he was "totally original", according to Southam.[91] Bradley divided Austen's
works into "early" and "late" novels, categories which are still used by scholars today.[92] The
second path-breaking early-20th century critic of Austen was R. W. Chapman, whose
magisterial edition of Austen's collected works was the first scholarly edition of the works of
any English novelist. The Chapman texts have remained the basis for all subsequent editions
of Austen's works.[93]
In the wake of Bradley and Chapman's contributions, the 1920s saw a boom in Austen
scholarship, and the novelist E. M. Forster primarily illustrated his concept of the "round"
character by citing Austen's works.[94] It was with the 1939 publication of Mary Lascelles'
Jane Austen and Her Art"the first full-scale historical and scholarly study" of Austenthat
the academic study of her works matured.[94] Lascelles included a short biographical essay; an
innovative analysis of the books Austen read and their effect on her writing; and an extended
analysis of Austen's style and her "narrative art". Lascelles felt that prior critics had all
worked on a scale "so small that the reader does not see how they have reached their
conclusions until he has patiently found his own way to them".[95] She wished to examine all
of Austen's works together and to subject her style and techniques to methodical analysis.
Subsequent critics agree that she succeeded. Like Bradley earlier, she emphasised Austen's
connection to Samuel Johnson and her desire to discuss morality through fiction. However, at
the time some fans of Austen worried that academics were taking over Austen criticism and it
was becoming increasingly esoterica debate that has continued to the beginning of the 21st
century.[96]

Modern scholars emphasised Austen's intellectual and artistic ties to important

18th-century figures such as Samuel Johnson.

In an outpouring of mid-century revisionist views, scholars approached Austen more

sceptically. D. W. Harding, following and expanding upon Farrer, argued in his essay
"Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen" that Austen's novels did not
support the status quo but rather subverted it. Her irony was not humorous but caustic and
intended to undermine the assumptions of the society she portrayed. Through her use of irony,
Austen attempted to protect her integrity as an artist and a person in the face of attitudes and

practices she rejected.[97] Almost simultaneously, influential critic Q. D. Leavis argued in

"Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing", published in Scrutiny in the early 1940s, that
Austen was a professional, not an amateur, writer.[98] Harding's and Leavis's articles were
followed by another revisionist treatment by Marvin Mudrick in Jane Austen: Irony as
Defense and Discovery (1952). Mudrick portrayed Austen as isolated, defensive, and critical
of her society, and described in detail the relationship he saw between Austen's attitude toward
contemporary literature and her use of irony as a technique to contrast the realities of her
society with what she felt they should be.[97] These revisionist views, together with prominent
critic F. R. Leavis's pronouncement in The Great Tradition (1948) that Austen was one of the
great writers of English fiction, a view shared by Ian Watt, who helped shape the scholarly
debate regarding the genre of the novel, did much to cement Austen's reputation amongst
academics.[99] They agreed that she "combined [Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's]
qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".[100]
The period after the Second World War saw a flowering of scholarship on Austen as well as a
diversity of critical approaches. One of the most fruitful and contentious has been the
consideration of Austen as a political writer. As critic Gary Kelly explains, "Some see her as a
political 'conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order. Others see
her as sympathetic to 'radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the
form of patriarchy ... some critics see Austen's novels as neither conservative nor subversive,
but complex, criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting stability and an open class
hierarchy."[101] In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), perhaps the most important of
these works, Marilyn Butler argues that Austen was steeped in, not insulated from, the
principal moral and political controversies of her time, and espoused a partisan,
fundamentally conservative and Christian position in these controversies. In a similar vein,
Alistair M. Duckworth in The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels
(1971) argues that Austen used the concept of the "estate" to symbolise all that was important
about contemporary English society, which should be conserved, improved, and passed down
to future generations.[102] As Rajeswari Rajan notes in her essay on recent Austen scholarship,
"the idea of a political Austen is no longer seriously challenged". The questions scholars now
investigate involve: "the [French] Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class, 'improvement'
[of the estate], the clergy, town versus country, abolition, the professions, female
emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a
conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied a reformist position between these extremes".[103]
... in all her novels Austen examines the female powerlessness that underlies monetary pressure to marry,
the injustice of inheritance laws, the ignorance of women denied formal education, the psychological
vulnerability of the heiress or widow, the exploited dependency of the spinster, the boredom of the lady
provided with vocation"
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)[104]

In the 1970s and 1980s, Austen studies was influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
seminal The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which contrasts the "decorous surfaces" with the
"explosive anger" of 19th-century female English writers. This work, along with other
feminist criticism of Austen, has firmly positioned Austen as a woman writer. The interest
generated in Austen by these critics led to the discovery and study of other woman writers of
the time.[105] Moreover, with the publication of Julia Prewitt Brown's Jane Austen's Novels:
Social Change and Literary Form (1979), Margaret Kirkham's Jane Austen: Feminism and
Fiction (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988),
scholars were no longer able to easily argue that Austen was "apolitical, or even unqualifiedly

'conservative'".[106] Kirkham, for example, described the similarities between Austen's thought
and that of Mary Wollstonecraft, labelling them both as "Enlightenment feminists". Johnson
similarly places Austen in an 18th-century political tradition, however, she outlines the debt
Austen owes to the political novels of the 1790s written by women.[107]
In the late-1980s, 1990s, and 2000s ideological, postcolonial, and Marxist criticism dominated
Austen studies.[108] Generating heated debate, Edward Said devoted a chapter of his book
Culture and Imperialism (1993) to Mansfield Park, arguing that the peripheral position of
"Antigua" and the issue of slavery demonstrated that colonial oppression was an unspoken
assumption of English society during the early 19th century. In Jane Austen and the Body:
'The Picture of Health', (1992) John Wiltshire explored the preoccupation with illness and
health of Austen's characters. Wiltshire addressed current theories of "the body as sexuality",
and more broadly how culture is "inscribed" on the representation of the body.[109] There has
also been a return to considerations of aesthetics with D. A. Miller's Jane Austen, or The
Secret of Style (2003) which connects artistic concerns with queer theory.[110]

Modern popular culture

See also: Jane Austen in popular culture
Modern Janeites

The Jane Austen Centre in Bath, a place of pilgrimage for Janeites[111]

Critic Claudia Johnson defines "Janeitism" as "the self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for
'Jane' and every detail relative to her".[40] Janeites not only read the novels of Austen; they also
re-enact them, write plays based on them, and become experts on early 19th-century England
and its customs.[112] Austen scholar Deidre Lynch has commented that "cult" is an apt term for
committed Janeites. She compares the practices of religious pilgrims with those of Janeites,
who travel to places associated with Austen's life, her novels and the film adaptations. She
speculates that this is "a kind of time-travel to the past" which, by catering to Janeites,
preserves a "vanished Englishness or set of 'traditional' values".[113] The disconnection
between the popular appreciation of Austen and the academic appreciation of Austen that
began with Lascelles has since widened considerably. Johnson compares Janeites to Trekkies,
arguing that both "are derided and marginalized by dominant cultural institutions bent on
legitimizing their own objects and protocols of expertise". However, she notes that Austen's
works are now considered to be part of both high culture and popular culture, while Star Trek
can only claim to be a part of popular culture.

Thackeray
Introduction

Vanity Fair is surely one of the world's most devious novels, devious in its characterisation, its
irony, its explicit moralising, its exuberance, its tone. Few novels demand more continuing
alertness from the reader, or offer more intellectual and moral stimulation in return. A. E.
Dyson, Vanity Fair: An Irony against Heroes [12]
Not many readers and critics today would disagree A. E. Dyson's assessment. The difficulty of
reaching interpretive closure was not lost even on the first-time readers of the novel. Their
earliest reaction is succinctly recorded by Henry Kingsley in his recollection of people saying,
"It is so very strange. One don't know whether to laugh or cry at it" (in Tillotson and Hawes:
330). In her lengthy review (which presages much twentieth-century criticism), Elizabeth
Rigby complained that "we cannot see our way clearly" (in Tillotson and Hawes: 80). More
than a hundred years later, similar voices can still be heard: "Vanity Fair is capable of
producing upset, annoyance, and confusion in readers," writes Steig, for whom the novel is an
example of "evasive narrative" (214). On the whole, words like confusion, ambivalence, and
ambiguity have become familiar labels for this intricately woven work which both invites and
rejects responses with a claim to literary, philosophical, or moral competence. In this chapter I
argue that in Vanity Fair irony works on a comprehensive scale and with all the authority
granted to it by its inclusion into the novel's narrative function. It is the founding principle of
the social, moral and literary satire on Victorian values and conventions; it builds the
philosophic perspective on human existence; it is the chief strategy of characterization; it
supports and enriches the dual structure of the narrative and reveals the full discursive
potential of the omniscient narrator. Still, Thackeray's irony in Vanity Fair exposes sites of
vulnerability in the moral and epistemological premises not only of this particular novel, but
of the Victorian realist narrative as a whole, and thus allows for a textual function to assert its
own power, albeit tentatively.
Satire

Ever since the publication of the first installments in 1847, critics have united around the view
that Thackeray's Vanity Fair is first and foremost a comic satire on Victorian materialism.
Satire, Northrop Frye points out, arises out of an inverted conception of the world (227). The
frontispiece [wrapper design] Thackeray drew for the serial numbers makes this this principle
clear: It bears the picture of a preacher dressed in motley, standing on an upturned barrel and
addressing a similarly clad audience. In the background appears Nelson's column turned
upside down. Like Bunyan, from whom he borrows his title, Thackeray attacks the
commodification of moral values, a phenomenon which he observed all around him , but his
novel expands and particularizes this theme by placing it in a remarkably vivid representation
of a world dominated by the worship of quantifiable goods. As in the eponymous marketplace
in The Pilgrim's Progress, everything changes hands in Thackeray's Fair from property, titles,
reputation, sons and daughters, ultimately to human affection and love. Unlike Bunyan's place
of exchange, however, this one has a stable, recognizable currency. Money is the universal
signified in this novel, which reflects a world where human values have been replaced by
market prices. Becky's famous statement "I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a
year" (40: 532) summarizes the way of the commercial, competitive, and hierarchical social

conglomerate which Thackeray presents with astounding accuracy. So, the spectacle of mirth
from the introductory Before the Curtain in the course of the narrative develops into a
grotesque representation of the material and moral realities of nineteenth-century England.
And this change is predicated on a fundamental shift in the concept of vanity, which here
takes on a secular, concrete and brutally materialistic meaning. Vanity in Thackeray's novel is
the desire to own and possess. In the rivalry with others for solid, measurable gains, men and
women push their way upward, ignoring the simple affective relationships that could allow
them a morally and spiritually fulfilling existence. The exceptions, like Amelia and Dobbin,
either become easy prey to clever emotional manipulators or, like the much more faultless and
insipid Lady Jane, do not have to fight simply because they have either inherited the muchenvied rank or married into the coveted money or both.
The forms Thackeray gives to his representation of the general clamber for the better position
are grounded in the typical structures of satire: "the episodic form, the collection of stories or
anecdotes, the list, the large dinner party or the group conversation, the legal brief, the
projector's pamphlet, the encyclopaedia, and the calendar" (Paulson: 5). Practically the whole
of this list is represented in Vanity Fair, where they replace the formal plot typically
associated with the novel of the time. Instead, its backbone is shaped by two series of
episodes strung around the heroines and linked on the principle of counterpoint, with only a
few, though perfectly timed, crossing points. What stops the satiric structure from succumbing
to its inherent looseness is the magnetism of one figure: that of Becky Sharp. Perfectly in
accordance with the norm of the eiron, she superbly manipulates the whole range of the
existing conventions, inverting them to her own benefit. Becky's actions all the while expose
the lack of moral worth in the world where she engineers her rise and where she manages to
resurface after her fall. At the same time, Becky also appropriates the role of an alazon and
thus concentrates the above-mentioned unworthiness into her own self and dramatizes it
through her behaviour. As both an outsider charged with an enormous dose of energy and
ambition, as well as a personality endowed with a psychological and behavioural pliancy that
makes of her the ideal insider, Becky becomes the inexhaustible source of a centripetal force
that unifies the narrative. And to the extent to which she and the rest of the characters are knit
together by the common goal of material success and social prestige, Vanity Fair fulfills
Thackeray's unquestionably satiric purpose, such as he himself explained it:
What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world . . . greedy pompous
mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior value" (Letters
II: 409).
Certainly, in choosing greed, selfishness, and hypocrisy for his targets, Thackeray does not
merely adopt the typically Victorian criticism of the ills of a competitive capitalist world but
rather works within a well-established tradition that dates much further back. Bunyan's echoes
from The Pilgrim's Progress are strong not only in the novel's title: the prologue "Before the
Curtain" makes it explicit that this Fairground is a carnivalized version of the place of
abominations Christian and Faithful must go through on their way to the Celestial City. But to
Thackeray, the spectacle of the people busily moving about in their self-serving pursuits has
foremost importance. So, although his verdict is that "Yes, this is Vanity Fair: not a moral
place certainly; not a merry one, though very noisy" (1: 1), he invites his readers to share his
fascination with their performance: "A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an
exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people's hilarity"
(ibid.). Nor is his tone quite identical to Bunyan's. Thackeray's view is filtered through
comedy and focused on the incongruity that marks the activities of both the subjects and the

objects involved in the perpetual economic exchange. There is, Thackeray says, in this
"bustling place,"
a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary,
smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies pushing about, bucks
ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the lookout, quacks (other quacks,
plague take them!), bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled
dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their
pockets behind. [1: 1]
By sending satire into the realm of the comic, Vanity Fair both reverberates with Bunyan's
condemnatory overtones and at the same time tames their apocalyptic fervour. This strategy
allows Thackeray to cast a more discriminating eye at human folly than his predecessor: as
the narrator, openly identifying himself with the author, says at the end of Chapter 8,
Such people there are living and flourishing in the world Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless;
let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful
too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that
Laughter was made. [8: 96]
The dramatization of various types of comic incongruity is therefore one reason why Vanity
Fair's satire, charged as it is with the indispensable strong emotional content and making
ample use of direct invective and sarcasm, seems less militant than that of Bunyan. But
Thackeray subjects Bunyan's conception of the Fair to yet another and more significant
transformation. Christian and Faithful, the protagonists of The Pilgrim's Progress, can resist
the seductive power of worldly attractions only because before them lies the promise of the
Celestial City. Thackeray's Fair, on the other hand, exists without any redemptive alternative.
And so far as a positive norm is at all proposed by the satire in his novel, it is recoverable only
by implication. Like the negatives Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless in the passage above, the
anarchic, destructive power of human folly presupposes as its antithetical opposite the
attraction of simple, this-worldly moral values like trust, honesty, compassion and
undemanding affection. Above all, the implied positive message insists that it is truthfulness
to oneself and to others that enables one to see through the imperfections of the social order.
In the absence of the promise of Paradise, the imperative that moves the satirist of Vanity Fair
is that of order in human relationships. "Charity and mutual forbearance," the narrator halfjokingly suggests, form the only deterrent against chaos, the "howling wilderness" (51: 643)
that lurks dangerously close to the edge of civilization. But when external Divine authority
vanishes, the responsibility of regulating social interaction falls on individuals themselves.
The narrator's advice on how to fulfil this requirement is deceptively simple: "The world is a
looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it
will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion; so
let all young persons take their choice" (2: 15). It is not difficult to see that there is really no
choice; the easy ironical reversal articulates an injunction as strict as Bunyan's. Its benevolent,
avuncular tone is a means of encroaching on the religious discourse on social relationships.
But instead of God's invisible presence is the image of the mirror which functions as one of
the controlling metaphors not only in this novel but in the doctrine of Victorian realism as a
whole (Polhemus: 125; Miller, J. H., 1968: 35). The individual and society are irreversibly
positioned face-to-face in an indivisible unity, whose preservation or dissolution leads to
reward or punishment here and now, rather than later and in another realm.

