Say what you like about Vanity Fair, but it cannot be denied that this is a big beast. It instructed me to remember there are other ways of reading. The long haul read. We do indeed lived in a disposable society, where there is always something new to consume. The list of novels to be read is as long, not as your arm, but your unimpeded view towards an undisclosed horizon. Consumption is all, and it starts to feel like an obligation of the novel to recognise this and to ensure that what it lacks in brevity it makes up for in efficiency. Vanity Fair belongs to a different epoch and was written with a different reading regimen in mind. For a start, it was serialised over the course of twenty months. Something which allows for a myriad of fluvial meanderings and overflows. There are chapters which feel almost entirely superfluous, but which are not, because they too are telling us something. Indeed, one of the most telling chapters for a modern reader, is one which is so laden with description that it feels like a detour through a botanical garden. Vanity Fair reminded me of the value of the novel as a backdrop to one’s life, as a persistent authorial chirping, like a season of newborn birds in a nest under the eaves of your stately mansion. They will chatter and sometimes sing and at times they will charm and at others grate and one day they will fly away and you will miss them without realising it. This is another form of reading, one we are on the point of discarding, or one that has been supplanted by the two dimensions of soap opera, which lacks the dimension of author, the glue that holds the book, if not the narrative together.
Given all this, a few comments of a more discursive nature.
Thackeray’s cruelty towards Miss Rebecca Sharp. In many ways, Becky Sharp feels like a predecessor to another character traduced by her author, Emma Bovary. Becky comes from a bohemian part of the world, her father a Soho painter. (If there was any regret in the reading of this novel it was that the author never ventured into Soho and its Bohemia, these places exist on the fringes of the book.) She is a resourceful young woman who does everything in her power to rise through the social ranks, with mixed results. At times she flares like a Catherine Wheel, at others she hurtles towards social disgrace. By a long chalk the most modern of the novel’s characters, by which one means, the one least accepting of the anti-diluvian social structures she finds herself born into, Becky has energy, wit and oodles of charm, for which she ends up being castigated by her author, but without which his book would be a damp squib. She is another in the line, along with Lady Macbeth and Bovary, and surely many more, of great female characters who challenge their authors. Thackeray clearly adores Becky, just like so many do, but he’s wary of the way in which his adoration or libido threatens the social order, and as a result feels the need to constantly pull the rug from under her feet.
Colonialism. It’s so long since I read Said that I don’t remember if he wrote about Vanity Fair, and as I wouldn’t have read the novel at that stage, perhaps it would have passed me by if he did. But the novel is a great guide as to the way in which the colonies were so ingrained in British society by the early 1800s. India and the West Indies both play key roles in the novel, with several Dobbin chapters set there. All the younger masculine characters find themselves abroad at some time or another. The dramatic playlets in which Rebecca stars, dragging her unfortunate husband into the spotlight with her, are a wonderful testament to the impact of what we might nowadays call Orientalism on British society as one could hope to find (even though these do nothing to forward the plot). A warped fascination with ‘the other’, which involves both caricature and wonder is at large and Thackeray captures this brilliantly. There is a similar relationship with Europe, which is primarily a playground for more military adventures. Two hundred years after publication, the same themes are still playing themselves out.
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