What the satirist of Vanity Fair really demands from people is unsophisticated human
authenticity, as well as at least some token intellect not a scientific one but the practical
commonsensical awareness that individuals are bound to the social roles that they enact in
smaller or larger social units. Thackeray has often been seen as the greatest sociologist among
the writers of his generation: indeed, his characters acquire their identity solely through their
communion with others, "the mutuality of their very numerous and vital relations," in the
words of the nineteenth-century critic W. C. Brownell (29). Participation in the "bustle, and
triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public" is for Thackeray an
inevitability of human life; outside is an existential void. "This, dear friends and companions,"
the narrator says, "is my amiable object to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the
shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise,
and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private" (19: 228).
Thackeray's secularization of Bunyan's staunchly Christian values therefore redraws and
expands the field of his comic satire. In this context, the most conspicuous stylistic device is,
quite predictably, verbal irony, most commonly blame-by-praise. Used consistently yet with
an amazing agility, blame-by-praise functions to fuel the universalizing drive of the satiric
derision because it so frequently accompanies references not only to the protagonists but also
to the secondary and the minor characters making up the crowd of the Fair. The linguistic
equivalent of the pictorial inversion of the world in the famous illustration referred to earlier
in this study, it is chiefly responsible for the sense, so powerfully conveyed on every page of
the novel, of a world that vibrates with physical, emotional and verbal life. Thus, the Misses
Osborne, who openly snub Amelia, are "affectionate young women" (12: 133); Mrs. Bute
Crawley, carefully working on her plot to have Rawdon married to Becky and disinherited by
his aunt, is "a good-natured lady, compassionating the forlorn life-guardsman's condition" (14:
165).
Thackeray's verbal irony undoubtedly works as a device that secures the comic parameters of
the satire, but it is also an effective mechanism of minimizing the distance between the
readers and the characters. The reason for this is, in the first place, the easy access that blameby-praise provides to the "reality" of the ironic conflict. But more than that, the very choice of
repertoire building the "appearance" opens the door wide to the true picture of the world for it
draws its resources from the discourse on behavioural patterns typical of Victorian society.
Exposing them as a pretense, the conflict of meanings erodes their claim to psychological
authenticity and moral superiority. Consider, for instance, Miss Pinkerton, the mistress of the
Chiswick Academy for young ladies. The "Semiramis of Hammersmith," as the narrator calls
her (1: 3), at first looks like the perfect embodiment of Aristotle's alazon. The repeated
allusions in the opening chapter to her turban and Roman nose emblems of her "boastful
dissimulation" serve to raise the verve of humour to the point of explosion. Nevertheless,
Thackeray attacks Miss Pinkerton not so much for the incongruous airs she puts on as for her
segregationalist attitude towards the girls in her institution. Her Academy is a replica of the
Victorian world outside it, and each student is allocated a place corresponding to that held by
her parents. Free indirect thought gives access to the economic logic that motivates Miss
Pinkerton's refusal to give Becky a "Dixonary" as a farewell gift: "Miss Sedley's papa was a
merchant in London, and a man of some wealth; while Miss Sharp was an articled pupil for
whom Miss Pinkerton had done, as she thought, quite enough, without conferring upon her at
parting the high honour of the Dixonary" (1: 6). As a shrewd economist, she makes the rich
heiress Miss Swartz pay twice the normal fee, and calculates on Becky's doubling as an
instructor of music without additional expense. Also, behind her farcical grandeur there lurks
a true and socially active malevolence. Having kept a "file" on her former drawing-master and

his daughter, she produces the crucial information against the new Mrs. Rawdon Crawley (20:
117) and so helps destroy the young couple's chances of winning the favours of Rawdon's
wealthy aunt. With Mrs. Pinkerton's portrait so greatly enriched by its inclusion into the
ethical and economic discourses, Becky's victory against her employer in the opening chapter
of the novel becomes her first triumph, albeit on a small scale, in her spirited rebellion against
the whole system. It turns the "little battle between the young lady and the old one" in which
"the latter was worsted" (1: 25) into an event that appropriately consolidates Rebecca as the
pivotal figure in the satire.
Yet it is again through verbal irony that Thackeray ambiguates Becky's status in the satiric
framework of the novel and thus unsettles the belief that she might hold the clue to the novel's
true meaning. Typically for the satiric structures, she begins as an eiron, exposing the
corruption of a society inhospitable to a person without the credentials of inherited rank and
wealth. The contrast between her well-deserved success and the ineffectuality of the people
she manipulates highlights the differential and inclusive aspects of Thackeray's irony: what
she gains through her own efforts is something else, and something more than what the world
expects of her. That is why her story, rendered in consistently dramatic terms, becomes the
organizing centre of the satire. As she rises in the world, however, blame-by-praise epithets
become a stable part of her descriptive code and turn her into one more target of Thackeray's
moral criticism. At the peak of her upward climb her presentation to Court she is
referred to as "this angel," "our beloved Rebecca," "the virtuous Becky," "the dear girl" (48:
599-605). Satire and mirth remain well integrated throughout: the writer does not let comedy
out of his grip, thus keeping the danger of the typically Victorian dogmatic censoriousness at
bay. Laughter tinges the satire on Becky's social ambition even in the ingenious play with
orthographic conventions. Thackeray can extract the maximum effect from his ironic ridicule
by simply manipulating the use of capital letters, just as in The Yellowplush Papers he plays
with the rules of spelling to enhance the impact of his social and moral satire. In Vanity Fair,
he briefly launches into a castigating attack on George the Fourth, the meeting with whom is
for Becky the symbolic event marking her victory in her battle to get to the coveted position
(which, as an alazon, she believes she is entitled to). The satire on the King is based on the
visual "enlargement" of the qualities falsely attributed to him by "polite" discourse: he is "that
Great Character in history," "George the Good, the Magnificent, the Great" (48: 599)2. The
effect, however, rests on more than visuality. The capital letters capture the inflections of the
spoken discourse which high society has accepted as its communicative code and which
Becky has mastered to perfection. Having therefore created and hyperbolized the ironic
appearance by appropriating public discourse markers, Thackeray then stretches the margins
of his satiric derision to embrace Becky, with the added ironic effect of the narrator's selfdisparaging refusal to describe the summit of her rise:
What were the circumstances of the interview between Rebecca Crawley nee Sharp, and her
Imperial Master, it does not become such a feeble and inexperienced pen as mine to attempt to
relate. The dazzled eyes close before that Magnificent Idea. Loyal respect and decency tell
even the imagination not to look too keenly and audaciously about the sacred audiencechamber, but to back away rapidly, silently, and respectfully, making profound bows out of
the August Presence. (48: 604)
In the closing scene of the novel, the play with capitalization again comes to cast doubt both
on Becky's allegedly recovered gentility and on the conventions that allow her to sustain that
latest image in her new milieu. Reality and fiction become indistinguishable from each other
as the grateful objects of her benevolence appear in the shape of titles of religious tracts: "Her

name is in all the Charity Lists. The Destitute Orange-girl, the Neglected Washerwoman, the
Distressed Muffin-man find in her a fast and generous friend" (67: 877). Conversely, with
some other characters the absence of a capital letter can diminish conventional terms of social
superiority: the Reverend Bute Crawley, Sir Pitt's brother and Rector of Queen Crawley, a
man who dedicates his life to hunting, betting, and dining, becomes "the reverend gentleman,"
"his reverence" when he is involved in "solemn speculations" about his rich sister's longawaited demise and the small likelihood of her leaving him any money (11: 124).
The regularity with which Thackeray uses blame-by-praise within the context of the phrase
and sentence forms a rhythmical pattern which works in two ways, both crucial to the
strategies of his satire yet anchored in irony's inclusive dimensions. On the one hand, it
conditions the reader to expect and enact the reversal of meaning openly invited by this
structure. More importantly, however, it bars the escape route from the polite world's
discourse, inasmuch as the substitution of the hypocritically benevolent "appearances" with
their opposites leads only to complicity with the malevolence of Miss Pinkerton and her social
kin. As an interpretive and moral aporia, blame-by-praise functions in conjunction with
another pattern that linguistically enacts the conflict and the coexistence of meanings in
irony's dramatic structure. This is the paradox or non-sequitur where the presentation of an
action is hybridized with the presentation of its motive or its consequence in overtly
contradictory terms. Thus Cuff, the "unquestioned king" of Dr. Swishtail's school, "ruled over
his subjects, and bullied them, with splendid superiority" (5: 50). When, surprisingly, he is
disobeyed by Dobbin the grocer's son contemptuously known as "Figs" he is somewhat
intimidated, to the point that "he never meddled personally with the grocer's boy after that;
though we must do him the justice to say that he always spoke of Mr. Dobbin with contempt
behind his back" (ibid.). Or take George's sisters, who boast about their treatment of the
despised Amelia: "We are kind to her," the Misses Osborne said and they treated her with
such extreme kindness and condescension, and patronised her so insufferably, that the poor
little thing was in fact perfectly dumb in their presence, and to all outward appearance as
stupid as they thought her" (12: 132). The narrator makes a jibe at the harmony in the
Reverend Bute Crawley's household, revealing the mercenary wisdom of the person who
takes the merit for it, Mrs. Bute Crawley. A woman who won her future husband over a game
of cards with her mother, she subsequently "ruled absolutely within the Rectory, wisely giving
her husband full liberty without. He was welcome to come and go, and dine abroad as many
days as his fancy dictated, for Mrs. Crawley was a saving woman and knew the price of port
wine" (11: 114). And the young Pitt Crawley, who hopes for a brilliant diplomatic career,
"failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity that ought to have insured any man a success (9:
100).
What these examples show is that the fallacious logic which creates Thackeray's recurring
ironic hybrids is not just comic artifice with a function limited to the level of rhetoric. Such
paradoxical statements are a textual reflection of the very disjunctions in the discourses of
power that pervade the community that uses them. It is hardly surprising that G. H. Lewes
found himself so deeply disturbed by the most notorious of them, Becky's "I think could be a
good woman if I had five thousand a year" (Letters, II: 353)1. Although they belong formally
to "telling" rather than to "showing," they are in fact miniature scenes in which the personages
literally enact ironic conflicts that combine two untruths, both of which are seen by Thackeray
as the ideological underpinnings of Victorian mentality and morality. Thus, neither the faces
the participants in the Fair turn towards the looking-glass of their world nor the reflections it
casts back to them turn out to be authentic: the virtues they profess, such as respect, affection

and compassion, are exposed as mere verbal masks, but the approval and admiration they
attract are shown as equally sham.
This radical incoherence of the discursive world of the Fair comes out in the very syntax of
Thackeray's non-sequiturs. The illogical connectors in the examples above bring into focus
the combination of a cliched language that offers tongue-in-cheek praise for the characters
with actions which are true to their selfish motives but false with regard to the standards of
genuine morality. This ironic conflict is often further highlighted by snaps of indirect
discourse that "echo" formulaic moralistic pronouncements coming either from the characters
themselves or from the social talk of the polite society they move in. The irony produced by
the non-sequiturs thus serves the novel's realist aims by defamiliarizing the conventional
formulae with which society "reflects" the equally conventionalized self-portraits that its
members show each other. Peter Garrett's observation that "Thackeray claims for his work a
negative, or relative realism: its "truth" is perceived through the displacement of falsifying
conventions" can therefore be applied not only, as he suggests, to the overall parodic intention
of the novel (117) but also to the satiric exposure of the duplicity, both in its verbal and
affective forms, that typifies human interaction in Vanity Fair.
The effect of Thackeray's non-sequiturs becomes especially powerful when they are
combined with other stylistic devices typically employed in satire repetition and
enumeration. Their cumulative effect makes the ironic conflict even more pronounced. An
excellent example of this is the Countess of Fitz-Willis, who briefly appears on the stage
when Becky has reached the very apex of her upward rise. The Countess, a minor personage,
participates in a short narrative sequence which dramatizes the concept of worldliness and
serves to expose the moral inauthenticity of English social order. The narrator begins
characteristically with pretended immersion in the discourse which equates social prestige
with moral worth:
Here, before long, Becky received not only "the best" foreigners (as the phrase is in our noble
and admirable society slang) but some of the best English people too. I don't mean the most
virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, or the richest, or the
best born, but "the best" in a word people about whom there is no question. (51: 636)
The repetition ad absurdum of "best" builds a gradation that culminates on the pretended
agreement with the ironic victim's ideology. In the final account, the concept of goodness
loses its meaning, while the clash between actual fact and the ideology that proclaims the
likes of the Countess as "the best" reveals society's failure to recognize moral worth. Added to
the repetition and enumeration is also the overuse of superlatives which, in conjunction with
the familiar ironic device of pretended defense of the victim, enlarges the appearance to
grotesque proportions. The Countess's name is then almost casually dropped among the list of
the august personages who form Becky's new circle of acquaintances and all of whom are
presented through aptronyms. There is also the pseudo-authenticating reference to another list
the registers of British aristocracy Debrett and Burke's Peerage:
the great Lady Fitz-Willis, that Patron Saint of Almack's, the great Lady Slowbore, the great
Lady Grizzel Macbeth (she was Lady G. Glowry, daughter of Lord Grey of Glowery) and the
like. When the Countess of Fitz-Willis (her Ladyship is of the King Street family, see Debrett
and Burke) takes up a person he or she is safe. There is no question about them any more.
(ibid.)

And even when the narrator sets out to describe the Countess's actual personality in greater
detail, he still ends up using the resources of the same "polite" discourse, thus baring its inner
contradictions. The generalizing superlative "best" now stands in open conflict with the truth:
Not that my Lady Fitz-Willis is any better than anybody else, being, on the contrary, a faded
person, fifty-seven years of age, and neither handsome, nor wealthy, nor entertaining: but it is
agreed on all sides that she is of the "best people." (ibid.)
Having thus differentiated the character's physical and behavioural portrait from her socially
acknowledged position of eminence, the narrator then proceeds in the same vein to dramatize
the ironic conflict of meanings by bringing the Countess in textual and physical contact with
Becky, only to end with the typical non-sequitur:
Those who go to her are of the best: and from an old grudge probably to Lady Steyne (for
whose coronet her Ladyship, then the youthful Georgina Frederica, daughter of the Prince of
Wales's favourite, the Earl of Portansherry, had once tried), this great and famous leader of
fashion chose to acknowledge Mrs. Rawdon Crawley: made her a most marked curtsey at the
assembly over which she presided: and not only encouraged her son, Sir Kitts (his Lordship
got his place through Lord Steyne's interest), to frequent Mrs. Crawley's house, but asked her
to her own mansion, and spoke to her twice in the most public and condescending manner
during dinner. (ibid.)
The overall effect of the whole sequence is that of satiric exaggeration, yet it gains authority
through structures that ostensibly obey the rules of argumentation, according to which a
general truth is substantiated by concrete examples. The fallacious logic thus works to
ambiguate and enlarge the scope of the ironic conflict: it is played not just between individual
behavioral models but, more importantly, between socially sanctioned ideological fixtures and
discourses, claiming for them the status of unquestionable truths while revealing their vacuity.
Throughout the novel, Thackeray relentlessly stages irony's dramatic structure in a like
manner for any character, especially if he or she is a member of the crowd that elbows its way
in Vanity Fair. But even the exceptions those who seem to carry the virtues that provide the
satirist's measuring rod are not spared. There is, for instance, the almost Dickensian Mrs.
O'Dowd, who looks like a reliable, if rather comic, embodiment of warm-hearted good-will
and integrity. Yet she is as much of an alazon as everyone else, for her behaviour is saturated
with instances of inflated self-importance. For all her kind-heartedness and resilience in the
face of adversity, she is a stranger to modesty and reticence. But while her "boastful
dissimulation" is the source of much hilarious comedy, Thackeray does not exclude her from
his satire because he sees in her a more fundamental fault. Like Amelia, though in a radically
different behavioural form, Mrs. O'Dowd is an exemplar of the blind loyalty that blurs her
otherwise clear vision. She unproblematically extends her praises from husband, regiment,
King and Country to her family on her father's side, the Malonys, "whom she believed to be
the most famous family in the world" (27: 328). Her pet themes of Ireland, Dublin and the
Malonys, as well as her recurring tag-phrases and Irish brogue define her as yet another
embodiment of vanity, however harmless in her case that might be. Never doubting the
rightness of her judgement, in which family and native country are one up on everybody else,
Mrs. O'Dowd cuts a ridiculous figure wherever she moves, as, for instance, at the Opera in
Brussels, where "she favoured her friends with these and other opinions in a very loud tone of
voice, and tossed about a great clattering fan she sported, with the most splendid
complacency" (29: 348).

Examples like the last one point to one of the greatest difficulties in interpreting the irony of
Vanity Fair. With the maximum possible contrast as its structural principle, verbal irony
provides the audience with an easy confidence that they can effortlessly lift the mask of
hypocrisy that has become society's casual wear. What satire requires, however, is that the
reader can then step back, or rather, rise above the object of criticism and examine it from a
safe remove. The case of the seemingly sympathetic character of Mrs. O'Dowd, or of Raggles,
Becky's apparently innocent victim, is typical of the way Thackeray's work fails to sustain
that consoling distance. As the first-time readers were quick to observe, Vanity Fair shifts the
response away from its apparent subject the principles on which English society is
structured and which determine its functioning onto the obviously inexhaustible area of
human behaviour in general. Unsurprisingly, in her otherwise applauding review of the book,
Elizabeth Rigby pleaded for "a little exaggeration and improbability to relieve us of that sense
of dead truthfulness which weighs down our hearts, not for the Amelias and Georges of the
story but for poor kindred human nature . . . . Every actor on the crowded stage of Vanity Fair
represents some type of that perverse mixture of humanity in which there is something not
wholly to approve of or to condemn" (in Tillotson and Hawes: 65). Elizabeth Rigby was
voicing the common accusation of misanthropy that invariably accompanied the laudatory
comments on the novel's realism and its author's brilliancy of style and portraiture. As
Polhemus points out (148), in spite of his pronounced disaffection with Swift's bitterness,
Thackeray was in fact placed by his early readers closer to the author of Gulliver's Travels
than he liked to think. W. C. Roscoe recognized the affinity in 1856: "As Swift rakes in dirt,
so Thackeray in meanness . . . we know that meanness and baseness are in our own natures;
but the true way to deal with them is, looking upwards, to tread them under foot, not to go
scraping about with our noses to the ground and taking credit for our humility and honesty
when we lay them bare" (in Tillotson and Hawes: 280). Perhaps less unambiguously than his
predecessor, Thackeray, too, was claimed to have made human wickedness seem not only
universal but also inescapable.
There is, nevertheless, a fundamental difference between Thackeray and Swift that needs to
be recognized. It resides in the way Vanity Fair deals with human imperfection through the
mechanism of satiric irony. The alleged "meanness and baseness" are here exhibited as
aspects not so much of human beings as a biological species as of the habitual behavioural
and discursive practices within a society wholly engaged in the pursuit of a happiness that
can, as contemporary psychology has come to recognize, be defined only relationally. If some
kind of essentialism can be seen in Thackeray's attitude to his satiric subject, as Rigby and
Roscoe, and in the twentieth century Rawlins and Wheatley seem to suggest throughout their
respective studies, it is, of course, in his equalization of human nature with vanity. Yet each
person's individual vanity can only be discovered in his or her performance of a social role
played in an interaction between unequals and can be expressed in the terms that are socially
agreed upon. As Wheatley himself points out, "[c]ant and hypocrisy, his favourite targets, are
"formal" vices, for they depend on rigidified codes of language and behaviour" (80).3 This
attention to social action, both linguistic and physical, impels the narrator of Vanity Fair first
to name the ironic appearance according to the vocabulary of polite discourse and then to
dramatize it. Of course, supporting every claim with incontrovertible evidence is the method
of the empiricist and not of the satirist; that is why Wheatley can argue that Thackeray's novel
rises out of the uneasy juxtaposition between satire and realism (56-59). Indeed, recruiting its
resources exclusively from socially disseminated discursive practices, Thackeray's ironic
strategy works towards an end where explicit formulation of the reality cannot escape the trap
of those same practices. Its rhetorical power makes such a comprehensive sweeping gesture
over the discursive repertoire from which the appearance draws its expressive means that

little opportunity is left for any corrective reversal that could be appropriately formulated. At
the same time, the plane on which the extreme exploitation of irony's transdiscursive aspects
takes place in Vanity Fair allows a new line of inquiry: on how discourses are made and on
the forms that allow them to circulate and vie for power not only within the realm of social
interaction, but within that of literature itself.
Parody

From the very first appearance of the novel in monthly parts, critics have been quick to
recognize that Thackeray's satire in Vanity Fair turns against the very fictions, circulating in
his contemporary society and nurtured within its literary discourse, which perpetuate the
desire to identify with a false ideal. As Flamm notes (8), the undisguised anti-literary drive
was, in fact, what Thackeray's contemporary reviewers noticed and praised about his novel.
The running motif in all the first comments is well expressed by G. H. Lewes: Vanity Fair, he
wrote, made a break with "the phantasmagoria of the stage and the circulating library" (in
Tillotson and Hawes: 48). In the twentieth century, Kathleen Tillotson, Charles Manskopf,
John Loofbourow and Barbara Hardy, among others, convincingly argued that Vanity Fair's
negative truths can be properly assessed only when the novel is read as a satiric rejection not
only of vice and folly but of popular fictional stereotypes as well. If, as Frye says, "one of the
central themes of the [ironic and satiric] mythos is the disappearance of the heroic" (228),
Vanity Fair, this "Novel without a Hero," then musters all the power of irony to sever the
affective link between the world of ordinary, everyday existence and the dreamlands of
fashionable romance.
The form which from the very start of his writing career Thackeray found most congenial to
his campaign against the romanticizing of life was parody of fashionable styles and novels
Silver Fork, Newgate, sentimental family romances and melodrama. Compared to its
predecessors Catherine, Barry Lyndon, Rebecca and Rowena and the Novels by Eminent
Hands, the last of which ran concurrently with Vanity Fair Thackeray's famous
masterpiece contains fewer instances of what has been defined as "specific parody" (Rose:
83), whose effectiveness depends on the reader's knowledge of the parodied work. Only one
passage in Chapter 6 makes overt allusions to the formulaic principles of popular fiction: "We
might have treated this subject [the likelihood of Jos proposing to Rebecca] in the genteel, or
in the romantic, or in the facetious manner . . . . But my readers must hope for no such
romance, only a homely story" (6: 60-61). From a narrowly intertextual perspective, therefore,
Vanity Fair seems almost completely self-reliant, yet all the time its "general parody" that
is, ironic allusions to the discursive and rhetorical conventions of romance catalyzes its
critical energy and thus functions as the essential constituent of its narrative function.
Parody in Vanity Fair resonates with the clash between the appearance inherent in clichd
formulations and the reality of verisimilar presentation of character and action. It foregrounds
the spuriousness of the heroic ideal, as in the sequence introducing Amelia: "her face blushed
with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes that
sparkled with the brightest and honestest of good-humour" (1: 7). Commenting on this initial
description of the novel's protagonist, Iser rightly argues that the clichs "achieve their
purpose precisely by depriving the character of its representative nature" (107). It is difficult,
however, to agree with Iser's further claim that since Amelia is the novel's heroine, the parody
disorients the readers by not allowing them to identify with her (107). On the contrary: the
cliches actually prompt the reader to recognize the unreality of the stereotype of "the lovely

imbecile" which provided popular nineteenth-century romance with one of its chief structural
and ideological fundamentals (Dalziel: 84).
A remarkable example of the way in which parody insinuates itself into the appearance of the
ironic conflict between romantic idealization and non-heroic human actuality is the episode in
which Sir Pitt Crawley proposes marriage to Rebecca. A member of British landed
aristocracy, Sir Pitt is the grotesquely vulgar antipode of the idealized image of
the Nobleman as portrayed by popular romance. The initial glimpse of him is of a man in drab
breeches and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul neckcloth lashed round his bristly neck, a
shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of twinkling grey eyes, and a mouth perpetually
on the grin. [7: 78]
At the appropriate moment in the proposal scene, Thackeray recalls this ludicrous portrait:
kneeling before the girl as he makes her his offer, Sir Pitt "leered at her like a satyr" (14: 178).
The grotesque is then swiftly raised to the highest possible sublime where it is turned into an
ironic appearance. The elevation takes place alongside an expansion of the context of the
irony: the narrator's metafictional comment on the scene musters the additional authority of
conventional allegory to criticize the absurdity of both the objects of romantic desire the
Nobleman and the Fair Maiden and the stereotypical situation in which romance places
them and the reader:
Every reader of a sentimental turn (and we desire no other) must have been pleased with the
tableau with which the last act our little drama concluded; for what can be prettier than an
image of Love on his knees before Beauty? [15: 179]
The appearance is then flung back with a resounding thud to the low level where the
descriptive code was initiated. The allegorical Beauty and Love resume their human forms.
However, not only does the scene cancel the possibility of a happy union between them the
ultimate destination of the Love-Beauty conjunction but the narrator goes further to
support his rejection of stereotypes through a quick series of intensely perceptible, contrasting
sensory impressions:
But when Love heard that awful confession from Beauty that she was married already, he
bounced up from his attitude of humility on the carpet, uttering exclamations which caused
poor little Beauty to be more frightened than she was when she made her avowal. . . . "So the
rascal ran off, eh?" Sir Pitt said, with a hideous attempt at consolation . . . . Saying which,
Rebecca went down on her knees in a most tragical way, and taking Sir Pitt's horny black
hand between her own two (which were very pretty and white, and soft as satin), looked up in
his face with an expression of exquisite pathos and confidence. (ibid.)
This sequence might be taken for sheer farce if Sir Pitt were not a figure originating not just in
Thackeray's antiliterary endeavour but in his social criticism as well. The Baronet's entrance
on the scene of the novel hs earlier in the novel provoked the narrator into a sarcastic
invective against a social structure that not only tolerates but actually upholds the supremacy
of a corrupt and degenerate landed gentry. In this open denunciation of inherited status, the
stylistic features the encyclopaedic list of personal and social characteristics, the overt
negation, the sarcasm unmistakably signal satire:

Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read who
had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettyfogging; who never had a
taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul: and yet he had rank, and
honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He
was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers courted him, and in Vanity Fair
he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue. [9: 102-03]
Textually, the proposal scene places Sir Pitt at its focus, but through the deft blending of the
social and the literary targets of his irony, Thackeray manages to include Becky into its scope
as well. This happens in spite of the fact that throughout the sequence she successfully mimics
and herself parodies the stereotype of the romance heroine. Yet, for the first time in her life
she has miscalculated and, by marrying Rawdon rather than his father, has made the greatest
mistake in her life. Correspondingly, for the first and only time in the novel Thackeray shows
her capable of fear and unable to hide it: "Rebecca started back a picture of consternation"
(14: 178). But even as she regains her presence of mind, she already moves into the realm of
satire, for her panic originates not so much in the fact that she has misplaced her bets as in her
disappointment that she cannot marry this particular nobleman, horny and black like his hand
as he may be. It is notable that all the men over whom she chooses to cast her net Jos, Sir
Pitt, Rawdon, Lord Steyne, and even her disreputable consorts from her Continental period
cut physically or mentally grotesque and repulsive figures. Yet Rebecca "reads" them as mere
emblems of the kind of life to which she aspires. Although in manipulating their feelings she
is indeed "a very clever woman" (10: 111), her hubris makes of her another alazon.4 Unlike
Amelia, she does not derive her notions about society and its ways from fashionable romance,
yet she too, despite her callous pragmatism, succumbs to the mechanics of conventionalized
desire. Like Amelia, who weeps "over the end of a novel, were it ever so stupid" (1: 8), Becky
in the proposal scene sheds "some of the most genuine tears that ever fell from her eyes" (14:
178). And because it is her own "fashionable" novel that her tears fall over, she is subsumed
under the satirist's condemnation.
Parody in Vanity Fair functions as the controlling force not only of individual dramatic scenes
but also of the narrative design as a whole. Vanity Fair, like indeed all of Thackeray's mature
novels, occupies a unique place in English fiction up to the eighteen-fifties (and largely after
that) in that it excludes the principle of suspense. This fact alone provides evidence of
Thackeray's conscious and consistent anti-romantic realist aesthetic, which, starting with his
earliest novel Catherine, he applied with the militancy of a dedicated warrior. His very
reliance on individual character and personal history as the only justification of narrative logic
reflects a conviction that truth involves rejecting providentiality as the governing principle of
human existence.5 But narrative in Vanity Fair is not conceived as a simple negative
statement: its substance or "texture," as Loofbourow has shown (23 ff.), is made up of various
combinations and permutations of the elements familiar from the structures of criminal and
chivalric romance and popular melodrama. What is more, parody supplants the missing
narrative links in the novel: sequences of sentimental day-dreaming align the first parts of the
two contrasted heroines' stories, while the physical disparity and the psychological sameness
of the male objects of their desire George and Jos serve to debunk the convention itself.
Marriage the traditional ending of romance comes before the novel has even reached its
middle, and enables the writer to explore the various forms of dysfunctional relationship
between the partners. Also, in Thackeray's ironic remodelling of conventional narrative
patterns, cause and effect relationships, whose strict logic and transparency build the plot of
fashionable fiction, take a different shape. They are often camouflaged, as in Dobbin's acting
as "the messenger of Hymen" (the title of Chapter 20) when he is in fact engineering an

unhappy marriage, or they are simulated, as in Becky's producing George's letter when
Amelia, all by herself, has already found the strength to call Dobbin back and to bring about
the "happy" ending.
Plot, George Levine says in his discussion of the Victorian realist novel,
as the bearer of desire, is the means by which the extreme or the "orgasmic" enters
narrative, and in the quest both for truth and for civilising morality which the novel was
attempting to confirm, the extreme was banished with plot. The monstrous, domesticated by
Austen, exorcised by Scott, is, in Thackeray, transformed into banality. [146-47]
"Banality" aptly defines the ideological tenet towards which Thackeray orients his parody as a
strategic narrative form in Vanity Fair. Romance as a whole, and in particular the fairy-tale
pattern adopted by nineteenth-century popular fiction, is a palimpsest whose signs have not
been completely obliterated in this novel. They keep cropping up as ironic echoes in the
allegorical images of Love and Beauty from the episode discussed above, in the gold and
glitter and the stately coach in the opening paragraph with their reminiscences of the
Cinderella story, but mostly in the selection and the arrangement of the narrative material.
Becky musters all her charms to tame her Beasts and almost succeeds. Amelia sleeps her
youthful days in expectation of her Fairy Prince George, who soon arrives on the scene. But
above all, it is Becky's career that suggests an analogy between her struggle against the
powerful social mechanism that seeks to exclude her and the motif of a battle against
superhuman or supernatural foes which is a staple element of the fairy-tale.6 And while her
victories enhance her stature, her ultimate fall becomes even more shattering to romantic
desire, especially since the only monster she succeeds in vanquishing turns out to be the
degenerate weakling Jos Sedley.
The intertextual frame thus motivates the narrative rhythm: what to Ermarth (21-22) seems
like a purely paratactic arrangement of the narrative units in Vanity Fair, is in fact a constant
ironic reversal and subversion of the ideological constituents of romance. Thackeray does not
merely, as Kathleen Tillotson asserts, turn "away . . . from heroes and heroines, from the
conventional ending, from the . . . professional parts of novels'" (235). He engages his fiction
in a constant dialogic relationship with conventions that extend from literary stereotypes to
fossilized ideological patterns. And by doing this, he positions his ironic conflicts of meaning
firmly within discourse, using them as a strategy to investigate and assert ordinariness as the
defining characteristic of the real.
Philosophic irony

As already pointed out, many twentieth-century critics have noticed that there is more to the
whole configuration of relationships between what Vanity Fair presents as reality and as
appearance than can be covered by the consideration of the writer's satiric and parodic
intentions and their execution. The very outset of the novel announces a radical expansion of
the field of the neat antiphrastic opposition, set by verbal irony, between moral and ethical
polarities and by the comedy so fundamental to Thackeray's satire. The statement with which
the Manager of the Performance begins his "Before the Curtain" opens up additional
perspectives: the emotion, he says, that overcomes him at the sight of his own spectacle is one
of "profound melancholy" (21). The sad tonality announced here is the same that permeates
the famous ending of the novel: "Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world?
Which of us has his desire? or having it, is satisfied?" (67: 878). This tonal frame sets and

sustains the associative link with the novel's other obvious intertextual source apart from
Bunyan: the Book of Ecclesiastes. The closing words of Vanity Fair practically repeat the
Biblical Preacher's generalizations: "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and
behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit" (Eccl. 1: 14) or "For what hath man of all his
labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his
days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yeah, his heart taketh not rest in the night. This is also
vanity" (Eccl. 2: 22-23). Yet Ecclesiastes supplies Vanity Fair with only the theme of
philosophic irony. Its development, as few critics have failed to notice since the book was first
published, is a source of tension, relativism and even nihilism. Lougy (64) and Ermarth (21),
for instance, have claimed that Thackeray asserts the absolute supremacy of a fickle Fate that
holds the characters in a tight grip, denying them the gratification of personal development or
fulfillment. Furthermore, assertion that all human effort is transitory and contingent in fact the
rejects the moral certitude and the corrective impetus of the reality of satiric irony. Thus the
salient presence of madness in Vanity Fair as "an essential rather than accidental attribute of
the human condition" (Lougy: 66) indicates a fundamental conflict between the satiric and
metaphysical aspects in the very concept of vanity. In social terms, the novel presents
madness as a norm, yet in psychological terms it is an aberration. Aligning his voice with that
of the Biblical preacher, the narrator and here it would be safe to say, Thackeray himself
seems to project an ironic outlook as "infinite absolute negativity" which undermines the very
process of meaning-creation, at the same time supplying the ironist with a protective shield
against the destructive impact of his reality.
In the novelist's hands, however, the existential problematic is not only a theme but also the
origin of a discursive strategy which employs irony to enrich the meanings produced by satire
and gives rise to some of the most striking effects in the novel. As already pointed out,
Thackeray's satiric irony cuts into the very principle on which capitalist society is built that
of the free market where everything and everybody turns into a commodity. What the novel
lashes against is not just the effect of the endless competition for material goods and a higher
social status, but also the absolutization of money as the supreme ruler of human life.
Philosophic irony, on the other hand, offers a counterbalance, yet it does so without recourse
to a transcendent God. Instead, the measure of all things that it offers is Time. Time is indeed
the only absolute in this work where everything else is subject to the arbitrariness of the
market. That is why history the passage of time seen in its human dimensions, both public
and private best exposes all human vanity.
Historical narrative in Vanity Fair organizes itself around the relational and inclusive
dimensions of ironic meaning: with time, everything becomes something else and something
more, but is never wholly eliminated. Thackeray's "puppets" do not change intrinsically, but
as they grow old, they become less destructive to themselves and to others, the excesses of
their desires less sharp-edged. George's love letter reappears after fifteen years but it has lost
its power to wound or to heal . . . the emotionally mature Amelia, who has learned the lesson
of humility, has already written to Dobbin, asking him to come back. George's presence in her
life has been exorcised by herself (Becky's help comes belatedly), and time cured Dobbin,
too, of his blind devotion, so he takes Amelia with a sober awareness of her weaknesses. Even
for Becky, who alone in this novel seems impervious to time, retrospection lays bare the truth:
"Becky, who penetrated into the very centre of fashion, and saw the great George IV face to
face, has owned since that there too was Vanity" (51: 637; italics added). What Jean Sudrann
says of Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon is quite applicable to Vanity Fair too: "He has
written a novel which, through its vision of the human condition as man's life in time,

diminishes the urgency for the punishment of evil perpetrated by individual men while at no
time does it ask us to excuse or condone the moral flaw" (363).
The ultimate destination of personal history is death and, as Knoepflmacher points out, death
in Vanity Fair is "the only true vanquisher of vanity" (82). Its vision blunts the differential
edge of satiric irony; pathos, rather than comedy, Bruce Redwine notes (659-660), suffuses
the narrator's language in all the death scenes in the novel. The memento mori motif,
constantly kept in view by the perspective of philosophic irony, supplants satire's antitheses
with the all-comprising difference between "then" and "now," but at the same time
emphasizes their mutual relationship. The interdependence of past and present serves as a
major internal norm of the narrative rhythm in Vanity Fair. In a digression in Chapter 19,
apropos of the imploring and hence self-humiliating letters written by Becky's unfortunate
father and by Becky herself and kept by Miss Pinkerton for future use, the narrator introduces
and then ironically qualifies the meanings inherent in the two temporal coordinates: "Perhaps
in Vanity Fair there are no better satires than letters," he says,
Take a bundle of your dear friend's of ten years back your dear friend whom you now hate.
Look at a file of your sister's! how you clung to each other till you quarrelled about the
twenty-pound legacy! . . . . Vows, love, promises, confidences, gratitude, how queerly they
read after a while! There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every
written document (except receipted tradesmen's bills) after a certain brief and proper interval.
Those quacks and misanthropes who advertise indelible Japan ink should be made to perish
along with their wicked discoveries. The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded
utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to
somebody else. (19: 178)
The passage reveals one of the central assertions of philosophic irony in Vanity Fair, repeated
in the stories of each of its protagonists and recognized by those who are shown approaching
death: time does not heal the spirit but enforces the painful recognition of its past errors, thus
taking on the role of the supreme ironist.
Thackeray's philosophic irony endows all selfish pleasures and ambitions but also all material
possessions with a double mode of existence: in the context of satire, they are the reality that
the world of the Fair recognizes but also hides behind a mask of Christian virtue.
Contrariwise, from the cosmic perspective of memento mori, they are merely an appearance,
a semblance of happiness. Genuine fulfillment of the self is only partially possible and comes
only to those who can, at least to some degree, recognize the temporality of individual
experience. It comes to Dobbin, though a final ironic twist qualifies even this one victory over
the standards of the Fair: "seizing up his little Janey, of whom he is fonder than anything else
in the world fonder even of his "History of the Punjaub," or to Amelia, who has to live with
the knowledge that she is no longer Dobbin's idol: "Fonder than he is of me," Emmy thinks,
with a sigh (67: 877). To those like Sir Pitt Crawley, who lack the inner resources to face the
Death's head early enough, all-presiding time brings a farcical second childhood: "For this
was all that was left after more than seventy years of cunning and struggling, and drinking,
and scheming, and sin and selfishness a whimpering old idiot put in and out of bed and
cleaned and fed like a baby" (40: 515).
The infusion of the existential problematic with irony also affects Thackeray's handling of
material detail in Vanity Fair. One of the main reasons why this novel is even to this day
perceived as unquestionably and thoroughly realistic is that it is based on the strict and

consistent referentiality of its particularities. Action and character are always firmly located,
temporally, topographically and geographically, in an environment built out of precisely
selected and clearly ordered details the bench right next to the door of the Brussels
ballroom, where George in Chapter 19 hurries to leave Amelia and from where she can
observe the goings-on between her husband and Becky, but fails to notice the billet-doux in
the bouquet; the ribbons of the eponymously known Miss Horrocks, whom the gardener
catches in his orchard "eating peaches in a sunshiny morning at the south wall" an
infringement on his property that results in his own dismissal and eviction (39: 502). The
same Ribbons/Miss Horrocks acts as sentinel to Sir Pitt's room and meets visitors at the door
of the housekeeper's room "which commanded the back entrance by which they were
admitted" (39: 503). Temporality acquires specific representation in the "scarce three lines of
silver in [Amelia's] soft brown hair" which Dobbin notes as he sees her again after his tenyear absence (58: 742). These and numerous other details are placed with the accuracy of the
graphic artist that Thackeray had initially planned to be. The world of Vanity Fair is indeed a
whole made out of "pen and pencil sketches," as the novel's original subtitle was, where
chronology is constructed out of changes in material reality brought about by time. It is this
double temporal allegiance that makes this reality more than just a prop in the dramatic scenes
where it is referred to. In Thackeray's version of Vanity Fair, the significance of things
becomes, as Barbara Hardy rightly points out (96), "suspect" since they are expressive of the
values of the Fair rather than of human needs. But their status as commodities liable to
become objects of fetishism is also infused with a temporality that nourishes the historical
drive of the narrative. Material things are treated as possessions that appear, disappear, and
reappear, like Jos's portrait or the little desk, Becky's present from Amelia. They change hands
like the Indian shawl which Dobbin has given Amelia as a gift and which, as the very last
resort, she sells for twenty guineas in order to buy Georgy books as a Christmas gift the
books, as the narrator says, "extant to this day" (46: 586). Or like Becky's jewellery, with
which her maid Fifine absconds the night after the catastrophe. While time does not affect the
materiality of objects, it changes people's relationship with them. The onward movement of
time is marked by the transformation of "having" possessions to "losing" them. And because
the marketplace commodifies not only objects but people as well, the human reality is also
subject to the effect of temporal instability where past, present and future engender meanings
that enter in ironic relationship with each other. In the context of satire with its emphasis on
the present moment, objects and people are either reified that is, turned into seemingly
immortal fetishes or idols or commodified and put on the stalls for sale. Philosophic irony,
on the other hand, gives them life in time, so that although their essence, and hence their
denotation, remains the same, they undergo a connotative change. As a result, Vanity Fair
constructs a highly motivated mimesis of empirical reality: its details, especially the material
ones, are always related to individual, and therefore t ransitory, desire.
"Particulars," Levine says in The Realistic Imagination, "are the instrument of
disenchantment" (153). Andrew H. Miller also notices the dialectical content that infuses
Thackeray's world of objects, its inscription into a "dynamic of desire and disenchantment"
(26). The very matrix of Thackeray's plotless novel is provided by this dynamic, with its
downward psychic direction. This is all the more remarkable when we realize that in spite of
its impression of profusion and variety, the world of objects in Vanity Fair is made by
surprisingly few classes. It is built almost exclusively of things that serve as exchangeable
commodities, like the diamonds Becky hoards or the Indian shawl which Amelia sells, or as
status symbols, like the stately coaches whose presence punctuates and underscores Becky's
upward rise and subsequent fall. It is their connotative potential as symbols of change that

charts the work's narrative geometry, initiated as early as in the opening paragraph and infused
with a powerful architectonic potential:
While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove
up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a
large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a
three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black servant, who reposed on
the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew
opposite Miss Pinkerton's shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell, at least a score of
young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of the stately old brick house. Nay,
the acute observer might have recognised the little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima
Pinkerton herself, rising over some geranium pots in the window of that lady's own drawingroom. (1: 3)
In no more than three sentences, the passage manages to make Amelia's and Becky's departure
from Chiswick Mall an event of overpowering physical concreteness. It comes forth through
the insistence on the calendar and the clock, on sizes, shapes, numbers and primary colours.
These details set up a code which, at every moment further on, authenticates the time and the
place of the events described. But the very choice of particularities indicates that their
function is more than mimetic, for they represent recognizable status symbols and so initiate
the satiric pattern of the novel. At the same time their subsequent rhythmic recurrence turns
them into coordinates in the two contrasting lines of narrative progression, with their
contrapuntal distribution of climaxes and anticlimaxes. For Amelia, the blazing gold in the
light and the coach starts an ironically inverted Cinderella story that will bring her down from
the riches she now takes for granted to the rags from which she is rescued only by the
serendipitous return of Jos, grotesquely transmogrified into a Fairy Godmother. Conversely, in
Becky's case the ignominious departure from the Academy with its "great iron gate" is the
beginning of her enactment of a heroic myth, an upward rise culminating in her entry into the
much statelier Gaunt House and subsequently into the Royal Palace, where she arrives in
Pitt's emblazoned family coach. The final collapse of Becky's dream takes place amidst the
rumble of Lord Steyne's barouche in Rome: the grotesque vulgarity of Madame de Belladona,
Lord Steyne's new mistress and Rebecca's satirically inverted doppelganger, offers a fitting
anticlimactic ending to the myth of worldly success that she has believed in. The opening
paragraph also sets up a contrast of light and darkness which, too, condenses narrative
possibilities that will be developed later on. Steeped in the opening passage in June blaze and
the sunshine of her affluent cosseted youth, Amelia will sink to the darkness that "fell down
on the field and the city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face,
dead, with a bullet through his heart" (32: 406). Conversely, Becky, the "girl of whom no one
took any notice" (1: 9), will be invariably placed in a brightly-lit environment up to and
including the discovery scene, when Rawdon, returning to his house on that fateful evening,
sees that "the drawing-room windows were blazing with light" (53: 675). Flowers, too, will
surround Becky as signifiers of her seductive power and emblems of victory: the "bow-pot"
she does not get from Chiswick Mall is more than made up for by the bouquets her admirers
heap on her wherever she goes. The natural, potted red geraniums in Miss Pinkerton's
windows will find their mock-pastoral, parodic echo in the sentimental song "The rose upon
my balcony" which Becky sings at Gaunt House (51: 651). By contrast, the bouquet George
does not buy for his wife in Brussels marks the moment when Amelia realizes the reality of
the breakdown of her romantic dream of love and marriage.

In a letter to David Masson Thackeray voiced his objections to Dickens's aesthetic principle
of using symbolism to elevate the emotional response: "in a drawing-room drama, a coat is a
coat, and a poker is a poker; and must be nothing else according to my ethics, not an
embroidered tunic, nor a great red-hot instrument like the Pantomime weapon" (Letters, II:
772). Thackeray's objects are indeed always functional in a pragmatic sense, yet because in
Vanity Fair they are commodities, they take on a symbolic value for those who own or desire
them. "For the characters in Vanity Fair," writes Andrew H. Miller, "the profane world is not
sanctified; objects acquire a libidinal content rather than a religious one and derive their
"power," or significance, from being desired . . . Fact and value, object and meaning, are
related subjectively in Thackeray's world, according to discourses of solipsistic pleasure"
(36). Like Johnson's "Dixonary" from the opening chapter, in this crassly materialistic
universe of selfish desire, satire, parody and cosmic irony embed houses and horses, coaches
and cushions, parasols and poodles, bouquets and books, glitter and glamour, into social and
discursive practices, and to the ideologies that underpin them.7 That is why objects in Vanity
Fair become also the points of orientation in the novel's intricate system of contrasts, and
especially in that between the two protagonists.
Becky and Amelia are never allowed to stand in the same relation to the material expressions
of desire, though they begin from the same point. What is true of Becky during her stay with
the Sedleys is valid for Amelia too: both build castles in the air, "with a husband somewhere
in the background" (3: 26), though Becky places in hers diamond necklaces, while Amelia
fills it with flower-gardens and rustic walks (13: 148). But once the marriages are a fact, the
two girls' paths diverge not only in spatial and social terms but also with regard to their
respective attitude to and conduct in the material world. Amelia's individuality, as Hardy
notes, largely depends on the fact that she "stands apart from the mercantile values" (101): her
form of vanity expresses itself in worshipping things of no practical worth but with a high
nostalgic content George's sash, the piano she mistakenly thinks of as "George's piano," the
portrait of her husband, even Georgy's composition on Selfishness. Becky, on the other hand,
is a fetishist of commodities that seem to have no history. The only true relics she preserves,
out of sheer amusement, are George's billet doux and Jos's portrait and they are, to refer to
Hardy again, only parodies of genuine relics (102).
But the material necessities of everyday existence are also involved in the contrast between
the girls' opportunities and their realization, a contrast proceeding from Ecclesiastes' skeptical
denial of absolute happiness or its opposite. Thus even the most ordinary of objects can
initiate a dramatic irony whose edge cuts into the central narrative and ideological structures
of the novel. The objects around which the two heroines build their girlish daydreams stand in
a contrast whose apparent purport is to emphasize the distance between sentimentalism and
pragmatism. This assertion, however, is ironically qualified as the narrator extracts every
ounce of its dramatic potential to reveal that each character's fixation on ideological absolutes
prevents her in a like manner from seeing the relation between the imagined objects and the
man they are dreaming about. Had Amelia been less blind to George's pampered prodigality,
which is obvious to everyone but herself had she realized that two thousand pounds are
nothing to him and that rustic walks and village churches are not his setting she might have
assumed some control of their relationship. Instead, she mechanically builds the news of his
disinheritance into her romantic dream of "sharing poverty in company with the beloved
object" (25: 302). Had Becky's fetishism of status symbols not blinded her to the emotional
growth of her husband, she might have averted her disaster. Had Amelia paid more attention
to her father's mental degradation and shown some responsibility for the family finances, she
might not have had to lose Georgy. Yet, as the narrator says, lost opportunities are necessary

"doubtless in order that this story might be written" (16: 192). "Are there not little chapters in
everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?" he earlier
facetiously queries the reader (6: 61), seemingly using his reference to the dramatic ironies of
everyday life to undercut the implications of his philosophic irony. Yet his joke is serious,
reflecting a fundamental premise of every ideology that it is most effective when it is most
invisible, that if unquestioned and mechanically followed, what seems like common sense
assumptions only consolidates people's vulnerability to the powers that be and prompt them to
repeat their errors. Pushed by her respective ideological blindness her vanity, in
Thackeray's terms each heroine's story shows her to be guilty of errors of omission that
become errors of commission. In this sense, the charity sale in the final tableau of the novel,
with its hints at a general philistine acquiescence to existing conventions, is a fit conclusion to
each of the two stories whose contrapuntal relation to the other reveals a formal identity too.
The concluding episode not only brings the protagonists together but also irradiates the
strands of parody and satire with the Biblical preacher's skepticism on human desire. Despite
their powerful vitality, people ultimately emerge into the light of Thackeray's philosophic
irony as puppets, stuck in the repetitive patterns and sequences of behaviour and unable to set
themselves free from the traps of their constricting beliefs and aspirations.
Discursive Versatility: The Heroines

To say that Becky lacks the capability to oppose conventions is probably a rather unusual way
of defining Thackeray's most famous heroine, usually admired for her courage, resilience, and
independence of spirit. It fits, of course, Amelia traditionally regarded as the passive nonheroine who, unconscious of the historical and social facts around her, lives in a realm of pure
fantasy. Yet it is Becky who comes to identify herself with the society she initially despises,
while Amelia manages to see through at least some of her romantic illusions. This paradox
underlies the frequently voiced dissatisfaction with the way the narrative of Vanity Fair deals
with its two protagonists. The expectations that they should stay in the positions affixed at the
outset by the binary opposition of satiric irony fail, for many critics, to materialize. Becky's
controversial function in the novel's moral aesthetic has put many readers and critics on their
mettle. Early and mid-twentieth-century critics like Lord David Cecil, Arnold Kettle, Dorothy
Van Ghent and A. E. Dyson see her as the true heroine of the story, the only one endowed
with the talent and intellect needed to raise one above the standards of the Fair. They and
others treat the negative traits in her character and the harm she does to others as the
consequence of the disadvantages of her childhood and her lack of real opportunities in a
conservative social structure. To quote A. E. Dyson, "Her anti-social qualities are at least as
much the effect of the world's dealings with her as their cause" (18).8 Due to her courage,
vitality and wit, Dyson typically holds, Becky pays back the degenerate world of the
aristocracy and the blindly ambitious middle class in their own coin. She is therefore
commonly regarded as the organizing centre of Thackeray's social and moral satire, a
picaresque eiron in her own right. In the words of Bruce K. Martin, "she is cast as the nemesis
of vanity, determined and able to survive by preying on the conceit of others" (Martin: 41 also
Dyson: 41).9 Becky fails, says Russel A. Fraser, another of Becky's champions, "because she
is too clever" (144). Fraser is one of the many, including Walter Allen (179), who discover
fundamental inconsistency and deliberate injustice in the way Thackeray handles his heroine,
blaming him for his distortions of or downright lies about a personality that, objectively,
commands the reader's admiration.
Certainly, Becky has also had her detractors, and they have been no less vociferous than her
fans. Their argument is that Thackeray is consistent in his presentation of her from the start.

According to Iser, Thackeray makes it clear that Becky is guilty of a fundamental error of
judgement, both of herself and of the worthiness of her goals (110). John Tilford in his "The
Degradation of Becky Sharp" puts forward the view that through her Thackeray impressively
makes his moralist's assertion "that evil is deceptively appealing, but that as its ugliness will
inevitably transpire it cannot flourish forever" (608). Using as his evidence the comments that
surround her throughout the book, Tilford concludes that Thackeray is steadfast in his
negative attitude towards Becky. Tilford's view is shared by John Hagan, according to whom
Thackeray is unsympathetic to Becky, he does not shift his attitude and any impression that he
does so is based on the critics', and not the writer's, fallacious reasoning. Unlike Becky's
defenders, who see her as triumphant as ever at the end of the novel, Hagan believes she gets
her just deserts:
The very fact that [Becky] is happy at the end of the novel that she has come to no moral
self-awareness and suffered no remorse is only the final proof for the reader of the
completeness of her corruption. She has become a supreme example of how wicked a heart
may lie behind the most attractive facade. (487)
Although seemingly more transparent and therefore less often discussed in such detail,
Amelia's presentation and function in Vanity Fair has also raised varying and even
contradictory interpretations. For those who do not put Becky's "badness" to question, Amelia
looks too flaccid and uninteresting to act as her foil. At the same time, there are others who
treat her as a psychological entity in her own right, proof of Thackeray's insight into the
variety and complexity of human character. She has thus been described as the victim of her
passive temperament, a slave to all kinds of conventions, or as a good but silly woman. Her
greatest "handicap," according to Dyson, is "her lack of any real intelligence or talent or of the
courage and will-power needed when life turns sour" (16). Similarly, Mark Spilka defines her
as "much more an effect than a cause. An imperceptive woman, she feels rather than thinks
her way through life" (206). By contrast, some critics have blamed Thackeray for excessive
fondness for his heroine and for lavishing praises on her which her dramatic presence does not
deserve. Distinguishing between what Thackeray shows and what he tells the reader, Spilka
accuses the novelist of creating a "dramatic fraud" (207; also Greig: 108-109). Certain
attempts to place Amelia in some psychological category have led to the naturalization of her
deficiencies: for Taube, she is "a naturally passive personality re-enforced by education that
did nothing to develop any sense of independence" (2). Trying to explain her, Taube (3) and
Dyson (24) even venture a medical diagnosis: in the words of the latter, she is an "incurably
neurotic woman, destined to unhappiness whether things go well for her or not" (Dyson: 25).
The contrast between the two heroines has thus received an essentialist treatment: normality is
seen to be embodied in Becky with her "robust mental health" (ibid.). Even when critics have
paid due attention to the historical and cultural context of Amelia's conception as a character,
the result has often been further dismissal. Thus Katharine M. Rogers, who analyzes her in the
light of Victorian conventions of womanhood, makes a sweeping generalization that refutes
its own premises: Amelia, she concludes, "consistently displays the innocence, humility,
submission, and uncritical devotion which belonged to the Victorian ideal of womanhood, as
well as the love, altruism, compassion, and gentleness which will always be valued" (1374).
Against this background of continual critical debate, it is hardly surprising that Thackeray's
alleged sentimental weakness for his protagonist has been seen as the cause of a general
dislocation of his aesthetic constructs from the moral framework of the novel. Amelia,
Rawlins argues, "however much we may dislike her, must be a heroine she is so
recognizably at the centre of a dramatic structure of definably good and bad plot

developments . . . Amelia comes forward as an alternative [to the complete cynicism of

Becky's world] and fails" (30, 32; also Lubbock: 94). Against such a view and taking into
consideration the parodic orientation of Thackeray's characterization, Sister Corona M. Sharp
proposes a much more valid claim: Thackeray's consistent use of allusions to popular heroines
illuminates Amelia's chief characteristic: her "emotional immaturity. Hence, although the
narrator manages a semblance of sympathy, it seems the evidence in the beginning as well as
at the end of the novel points to an ironic attitude of pity mixed with ridicule" (328).
Viewed from the vantage point of irony, all these conflicting interpretations appear to
privilege the neat antithetical relationships one expects from its use in Thackeray's satire.
With her cleverness, energy, and artistic talent, Becky offers a seemingly perfect fit with the
role of an eiron and Amelia, who blindly devotes herself to selfish idolatry, looks like an ideal
alazon. Or both should be interpreted as the targets of Thackeray's dismissal of erroneous
patterns of behaviour, so that any change of authorial attitude ought to be regarded as a breach
of faith with the reader who expects a stable perspective. Still, as most critics of the later
twentieth century have realized, Becky's amoral attitudes are as unsettling as Amelia's
identification with the Victorian homely virtues, and fail to match the antiphrastic oppositions
of satiric irony. Polhemus rightly points out (135-136) that the arguments adduced by
Rebecca's supporters rely in fact on an irrelevantly anachronistic standard which derives from
modern concepts of unfettered womanhood. Conversely, a subliminal masochism in the
human psyche distances Amelia from the reader's sympathies. "Amelia," he says, "naggingly
reminds us of that wide sheepish streak in ourselves that asks to be fleeced and that eschews
the taxing effort it takes to quit the herd mentally" (138). Indeed, much more easily than
Becky, Amelia slips into the position of a target of satire, with the consequence that the
complexity of her character and her function in the novel tend to be underplayed by many
critics.
Yet, a careful look shows that both heroines keep evading conventional moral and literary
categories and the binary oppositions they presuppose. And this is not, or not only, due to
Thackeray's own ambiguous personal relationships and complicated psychological life, as has
been claimed, but to irony's nature: it rejects the dogmatic assertions that stem from rigid
ideological affiliations. What Thackeray does with his protagonists is not so much to fix them
in the positions determined by satire and philosophic irony he uses his heroines to reach
further, to the place where the two paradigms originate. Peter Garrett's opinion leads in this
very direction: the two figures, according to him, "function first of all as registers of
experience, instruments for establishing a characteristic relation to the world" (105). To arrive
at this understanding, however, the interpreter must embark on a transdiscursive and
transideological journey &mdasah; the same that the ironic narrator himself undertakes. The
two heroines must be "read" as participants in the ironic conflict of meanings and as
determinants of the process, again aptly defined by Garrett as the "construction and
deconstruction, of formulating, breaking down, and reformulating binary oppositions" (113).
In other words, Thackeray's ironic strategy involved in his character construction and
presentation must be seen as reaching out not directly to the non-verbal world but to the
discourses that formulate its "truths." Such an approach undoubtedly imperils the stability of
these "truths" and the success of the artistic endeavour but these are the risks faced by any
ironist.

Becky Sharp's Transdiscursive Journey

The discursive versatility that characterizes Becky's presentation in Vanity Fair can be found
in a sentence, which, in a typically Thackerayan manner, condenses the whole repertoire of
ironic strategies in the writer's handling of his heroine. After the memorable scene of Becky's
defiant rejection of the Dixonary, the narrator joins the two main protagonists in the Sedleys'
coach. His eyes first fall on Becky herself:
When Miss Sharp had performed the heroical act mentioned in the last chapter, and had seen
the Dixonary, flying over the pavement of the little garden, fall at length at the feet of the
astonished Miss Jemima, the young lady's countenance, which had before worn an almost
livid look of hatred, assumed a smile that perhaps was scarcely more agreeable, and she sank
back in the carriage in an easy frame of mind, saying, "So much for the Dixonary; and thank
God, I'm out of Chiswick." [1: 13]
The apparent function of the sentence is purely referential this is the first time when the
narrator gives a close-up of Becky's expression as a metonymical representation of her
emotional state. But it is also densely iconic of the whole narrative geometry and descriptive
repertoire of Vanity Fair. In the first place, its very structure reflects the novel's characteristic
anticlimactic drive: the cumulative periods peak on the sinister combination of "hatred" and "a
smile that perhaps was scarcely more agreeable" to fall off into the frustrating casualness of
Becky's action ("she sank back") and the simplicity and directness of her spoken words. More
importantly, the lexicon of the sentence comprises the key elements of the descriptive code
the narrator will henceforward be using to characterize his protagonist. What is more, the
sequencing of these elements performs an ironic double gesture: it offers, and then rejects, a
positive evaluation of an event which reveals the character's permanent traits.
The vocabulary of the sentence also breaks loose from pure reference. It reverberates with the
ironic antitheses that define the status of the two protagonists in the satiric framework of the
novel. The adjective "heroical," for instance, echoes the parodic deposition of Amelia from
her status of conventional heroine in Chapter 1, where the narrator plainly announces that
"she is not a heroine" (1: 7). But although it belongs to the repertoire of mock-heroic comedy
which provides much of the novel's texture (Loofbourow: 60-61), the adjective "heroical" also
announces the descriptive code of triumphant invasion of alien territory, of war and battles,
that punctuates Becky's story. The word "act" thus fits into the main pattern of contrast, for it
sets off Rebecca as a doer, one who challenges Chiswick Mall's claim to authority, while
Amelia, as depicted in Chapter 1, remains suspended on the horns of her emotional dilemma:
"between her two customs of laughing and crying, Miss Sedley was greatly puzzled how to
act. She was glad to go home, yet most wofully sad at leaving school" (1: 8). There is also the
rejection of the gift that is, from Becky's perspective, not only humiliating but also valueless:
as Hardy (104-5) and Miller (41) point out, the manner of receiving and offering gifts is one
of the intersubjective gestures that serve to contrast the two protagonists throughout the novel.
In Becky's system of values, Jemima's gift is gratuitous and by discarding it, she announces
her choice to join the world of quantifiable and exchangeable goods. By far the most
significant details in the sentence, however, are the "livid look of hatred" and the "smile that
was scarcely more agreeable." They set up the vantage points from which the two protagonists
make diametrically opposite claims on the reader's response. Becky's "hatred" contrasts with
the love that will guide Amelia through her life. Taken together, the two descriptive details
combine into an antithetical pair with the first description of Amelia, whose face "blushed

with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes that
sparkled with the brightest and honestest of good-humour" (1: 7).
Although they register only a momentary appearance, the particulars of Becky's expression
initiate the ironic play of differences that typifies Thackeray's presentation of his protagonist
throughout the novel. They lead away from the discourse of action, courage and justifiable
rebellion that sheds a positive light on her and put into view a sinister aspect in her
portraiture, one that is soon consolidated in the ensuing conversation between the two girls. In
this short dialogue, Becky emphatically uses vocabulary replete with allusions to hell and
murder. The Academy for young ladies is for her "the black hole" and, as in an incantation,
she says, "I wish [the whole house] were in the bottom of the Thames, I do; and if Miss
Pinkerton were there, I wouldn't pick her out, that I wouldn't" (2: 14). That her outpouring is
not the typically adolescent release of anger but comes from a deep-seated attitude becomes
evident in her reaction to Amelia's reproaches for harbouring "such wicked, revengeful
thoughts." "Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural," answered Miss Rebecca. "I'm no angel"
(ibid.). Becky's self-definition through the naturalization of the diabolic establishes the other
major descriptive code in her characterization. It opens up an interpretive avenue that leads
from the single instance to a consistent linguistic pattern used by the narrator throughout the
novel and, ultimately, to the Victorian discourse on women.
The interplay of the discourses on heroism, money, and women, illustrated in the sentence
above, is not a relationship that Thackeray sets up artificially, nor does it function within some
abstract sphere. "Heroism" in this novel is a concept with concrete social, psychological and
historical dimensions. Throughout, Thackeray "tropes" Becky's progress in society as a
military campaign against a formidable enemy force, analogous to that of Napoleon. The
metaphorical link is backed, especially in the first half of the novel, by the fusion of the
protagonists' private histories with the public history of the Napoleonic Wars and the battle of
Waterloo.10 As critic H. M. Daleski points out, this expressive medium with its recurring war
imagery sets Becky up "as a soldier of fortune" (142); Amelia, on the contrary, features as a
victim, "overwhelmed by the slaughter"(145).11 Thackeray's appropriation of the military
discourse as the comic imitation of a conflict between individual will and traditional
repressive authority is indeed a major factor in engendering the sympathetic response to
Becky shared by so many readers and critics. Yet, this strategy is also calculated to trigger the
emotional reaction associated with irony, as the narrator makes evident in his jocular play
upon words in "If this is a novel without a hero, at least let us lay claim to a heroine" (30:
369). The pun draws its effect from its immediate context, Brussels on the eve of Waterloo,
but mostly from the overt and persistent allusions, both verbal and pictorial (in Thackeray's
illustrations), to Becky as a female conqueror. A comic version of Napoleon, the eiron of
world history, she therefore easily slips into the image of a fighter for freedom and
independence, who, as Fraser aptly puts it, "mocks and discomposes, at least for a time, her
own time and the sphere which she has made her own" (145).
But from the very start, Becky's textual presence aligns the military imagery with a different
lexicon and semantics, which builds into a composite image of a sinister inhumanity. Unlike
the use of the heroic discourse on war, the pattern of demonization is stripped from comic
colours. Its beginnings can be spotted as early as in Chapter 2, where the narrator, in a truly
empiricist manner, examines all the aspects of her background. Setting up the argument of
"nature" against "circumstances," he finds that her behaviour is governed less by the
disadvantages of her family and social environment than by innate envy, hatred, and malice.
These are the characteristics that, once she is out of Chiswick, motivate most of her

relationships, and significantly those with Amelia, Rawdon, and her son. It is true that the
narrator sometimes speaks of her good-natured disposition, but, as has been noted (Hagan:
490), such references do not effectively neutralize the negative slant, as most of them occur in
circumstances where her interests are not threatened. Sustained by frequent mentions of her
green eyes, as well as by the pervasive imagery of serpents, poison, cold brilliance and sharp
(like her name) objects, the description of her "hard-heartedness and ill-humour"(2: 15)
metamorphoses into a whole allusive series that culminates twice: first in Chapter 51, with her
role of Clytemnestra in the charade at Gaunt House, and second, in the lengthy description in
Chapter 64 of the sirens "writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping
among bones, or curling round corpses" (812).
Sirens, as well as their pictorial translation of them as mermaids, belong to an imagistic
repertoire favoured by Thackeray, versed as he was in Classical literature (McMaster, R.D.:
33; Loofbourow: 61). By the mid-nineteenth century, both images had become
conventionalized, but, as has been pointed out (Reed, 1975: 57), the literature of the period
makes consistent use of Classical and Old Testament allusive material specifically to build the
portrait of the destructive woman. Thackeray does this neither mechanically nor superficially,
though, since he dramatizes the conventional representation. Becky thus becomes embedded
in the semantic field of death and destruction not only directly, through the overt analogy
within the abovementioned commentary but chiefly through her association with the satanic
Lord Steyne. From his diabolic appearance, through his admiration for her as "an
accomplished little devil" (52: 663) to the titles of "Viscount Hellborough, Baron Pitchley and
Grillsby" (64: 829) which Thackeray jokingly smuggles into the "obituary" of his death,
Steyne's status in the novel is that of a messenger of the underworld and a magnetic force that
draws Becky into its domain. Throughout, therefore, the demonic allusions and associations
categorize Rebecca in terms of a dangerous otherness. Ironically undermining the positive
association between her and Napoleon, they define her as a social and national menace just
like the French Emperor: "in those days, in England, to say "Long live Bonaparte!" was as
much as to say, "Long live Lucifer!" (2: 14).
Yet, since Becky is undoubtedly one of those persons "living without God in the world"
(Letters, II: 409), eliminating the higher truths of Heaven, she eliminates those of Hell as well.
In a novel whose life is firmly grounded in substantial, measurable, earthly vanities, her link
with the underworld is refracted through the Victorian discourses on women and on money.
These powerful male-produced discourses dissolve the polar opposition between the two
heroines, assiduously sustained by the narrator's loud and sugary praises for Amelia. The
stylized angel-devil antithesis therefore begins to function as an ironic
appearance
in conflict with an ideological reality, which resides in the sameness of the
attitudes that originate in and link the abovementioned discourses. This has been
noted by Robert Polhemus, who points out that both protagonists represent
"masculine condescension to, and fear of women" (129). As Nina Auerbach,
Nancy Armstong, Susan Kingsley Kent and Kimberley Reynolds with Nicola
Humble, among others, have shown, the notorious representations of woman as
"angelic" or "demonic" are projections of one and the same Victorian concept of
woman as a danger to social order. Behind the seeming conventionality of the
religious imagery which envelops so many of the Victorian pronouncements on
and fictional characters of women lies the purely secular understanding of

femaleness as a functional and social disease. Nowhere is this more obvious than
in the nineteenth-century medical discourse on female sexuality. An anonymously
written "study" published in the influential medical Journal of Psychological
Medicine and Mental Pathology in 1851, for instance, formulates the "norm" of
healthy femininity in the following terms:

If we look at the position which woman holds in creation, and the ends which she has to fulfil
the design of the Creator, we see at once that love necessarily constitutes the moving spring of
a large portion of her actions, and assimilates itself with almost every motive. Upon her
devolves the great duty of perpetuating the human race; and in fulfilment of this duty her
feelings oscillate between man and the offspring she bears. Her "desire" is to her husband;
but, in common with every female animal, her feelings are concentrated upon her tender
offspring; and thus it happens that, during the whole of the period in which the reproductive
functions are in activity, love of one kind or the other is the ruling passion, and so her whole
nature is imbued with love. (34)
It is not difficult to find in this a rigid code of a-sexual behaviour (Reynolds and Humble: 15)
dominated by concepts such as duty and love the same that provide the texture of Amelia's
portrayal in Vanity Fair. But the use of animalistic language in the passage also shows the
regulating and repressive drive of the discourse on women. It clearly delineates "wild nature"
as woman's domain, thus presupposing that "culture," the area governed by man, should be
imposed on her by force. What this amounts to is that even ideal femininity is defined as an
aberration from the norms of civilization and therefore dehumanized. It is a critical paradox
that in the twentieth century the same ideological slant towards women can be found in the
pronouncements, cited above, of critics like M. Taube and A. E. Dyson, who diagnose Amelia
as "neurotic" and therefore relegate her to the area of female pathology. But it is equally
difficult to see Becky as the embodiment of the healthy norm, as these critics claim: in fact, as
Robert Lougy rightly states, through her "Thackeray is describing a particular sexuality, one
that is perverted and employed in the service of death" (70).
Becky's "profile" is actually constructed out of the "pathological symptoms" of what in midnineteenth century became known as "moral insanity." Victorian medicine and psychology
claimed to have discovered this female "condition," allegedly caused by the malfunctioning of
the reproductive organs. The same study quoted above describes women suffering from it as
"irreligious, selfish, slanderous, false, malicious, devoid of affection, thievish in a thousand
petty ways, bold maybe erotic, self-willed and quarrelsome" (34). Throughout the novel,
Becky's zone is marked by pragmatic egotism and imperviousness to affection-based
relationships. She exhibits even the thievishness symptomatic of her "pathology." Thus,
having spotted her rummaging through Amelia's drawers, the Sedleys' servants suspect her of
having pinched her friend's "white ribbings" (6: 70). To finance her life in high society, she
effectively steals Briggs' legacy. The sumptuous attire she arrives in for her presentation to
Court includes the Crawleys' old lace and brocade which she has purloined from Pitt's house
in Great Gaunt Street. With the same ease of heart she appropriates husbands, brothers, and
sons, including her own brother-in-law. And in spite of her seemingly invulnerable goodhumour, her lack of affection for her husband and her son is Thackeray's heaviest weapon
against her. Cast in the mould of such a "pathology," which is further aggravated by the
demonic allusions, Becky's sinking into moral and sexual degradation, when, expelled from
English society, she turns first into a demi-mondaine and then possibly into a part-time
courtesan, is only too predictable. Following this logic, it is quite legitimate to assume that
she does murder Jos Sedley for his money. So, in spite of the assertions of critics such as

Walter Allen, Lord David Cecil, and Russel Fraser, all of her "crimes" including murder
appear to be quite "in" her discursive character, even though from a present-day perspective
they may be inconsistent with the other characteristics that the discourse of heroism attributes
to her.
The appearance of heroism in Becky's character is ironically destabilized even further, as the
implications of her abnormality widen to include the discourse of money and finance.
Loofbourow's assertion that "literal event gives no clue to Vanity Fair>/span>'s expressive
tensions" (79) is certainly not backed by Becky's story, to which Thackeray gives the shape
and the language of a business career. Her campaign against the System begins in her
childhood, when her first victories are over money: "Many a dun had she talked to, and turned
away from her father's door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and wheedled into good
humour, and into the granting of one meal more" (2: 29). Her stay at Miss Pinkerton's
establishment is dependent on questions of debts and financial obligations. Thus, when the
Semiramis discovers the young curate's infatuation with her apprentice, she "would have sent
her away, but that she was bound to her under a forfeit" (ibid.). The first confrontation
between the two women is effectively an argument about how much Becky is worth. Becky
sticks to her price: "I am here to speak French with the children not to teach them music,
and save money for you" (2: 31). Interestingly, even at this early stage, Becky decides on a
tactic which does not involve cash: "Give me a sum of money and get rid of me or, if
you like better, get me a good place as governess in a nobleman's family" (ibid.).
From that moment on, every one of Becky's daring moves involves cash-free economic
exchanges. For example, having won "a most timely supply of ready money" from George,
Rawdon grumbles: "It will hardly be enough to pay the inn-bill." "Why need we pay it?" says
Becky (25: 232), and her rhetorical question encapsulates her attitude to the ready-money
economy. Her "performance for profit," as Barbara Hardy has shown at length, compromises
her art throughout, but it also shapes her career as a risky business enterprise founded on the
exchange not of real but of symbolic capital for goods and services. And Becky, with her
"dismal precocity of poverty" (2: 29), has very early learned the value of symbolic capital.
Even as a young girl, she begins to hoard her "assets" by perfecting her artistic abilities on her
own and by going "through the little course of study which was necessary for ladies in those
days" (2: 31). At every step of her advance in society, she uses her artistic talent and sexual
allure as the security that can bring her more credit in the shape of usable commodities. Even
when she boxes her son's ear, she does so in front of Lord Steyne, himself no lover of mothers
and children, with the clear awareness that this will increase her value. The relatively little
ready money she acquires remains in her little desk she never invests it to enlarge her
business since, as Polhemus observes, she "acts out the mentality that holds that diamonds are
a girl's best friend" (132).
But as Becky moves on in society, she becomes bolder and "borrows" more and more
exploiting the fact that her chief creditor, Lord Steyne, with his inherited, unexpendable
wealth, can afford to estimate her "security" much higher than it is really worth. G. Armour
Craig's opinion sounds quite valid here: "The ghostly paradigm on which human nature plays
[in Vanity Fair] is the credit economy which in Thackeray's own lifetime finally developed
from a money economy" (98). Yet, Craig's claim that Thackeray's silence on what Becky
really offered Lord Steyne shows "the terrible irresolution of a society in which market values
and moral values are discontinuous and separate" (98) certainly does not apply to the heroine
herself. For Becky, who has astutely grasped the principles on which the Fair works, they are
one. So, when her business venture collapses and the narrator hybridizes his voice with hers to

present her version of the catastrophe, the climax comes with the word "bankruptcy" a
term easily attributable to Becky's vocabulary. With this word, the discourse of money
embraces the concepts of perverse femininity, aggressive, amoral "heroism" and intellectual
energy, introduced in the preceding three parallel phrases:
"What had happened" Was she guilty or not? She said not; but who could tell what was the
truth which came from those lips; or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure? All her lies
and her schemes, all her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this
bankruptcy. [53: 494]
The discourse on money, which fittingly ends the passage, explodes the tension between the
contradictory aspects of Becky's presence in Vanity Fair. Rather than embodying Thackeray's
repulsion from abstract evil or his fantasy identification with a rogue, the textuality
constructing her character uses its expressive resources as a nexus between the two. But even
after the discovery scene, Thackeray makes dramatic use of this type of material. For while
the events marking her upward rise lead towards her undisputed demonization culminating in
the description of her as a siren, the pattern of her actions after the discovery scene places her
in another part of the domain of finance day-to-day expenditure, whose control the
Victorians considered a woman's duty. This is something Becky is quite unused to, since
during her married life she has steered Rawdon's "earnings" from his gambling the family's
only steady income towards mollifying the more insistent among her creditors. Now she
does have a regular supply from Rawdon, but Rebecca is a bad home economist. What is
more, the account of her decline into poverty ironically qualifies the earlier "truth" about her
financial astuteness regarding the safety of her symbolic investment. Although she still
manages to exchange what is left of her symbolic capital for credit, she takes up gambling
because this activity most closely matches her inability to exist without business risk:
She never refused the champagne, or the bouquets, or the drives into the country, or the
private boxes; but what she preferred was the ecarte at night, and she played audaciously.
First she played only for a little, then for Napoleons, then for notes; then she would not be
able to pay her month's pension; then she borrowed from the young gentlemen; then she got
into cash again, and bullied Madame de Borodino, whom she had coaxed and wheedled
before; then she was playing for ten sous at a time, and in a dire state of poverty; then her
quarter's allowance would come in, and she would pay Madame de Borodino's score: and
would once more take the cards against Monsieur denRossignol, or the Chevalier de Raff.
[64: 596]
Both the strict sequencing and the use of modality in the passage enact the pattern of the kind
of life, based part on addiction to risk and part on necessity, that makes up the conventional
stereotype of the credit capitalist. Interestingly, it casts another ironic perspective on Becky's
greed for the external symbols of status and glamour: it reformulates and intensifies the
contrast between her and Rawdon, without exonerating the latter from the ethos of economic
exchange. Unlike his wife, Rawdon plays in order to secure and pay in ready cash, which is
for him a gentlemanly duty.12 In the heat of Becky's campaign for a place at the top, he
worries about the money they owe to Raggles, their landlord and a former servant at the
Crawleys' household. And when he finds the banknotes Becky has been hiding in her
pocketbook, his first impulse is to clear the family's debts to those who have behaved to them
in a similarly gentlemanly way his brother and Briggs. Unlike his wife, therefore, Rawdon
remains impervious to the seduction of credit capitalism. But this is not a recipe for success:
his growing alienation from Becky's world is due not only, as Lougy suggests (61), to

Thackeray's discovery in him of the long sought-for moral norm, but also to the extinction of
his whole species. In the new realities, the mixed economy of the brave and affectionate
hereditary soldier-aristocrat and gambler cannot survive and he must be sent off to Coventry
Island and to his death.
Rawdon's exclusion from Becky's area of interest and her growing distaste for him, however,
can serve as an ironic comment on her behaviour mostly because Thackeray includes him in
the most powerful antithetical structure in the novel the one between artfulness and
artlessness. For from the very first, this soldier has only one asset apart from his dyed
mustachios he is completely ingenuous, and it is Thackeray's detective power regarding
human character that enables him to see beyond what Rebecca and the world consider sheer
stupidity. Similar to Dobbin, Rawdon has a true and loving heart that he wears on his sleeve,
as the chapters devoted to his early married life and to his fatherly devotion show. That is why
he crosses generic boundaries and from a comic figure he is transformed into the nearest that
this novel allows to a tragic hero. Characteristically, Thackeray exploits this distinction
between the appearance, on the basis of which he and Dobbin are judged by the inhabitants of
the Fair, and the reality their capacity for feeling for dramatic purposes. Both Becky's and
Amelia's moments of defeat are prepared for and motivated by their inability and
unwillingness to distinguish between surface and depth, and in both scenes the men defeat
them by merely speaking the truth. And if, as Lubbock claims, Thackeray shows poor
theatrical skill in the discovery scene (101), and even less in the Amelia-Dobbin last
confrontation, it is not because his devices are crude but because he has by now become less
interested in the conflict of personalities than in the conflict of the values they stand for.
The transideological and transdiscursive dynamics of Becky's presentation in the novel
therefore place her at the centre of the Victorian discourses of power those on heroism,
money,love, and, most significantly, on women. None of them alone can define her: the ironic
play of differences that she engenders keeps her always as an "other," yet at the same time the
inclusive dimension of Thackeray's irony makes her the point of convergence and the centre
of meaning. Herein lies the source of the complex and contradictory impact she makes on the
readers, but also of the weight she carries in the novel's realist agenda.
Amelia Sedley: Power in Discourse

Unlike Becky, who is both artistic and artful, Amelia is repeatedly said to be artless she
emblematizes thenVictorian concept of "natural," if excessive, love, but in her case sentiment
is indistinguishable from sentimentality. As already mentioned, her term of the antithesis is an
element of the parody of romance and its stereotype of the ideal heroine. Especially in the first
half of the book, the narrator enters her mind with the express purpose of revealing her total
immersion into the discourse of love. But love and womanhood are explicitly formulated
through the male perspective. Woman is "the kind, fresh, smiling, artless, tender little
domestic goddess, whom men are inclined to worship" (12: 108); and George's heart melts at
Amelia's "prostration and sweet unrepining obedience" (20: 183). Amelia uncritically accepts
this view and during her courtship with George, relies solely on terms borrowed from its
language:
She thought of him the very first thing on waking; and his was the very last name mentioned
in her prayers. She never had seen a man so beautiful or so clever: such a figure on horseback:
such a dancer: such a hero in general ... He was only good enough to be a fairy prince; and oh,
what magnanimity to stoop to such a humble Cinderella! [12: 113]

The passage fully illustrates the extent to which romantic fiction misrepresents reality by
seeking to translate it through the patterns of the fairy tale. The very disbalance between
narrative and represented speech creates an ironic clash of meanings: although it is given the
whole thematic and textual weight, Amelia's behaviour, predicated on the abovequoted selfdebasing principle, becomes dissociated from positive, constructive action and remains
circumscribed within the limits of the romantic dream. Yet to read Amelia's story solely in the
light of a warning against the harm of reading sentimental novels, as the narrator himself
jocularly suggests in Chapter 18, would be reductive. Amelia's greatest fault is not that of
creating unproductive fictions or "building castles in the air," which, as Iser suggests, serves
to distance the reader's sympathies from her (109). It is certainly true that, as all critics agree
and as has already been indicated in this study, Amelia is Vanity Fair's main vehicle of
Thackeray's satiric dismissal of the excesses of romantic imagination. Love, however, is seen
in the novel not as a private, self-sufficient reverie, nor are Amelia's sentimental dreams of
happiness with George, as Iser claims, "dependent on the circumstances of the moment"
(109). Her lack of realistic standards of judgement is actually rooted in her mechanical
acceptance of a convention that poses as "common sense" that is, her inability to dissociate
the specific nature of her relationship with George from the Victorian ideology of manwoman relationship. Amelia's unreflecting adoption of a position of inferiority thus gives the
novel's concept of love its social dimensions: as Barbara Hardy aptly comments, in the world
of Vanity Fair love "cannot be free, or pure, or intact; it must be circumscribed and shaped by
the society into which it is born and in which it dies or half-dies" (161).
The narrator also makes it forcefully evident that Amelia refracts her sentimental desire
through the prism of the major socially-oriented characteristics which the discourse on
femininity attaches to female desire duty and self-sacrifice. It is because Amelia reads
them as dogmatic absolutes and enacts them literally that she so easily fills the role of an
ironic target. But as with Becky, once the concepts building the Victorian discourses of
womanhood are undermined, the gates open to the influx of other powerful discourses. When
living by the precepts of duty and self-sacrifice fails to bring her into the marital heaven
promised by the discourse on women, Amelia begins to define herself and her desire through
the language of crime. Thus, after receiving old Osborne's letter which announces an end to
the engagement and forbids all communication between her and George, she takes the news as
"the mere reading of a sentence of the crime she had long ago been guilty of the crime
of loving wrongly, too violently, against reason" (18: 167). Interestingly, first the narrator, in
an ironic "echoic mention," and then Miss Osborne both use a qualification that not only
supports Amelia's self-definition but expands its implications from the private to the public
sphere, with its hypostasis of order as an immanent positive value: Amelia, they say, does not
have "a well-regulated mind" (12: 114, 23: 210). This formulaic pronouncement engenders
inferences that have to do with madness, disorder and anarchy. The narrator even "quotes" a
Mrs. Smith whose declaration on Amelia's continuing love brings to light the mixture of the
ethical and the criminal discourses: "Such criminal impudence Mrs. Smith never knew of"
(169).
Thackeray's keen eye for the principles on which Victorian society actually works observes in
Amelia another typical feature: for her, the distinction between crime and sin is totally
blurred. That is why the textuality of her presentation begins to draw in the discourse of
religion as well. Consequently, it is only natural that after George's death she should begin to
access experience and distance herself from what she interprets as her previous wrongdoing
through the mediation of imagery related to god and sainthood. So, while the narrative builds
up the tension in Chapters 46 and 50 until it reaches the scene of Amelia's renunciation of

Georgy, the brief entry into her mind at the very climax of the dramatic sequence shows that
she has remained as dependent on received notions as before:
The sentence was passed. The child must go from her to others to forget her. Her heart and
her treasure her joy, hope, love, worship her God, almost! She must give him up; and then
and then she would go to George: and they would watch over the child, and wait for him
until he came to them in heaven. [50: 458]
This passage almost iconically reveals the direction Amelia's reasoning follows, away from
the objective assessment of the situation and into quasi-religious sentimental effusion. The
metaphoric "sentence" this time plays on the pun in the chapter title "Struggles and Trials"
and the climactic sequencing explodes on "her God, almost!", exemplifying the way her
thoughts veer away from rationality. Nearly hysterically, Amelia immerses herself into a
verbal medium which she uses as a shield against the onslaughts of the real. This opens the
gap between the pathos that the scene should legitimately elicit and the ironic criticism it
actually evokes. At a time when such a response is least expected, just as in the "Vagabond
Chapter" and Becky's failure to arouse affective identification, the reader's withdrawal of
sympathy signals the power of Vanity Fair to enforce a varying, complex experience of its
characters. Amelia does not, as earlier critics expected, provide a standard of judging Becky:
in a more devious yet more effective way, she engages the reader into the often painful
process of facing the ordinary, everyday reality of human imperfection and the way this
reality is inscribed in its discourses.
In addition, Amelia's implication in the discourses of power erodes the most obvious basis of
the contrast between the two heroines' narrative codes the opposition between action and
inertia, both physical and mental. Amelia, the conventional view goes, does not act for herself
as Becky does. Like Becky and the multitude of minor characters, whose rational processes
amount only to scheming, she becomes the target of satire because she, too, does not think, in
the sense of applying rational insight or facing the truth. Worse, she practically never says
anything. Yet in the few scenes where she does speak, she exhibits surprising verbal fluency.
The first of these scenes, her confrontation with Becky during the Waterloo battle, shows her
a different creature from the dull speechless woman she has hitherto been:
"Are you well?" said Amelia. "I daresay you are. You don't love your husband. You would not
be here if you did. Tell me, Rebecca, did I ever do you anything but kindness? ... When you
were quite poor, who was it that befriended you? Was I not a sister to you? You saw us in
happier days before he married me. I was all in all then to him; or would he have given up his
fortune, his family, as he so nobly did, to make me happy? Why did you come between my
love and me? Who sent you to separate those whom God joined, and take my darling heart
from me my own husband? Do you think you could love him as I did? His love was
everything to me. You knew it, and wanted to rob me of it. For shame, Rebecca; bad and
wicked woman false friend and false wife" ... "But what have I done to you," she continued
in a more pitiful tone, "that you should try and take him from me? I had him but for six
weeks. You might have spared me these, Rebecca. And yet, from the very first day of our
wedding, you came and blighted it. . . . You took him away. Are you come to fetch him from
me?" [31: 287]
In spite of her distraught state, Amelia attacks the person she now knows is her enemy using
the most successful strategy she could have chosen through references to Becky's
"otherness." Her rival now is not only a "false friend and false wife," but also a common

criminal who has "robbed" her of her husband. What is more, she defines Becky as the servant
sent by dark forces from another world, "taking away" her victims. Applying the same
strategy of demonization as the narrator himself, Amelia gets one of her rare chances to win a
victory against her rival, who "walked, too, silently away" (31: 287). Interestingly, Amelia
uses the same modality as Rawdon does when, at the end of the discovery scene and during
that brief moment when he is allowed a heroic status, he says, "You might have spared me a
hundred pounds, Becky, out of all this. I have always shared with you" (53: 494; italics
added). Amelia's use of the discourse of power is even more successful: a seasoned warrior
against other women, Becky is "surprised and somewhat abashed" and fails to answer the
other woman's recriminations with one of her habitual ironic counterattacks. All she can do is
save face by deliberately "misreading" the episode: "Rebecca was of a good-natured and
obliging disposition; and she liked Amelia rather than otherwise. Even [Amelia's] hard words,
reproachful as they were, were complimentary the groans of a person stinging under
defeat" (31: 288).
The scene shows that in spite of the assertions made by the novel's narrative function about
the radical difference between the two protagonists, Amelia is as fluent in the current
discourses as Becky, even though she is given fewer chances to show this. Most often she
uses them to establish a position of power by defending her self-reflection as a victim a
line of discursive action which she also takes with her mother, when she accuses her of
"poisoning" Georgy with Daffy's Elixir (38: 359), later with Georgy himself, when she tells
him he is to leave her (50: 459), and which culminates in her relations with Dobbin. On
returning from India, he refuses to accept the position she has assigned him of "her husband's
dearest friend," a "most kind and affectionate guardian," "so true and loyal a gentleman" (59:
546). Yet, when he bluntly declares, "It is for me to ask your pardon for being a fool for a
moment, and thinking that years of constancy and devotion might have pleaded with you," she
is overtaken by fear that she might lose him. Immediately, she goes on the offensive in the
already familiar manner, accusing him of cruelty, neglect and possibly murder and using what
has by now become her emblematic discursive strategy:
"It is you who are cruel now," Amelia said with some spirit. "George is my husband, here and
in heaven .... Have you not been everything to me and my boy? Our dearest, kindest friend
and protector? Had you come a few months sooner perhaps you might have spared me that
that dreaded parting. It nearly killed me, William but you didn't come, though I wished and
prayed for you to come, and they took him too away from me. (59: 551)
Like Becky, Dobbin is routed though not for long, as his famous speech at the end of the
novel shows. Amelia's appropriation of the language of crime, of vulnerable womanhood and
of religion has turned into a variety of the hubris which Thackeray designates as vanity.
Without underestimating the unfavourable factors that work against her, such as her father's
improvidence and the poverty it brings to his family, as well as her social and emotional
isolation, he thus makes it sufficiently clear that she fails to act as an independent and selfcontained personality. What she does is reenact mechanically adopted ideological
assumptions. This is certainly far from the sentimentality for which critics have often taken
Thackeray to task. "Sentimentality" is in fact a discourse that Amelia exploits in order to
fictionalize her life, thus reinstating the link between herself and popular romance patterns.
Her implication with the discourses of power and her effective use of them undermines the
very foundation of the antithetical opposition between the two heroines the claim that Amelia
is "artless." Posing as the eternal victim, Amelia empties this concept of any real meaning.
And if the audience's experience of her in the course of the novel is one of constant and

increasing withdrawal of sympathy, it is not only because again and again her drama is
revealed to be largely self-inflicted, but also because she, like Becky, does not want to resist
the constricting impact of the Victorian ideological and discursive fixtures.
Nevertheless, it is through Amelia that Vanity Fair opens the rift that allows the forces of
oppositionality in. Thackeray's faithfulness to the truth leads him to supply enough evidence
suggesting that his heroine is actually capable of assessing and formulating her condition as it
really is, even though until Dobbin's final departure she does not let her rationality acquire a
distinct verbal shape. The first proof of this comes before her marriage, when she secretly
reflects on the man she has chosen as her hero. Against the pressure of her emotions, her
reason weighs the evidence and finds her fairy prince far from ideal:
Her heart tried to persist in asserting that George Osborne was worthy and faithful to her,
though she knew otherwise. How many things had she said, and got no echo from him. How
many suspicions of selfishness and indifference had she to encounter and obstinately
overcome. To whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily struggles and tortures? Her
hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare to own that the man she loved was her
inferior; or to feel that she had given her heart away too soon. [18: 165]
Things here, we find, are called by their real names selfishness, indifference, lack of
understanding. Amelia's heart and reason speak with different voices, yet they both do speak,
and it is the latter that brings her into contact with truth. As already mentioned, some critics
have argued that in spite of the narrator's claim for sympathy, Amelia fails to win it because
she is governed by fear and because she lacks the necessary perceptiveness (Spilka: 206). It is
true that the self-derogatory language, which indicates her unconscious identification with the
Cinderella image, dominates her thinking during the early days of her marriage, as shown in
Chapter 25. But soon after, and in spite of her reluctance to dwell upon the relations between
George and herself, Amelia again uses language to access experience directly, without any
mediating discourse, even though the narrator's indirect, questioning mode leaves room for
uncertainty: "Was the prize gained the heaven of life and the winner still doubtful and
dissatisfied? . . . . Did she own to herself how different the real man was from that superb
young hero she had worshipped?"(26: 240-241). Tentative as they are, given as "misgivings
and fears" (18: 165), these instances of thought presentation, and especially the word
"different," burst as early as this the protective bubble of sentimental, overblown
qualifications and place her "romantic" and "realistic" conceptualizations of reality in an
irreconcilable opposition.
More effective for the oppositional strain, however, than the moments of indirect thought
presentation are the ones over which the narrator is silent. Amelia's prayers, for instance:
"These, brother, are secrets, and out of the domain of Vanity Fair" (26: 243). Or when she
decides to give Georgy over to his grandfather: "She could say no more, and walked silently
to her room. Let us close it upon her prayers and her sorrow. I think we had best speak little
about so much love and grief" (50: 460). The narrator's own explanation for his retreat is that
he is deterred by his respect for the deepest moments of distress, and since Amelia is the only
character who is placed in circumstances that are a legitimate cause of suffering, it is not
surprising that his silences occur only in that context. This has led Jack Rawlins to doubt
whether behind Amelia's solitary prayers is "anything but vanity in a pious guise" (31).
However, as Peter Garrett observes, the narrator's withdrawal suggests the existence of
"potential depth of feeling" (120) something no other character outside Amelia can
mediate. For a reader-oriented critic like Michael Lund, these silences function to engage the

audience's response: "Into such empty spaces thus deliberately left vacant by the narrator we
readers step, here filling in Amelia's unspoken distress with our own sympathetic
apprehension of it" (152). Garrett similarly points to the "imaginative effort" required from
the reader "to grasp what cannot be presented directly" (120). Yet there is more to these
declarations of reticence than Thackeray's manipulation of the reader's response, for the
narrator is not only unwilling but also incapable of giving them verbal expression. With irony
and satire having already compromised all language, there are no resources left for this
purpose. But acknowledging this significant lack, the narrative creates its textual function: the
truth about Amelia goes counter to the narrator's claim that the public domain of the Fair
comprises all of reality, and that it lends itself to representation and to critique.
There is also the problem of how to reconcile this truth with his statement that outside the Fair
one can only be "perfectly miserable in private" (19: 176). Most importantly, if outside the
domain of the social world there exist inexpressible truths the positive alternatives to the
discourses through which the Fair defines itself how can they be communicated? Attempts
to resolve these problems can be found in Thackeray's handling of the figure and the voice of
his narrator.
Narrative Authority and the Ironic Narrator

Criticism has dealt at length with the problematics of this elusive figure which constantly
changes its identities and moves freely between the world of the characters and of the readers.
The days when the narrator's intrusive tactics in Vanity Fair were deemed a breach of
aesthetic ndecorum are now long gone and no student of Thackeray would choose to share
Percy Lubbock's, Arnold Kettle's and Dorothy Van Ghent's opposition to his meddling into the
allegedly inviolable space of the story. Nor, ever since Geoffrey Tillotson's and Juliet
McMaster's powerful defense, have his commentaries been treated as an excrescence or
believed to come straight from Thackeray himself. Vanity Fair's narrator is, in fact, a prime
example of what Edward Said has formulated as one of the special conditions for the generic
conceptualization of narrative fiction: that "the truth whatever that may be can only be
approached indirectly, by means of a mediation that because of its falseness paradoxically
makes the truth truer" (57). In spite of his notorious versatility and the numerous masks he
dons, therefore, the Manager of the Performance, the preacher in cap and bells, the "brother
wearer of motley" (19: 176), the man who has personally spoken to the characters (62: 577),
is the chief agent in the construction and imposition of the global meanings in the novel, that
is, of its narrative function, as well as a character in his own right, and therefore instrumental
to its irony to no smaller a degree than the protagonists themselves.
The role of the narrator in Vanity Fair's ironic framework has been well-recognized by most
critics. Some have seen him as a Socratic ironist: Iser, for example, argues that the aesthetic
effect of the novel is produced by his strategies of creating gaps which "[stimulate] the
reader's critical faculties so that he may recognize the social reality of the novel as a confusing
array of sham attitudes, and experience the exposure of sham as the true reality" (112). The
narrator, according to him, offers a number of alternative ways in which the characters and
their actions can be judged and from which the reader must make a choice (118). Iser thus
rightly foregrounds the mediating function of Thackeray's narrator on the basis of an
analogical empiricist process.13 With its insistence that the narrator's appeal in Vanity Fair is
primarily intellectual, while the effect of his activity is aesthetic, Iser effectively evokes an
analogy between Vanity Fair and Plato's Socratic dialogues. Similarly, Juliet McMaster's
excellent first chapter of her comprehensive study of Thackeray shows how the narrator's self-

depreciating rhetoric in his commentaries spurs the reader on to reconstruct his own reality
and from a position of self-knowledge to confront the truth about the characters and about the
Fair as a whole. In a short but influential study, Sister Corona M. Sharp looks towards each of
the various levels of the novel where the narrator is operative those of character-portrayal,
of the narrator-reader relationship and of his self-depreciating attitude and also concludes
that on all of them he sets up contradictions that the reader must and can resolve. For all three
critics, there is a stable core of "truth" behind the array of moral and emotional postures that
the narrator strikes. The approaches to Thackeray's narrator as a Socratic figure therefore rely
on irony's differential aspect and foreground its satiric function. Reaching the reality is,
according to them, a heuristic enterprise, a voyage of discovery with the narrator as a ludic yet
reliable guide. His playfulness and subversive shiftiness indeed place obstacles and often push
one into the wrong path, but ultimately his moral and artistic integrity makes the journey
worth the reader's moral and aesthetic while.
Another critical perspective on Thackeray's narrator regards him as Schlegel's "transcendental
buffoon." In his analysis of Vanity Fair, de Ryals argues that the presiding "I" is that of the
romantic ironist, dramatizing "the irony of change" (35) and mixing with it the moralist's
pose. As a Victorian version of romantic irony, Thackeray's novel in de Ryals's view contains
all the necessary ingredients the generic mixture, the self-conscious performance carried
out by characters and narrator alike, the obliteration of the distinction between fact and
fiction, as well as the resulting instability of the reader's own position. Like other critics, most
notably Iser (119) and Jack Rawlins (13), de Ryals concludes that the true subject of the novel
is the reader, but with the important difference that, according to him, the cosmic perspective
of time asserts the impossibility of change (47). Although he never overtly makes the point,
Rawlins also treats Vanity Fair as a product of romantic irony, since he insists that it is made
of heterogeneous generic material, while the narrator "uses the surface text for an aesthetic
discussion" (36).
There is much validity in the claims made by the abovementioned critics. The rejection of the
appearance by means of its distancing from the reality the differential aspect of irony's
meaning is indeed the purpose announced in "Before the Curtain," where the Manager of
the Performance presents his novel as a spectacle enacted on a specially constructed stage and
assigns to his readers the role of an audience awaiting the start of the show. In addition to this
self-conscious emphasis on the distinction between life and art, there is also the narrator's
function of creating and sustaining the impression that the two heroines and their stories stand
in a relation of contrast. The use of two heroines with symmetrical narrative lines a tactic
which invites the reader to treat the novel's structure as that of moral argument and to seek its
resolution based on poetic justice &mdasah; places Vanity Fair firmly in the tradition of
Victorian literature, with its pronounced didacticism. Yet, the impression that the novel is built
like an argument is another of the many false leads in Vanity Fair. The narrator himself
jokingly undermines it at the beginning of Chapter 6 through the facetious confusion of
premises and the parodic lowering of the level on which his reasoning moves: "The argument
stands thus Osborne, in love with Amelia, has asked an old friend to dinner and to Vauxhall
Jos Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he marry her? That's the great subject now in
hand" (6: 60). Moreover, unlike Socrates, Thackeray's narrator does not claim rational
reasoning and philosophical insight as the goal of his activity: "I" here is introduced to
personify the world in general," he states (36: 337). Again contrary to Socrates' selfdeprecating ironic dialectic, what his transdiscursive and transideological agility eventually
asserts is the "truer truth" that any claim for an individual position that differs from the
common one is no more than another projection of desire constituted within the available

discourses. For Thackeray's narrator is only slightly superior to the world he criticizes the
only height he commands is that of the "boards," or of the tub from which he sermonizes to
his cox-combed brethren.
The argument that the discourse of the narrator in Vanity Fair makes it a work of romantic
irony similarly meets with obstacles. There are, indeed, many formal analogies, which de
Ryals has painstakingly investigated in his study. Nevertheless, though the narrator may be a
buffoon, as this critic claims, he is not transcendent. His perspective is determined by the
vanitas vanitatum theme, hence his subjectivity is one he shares with all humanity. His
appearance in varying but concrete social roles as husband and father, as bachelor and an
old man, as a historian and man of the world serves to rivet his identity into the social
world. The versatility of identities, the breaking of the illusion, the anachronistic leaps from
the time of the action to the time of the writing and of the reading of the novel all of these
in fact work together to bring out the self-conscious awareness that the fiction is not life, but
that it can mediate between life's different aspects. If any final meaning can be found in the
narrator's discursive agility, it is that everything he says both is and is not true. The inclusivity
of this reality is that crucial moment of comprehension which Thackeray's realism aims to
produce. And for Thackeray in Vanity Fair this realization alone is an intensely personal
experience, directed to the inner reality of a self which "mirrors" the world in an infinite
regressive series of images.
The redirection of the final ironic meaning away from the simple differentiation between
appearances and reality, or from the assertion of the unlimited power of the artist's
subjectivity, becomes evident in Thackeray's decision to change his title-page illustration
when the novel came out in book form. In the later drawing, the foreground is occupied by a
sad-looking jester in rather shabby attire, gazing into a cracked mirror which reflects his own
expression of melancholy mixed with bewilderment. All the appurtenances of the puppeteer
and clown the wooden sword and the puppets in their box seem to have been hastily
discarded; an idyllic, typically English rural landscape forms the shady background, separated
from the stage by a flimsy wooden fence. Both the world of the reader's reality (implied by
the buildings in the background) and the world of the novel (emblematically represented by
the improvised stage) become peripheral to the clown's intense self-contemplation. Thackeray
himself, therefore, offers an alternative mode in which his narrator should be treated as a
figure less occupied in the process of negotiating the rift between the truth of experience and
the truth of art than in exploring the problems and discontinuities of experience alone.
The illustration pictorially repeats what Thackeray states in a famous letter to Robert Bell.
Bell had protested against the "unredeemed wickedness of [the novel's] pictures" which might
"corrupt [young people's] morals" (Letters, II: 503). Thackeray wrote:
If I had put in more fresh air as you call it my object would have been defeated it is to
indicate, in cheerful terms, that we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish
people "desperately wicked" and all eager after vanities. Everybody is you see in that book
for instance, if I had made Amelia a higher order of woman there would have been no vanity
in Dobbin falling in love with her, whereas the impression at present is that he is a fool for his
pains that he has married a silly little thing and in fact has found out his error I want to
leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story we ought all to be with our
own and all other stories. Good God, don't I see (in that may-be cracked and warped looking
glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses wickedness lusts follies
shortcomings? in company let us hope with better qualities about which we will pretermit

discourse. We must lift up our voices and howl to a congregation of fools: so much at least
has been my endeavour. [Letters, II: 503]
There are obvious references in this letter to the moralist endeavour of Thackeray's satire, and
to the earlier illustration of the preacher in motley "howling to a congregation of fools" on the
subject of vanity. The "better qualities" cannot be spoken about; they lie in areas where the
writer (or the narrator of his novel) cannot tread. But the "may-be cracked and warped looking
glass" both here and in the illustration attests to the belief that the artist, or his fictional
impersonation, is restricted. He has no direct access to the world: total objectivity, the faithful
representation of reality is impossible. The morality of his enterprise lies in offering the
means whereby the audience can look at themselves and discover their common humanity.
This means is narrative Thackeray invites his readers to "read" their lives as "stories" in
order to give them proper assessment. His novel can thus provoke analogies that will set up
similarities and differences not between life and art, but between structures of moral and
psychological experience that can be empirically created, on the basis of the historical
evidence narrator and reader have at their disposal.
The awareness that structures of experience are the real subject of Vanity Fair is the
underlying principle of the narrator-reader relationship in the novel. The narrator sets up an
openly dialogic form of communication; he is as versatile in his modes of address as in his
assumed identities. But unlike a Socratic dialogue, the proliferation of identities and of fictive
personages in the commentaries turns the dialogue into a conversation between the
participants in the Fair themselves. The narrator's role is not to support or, as would more
often be expected, to refute their theses. The ironic use of "echoic mention" offers him the
opportunity to adopt different positions vis-a-vis the attitudes expressed and the discourses
that have engendered them. Called upon by the direct modes of address to interpret the
ironies, the actual readers become aware that such patterns of thinking and behaviour exist in
and determine their own society, which constitutes the ironist's true "discursive community."
An excellent illustration of the narrator's use of irony for the purpose of mediating between
discourses comes when he introduces Miss Crawley, Rawdon's maiden aunt and the wealthiest
member of the Crawley family. Miss Crawley, the narrator says,
was an object of great respect when she came to Queen's Crawley, for she had a balance at her
banker's which would have made her beloved anywhere. What a dignity it gives an old lady,
that balance at the banker's! How tenderly we look at her faults, if she is a relative (and may
every reader have a score of such), what a kind good-natured creature we find her! . . . How,
when she comes to pay us a visit, we generally find an opportunity to let our friends know her
station in the world! We say (and with perfect truth) I wish I had Miss MacWhirter's signature
to a cheque for five thousand pounds. She wouldn't miss it, says your wife. She is my aunt,
say you, in an easy careless way, when your friend asks whether Miss MacWhirter is any
relative . . . Is it so, or is it not so? I appeal to the middle classes. Ah, gracious powers! I wish
you would send me an old aunt a maiden aunt an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage,
and a front of coffee-coloured hair &mdasah; how my children would work workbags for her,
and my Julia and I would make her comfortable! Sweet sweet visions! Foolish foolish
dream! [9: 90]
The irony in this "story" is seductively easy to spot and interpret, for it rests on the blame-bypraise and the non-sequitur which characteristically reflect the confusion between moral and
material values typifying the mentality of the world Thackeray satirizes. But it is when the

narrator buttonholes the reader, requiring a straight answer about the truth of this "case study,"
that the insidiousness of his tactic comes out in its full force. For the reply, whatever it might
be, will be self-condemning: even if it is negative, it will align the reader with those who, like
the younger Pitt Crawley, fall into the category of "pompous mean perfectly self-satisfied for
the most part and at ease about their superior value" (Letters, II: 309). The narrator does not
stop at the point where satire would have achieved its aim of rejecting the mercenary motives
lying behind ostensible respect and affection. He sends the whole episode into the realm of
dreams his no less than his reader's where it will remain intact, leaving the addressee the
possibility to enjoy the "sweet vision" in the security of the unspoken. This additionally
compromises the ethics of his gesture, for "sweet vision" and "foolish dreams" echo the
already discarded forms of identification with romance. The only positive content of the
whole digression is that of confronting the audience with a superbly detailed model of
thinking and behaviour which, in its ironic tone and form alone, suggests the existence of
alternative, correct modes of conceiving reality. The resulting relativity is perhaps the most
disturbing effect of the narrator's transideological, and hence slippery, discursive tactic. It
does indeed help carry across Thackeray's satiric condemnation of Victorian hypocrisy and
Christian self-righteousness, but it extends further than that, into the very heart of Thackeray's
moral and artistic endeavour in Vanity Fair the concept of truth. We see it most prominently in
the narrator's and most probably Thackeray's attempts to define Becky's status in the moral
and social framework of the novel. G. H. Lewes sensed that when he remonstrated against the
comment which follows her thought that she could be a good woman on five thousand a year.
"And who knows," the narrator says,
but Rebecca was right in her speculations and that it was only a question of money and
fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? . . . A comfortable
career of prosperity, if it does not make people honest, at least keeps them so. An alderman
coming from a turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton, but put him
to starve, and see if he will not purloin a loaf. [41: 392]
As Lewes rightly observed, the comment effectively asserts that "honesty is only the virtue of
abundance" (Letters, II: 353) and therefore goes against the very argument put forward by the
novel that money-grabbing is the most fundamental wrong of Victorian society. In his
reply Thackeray not only took responsibility for the comment but openly stated his belief that
"If Becky had had 5000 a year I have no doubt in my mind that she would have been
respectable" (ibid.). The replacement of "honest" with "respectable" does not remove the
problem regarding the standards by which Thackeray's "rogue" is to be judged. Is she corrupt
by birth, or has her poverty made her so? As I have already argued, Thackeray's answer in the
book is equivocal: the only norm of assessment he offers is the mutual interrelation of the
discourses that form the conceptual ground for her definition. Even in the same episode he
refuses to pin himself down as to the virtues Becky has ignored. Says the narrator, "It may,
perhaps, have struck her that to have been honest and humble, to have done her duty, and to
have marched straightforward on her way, would have brought her as near happiness as that
path by which she was striving to attain it" (41: 392). As near happiness, Sister Corona M.
Sharp points out, "has the subtle force of cancelling the moral lesson in the very act of
uttering it. If morality could not make Rebecca more happy than her present life, why should
she bother about it?"(329). But this renunciation of the moral standpoint is not, as the critic
claims, the asset of the Socratic ironist who "tears down false standards in order to build his
own" (330). Thackeray's irony typically rejects the very idea of standards, even as his satire
sedulously tries to assert it.

There is yet another aspect in Vanity Fair where the narrator's ironic strategies act so
subversively as to endanger the premises of the whole realist enterprise. This time the
problem has to do with truth not as a moral but as an epistemological category. Again, it is
around Becky that it arises. In Chapters 36 and 37, "How to Live Well on Nothing a Year" and
"The Subject Continued," the narrator traces Becky's machinations to establish herself at the
centre of fashionable society. The text here is as "documentary" as possible: it presents the
bare facts of her career as causes that lead to their logical effect Rebecca's success. It is this
factuality that foregrounds the ironic reversal of the notions of trust, honesty, and charity, all
of which are deliberately ignored by the heroine. The narrator's method is so rigorously
empiricist that it can easily convince the ironic interpreter that he holds the conflict of
meanings and therefore the truth in a firm grasp. In Chapter 47, "Gaunt House,"
however, the narrator's cognitive monopoly falters: confessing he has no access to the great
Marquis's mansion (432), he hands over the task of providing information to a certain Tom
Eaves. Tom Eaves is, like the narrator himself, "omniscient" because he is a man of the world,
one "who knows everybody's affairs" (433). Tom Eaves's domain is the dinner party, and the
form of his knowledge is that of gossip, or calumny more specifically: he has "no other
feeling with regard to his betters, but a constant and generous desire to dine with them" (436).
But with his claims that he belongs to the great world while he is in fact precariously balanced
on its periphery, he, too, is a boastful alazon who falls within the scope of the narrator's ironic
thrusts: he is "too glad to get a bow or a dinner" from any great person (434). The narrator
himself has some doubts about the truth of Tom Eaves's facts, so he presents them with a
caveat: his information "may or may not be true" (434). Yet, as Becky's activities take her to
the very centre of the "best" of society, the second-hand, Tomeavesian way of knowing
gradually encompasses more and more of the narrative, eventually acquiring the same
authority as that of the narrator.
According to critic Janice Carlisle, the effect of the inclusion of gossip as a form of
knowledge in Vanity Fair is "that this potentially hazardous development implicates the reader
in the process which keeps such nasty tales in circulation while it questions their reliability"
(57). For Carlisle, this is one of the undoubted feats of Thackeray's narrative technique in
Vanity Fair, since it tightens the experiential bond between fiction and audience. Another
critic, G. Armour Craig, however, regards this use of unreliable "external" information at the
expense of fair, straightforward presentation of fact, not as a potential but as an actual danger.
Analyzing the way the narrative deals with the fundamental question around Becky, "Was she
guilty or not?," Craig concludes that Thackeray refuses to commit himself to an answer
and to a meaning of "guilty" that could allot Becky a stable place in the novel's moral
framework. In consequence, he argues, the reader who wants to decide where Becky stands in
relation to his own moral standards "sees that while he wants to answer these questions, he
can only conclude that he is looking at a situation before which his moral vocabulary is
irrelevant" (97).
Compared to Carlisle, Craig has the better of the argument, though his conclusions need to be
extended further, to the coexistence of two principles on which Thackeray builds his narrative
in the last third of the novel. There is the narrator's omniscience, but there is also alongside it
the Tomeavesean way of knowing, with an equal claim to totalizing knowledge. Because they
can both construct coherent narratives, they compete for performative power each can
provide a logical ending to the story. And it is from the likes of Tom Eaves, whose "truths" are
already morally discredited by the narrator's irony, that Becky gets her sentence and is exiled,
physically and socially, from the fashionable world. Asking for the last time "Was she guilty
or not?" the narrator, in another flash of blame-by-praise, declares: "We all know how

charitable the world is, and how the verdict of Vanity Fair goes when there is a doubt" (55:
515). Yet Becky in "A Vagabond Chapter" acts precisely according to the image Vanity Fair
has constructed for her, displaying a compliance surprising in a person that has for so long
managed, artistically and artfully, to hold her own. Thus the verbal irony and therefore the
narrator's reality dissolves in a welter of appearances with no actual counterweight. So,
with the authority of his superior omniscience threatened, the narrator resorts to his last and
most objectionable "trick" to refashion, as with a magic wand, the stage-set of the
performance whose manager he is, into a world where the narrator is to be trusted because he
knows the characters personally: "It was on this very tour [to Pumpernickel] that I, the present
writer of a history of which every word is true, had the pleasure to see them first, and make
their acquaintance" (62: 574). The whole narrative thus becomes authenticated by virtue of
the narrator's claim that he has had direct access to reality and that his "facts" are actually
information passed on to him by the characters themselves. He has already slipped in an
anticipatory reference to this: "I was told by Dr. Pestler (now a most flourishing lady's
physician) that [Amelia's] grief at weaning the child was a sight that would have unmanned a
Herod" (38: 361). After Chapter 62, however, the authentication works as more than a minor
metanarrative joke. Rather than drawing the fictional world into the real one, the real world
itself gets sucked into the fiction, parallel to the two opposite directions of movement taken
by the narrator in the narrative space. This indeed grants the fiction the power that the realist
writer seeks to assert for his art a power enhanced by the aesthetic effect of his play with
the omniscient writer convention. Nevertheless, it also erodes the very standard on which
realism bases its claim to a comprehensive truth the correspondence of the world of his
novel to an ontologically distinct non-verbal reality.
The implications of Thackeray's outrageous breach of narrative conventions extend beyond
the readers' awareness that the novelist is playing a game with their trust and enjoying it. By
placing his narrator as a source of first-hand knowledge inside the world of his fiction,
Thackeray is, in fact, creating the textual function of his narrative: it ironically inverts, and
thus highlights, the conventionality of the devices whereby the realist writer creates the effect
of verisimilitude. His inconsistency provides a possible solution to his greatest problem in
Vanity Fair. This difficulty is not so much artistic as ethical and epistemological, and it arises
both from his uncertainty, which Thackeray shares with the other Victorian novelists, about
the nature and scope of the concept of reality, and from his comprehensive use of irony. Given
that with its ability to identify erroneous constructions of experience irony is a way of
knowing the truth about the "world beyond words," how can the ironist and the interpreter
escape complicity with the invalidated meanings? What moral value does that truth accrue,
since morality itself is a concept that is meaningful only within a particular discursive
universe and therefore vulnerable? Where can the ironist find a discourse unscathed by irony's
edge? Reaching out towards reality through first-hand knowledge, acquired by a sleight of
hand, is one way out of the quandary, but, as shown above, this mode of authentication risks
confusing the reader. Another is to reorient the target and search for some kind of pristine
"truth" in the intimately personal experience. In Vanity Fair, where social satire, parody and
the cosmic perspective govern the politics of irony, the latter remains a possibility only
tentatively explored through Amelia. The real attempt to turn it into the artistic foundation of
a whole novel comes with Henry Esmond, which forms the subject of the following chapter.