Abstract
In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is described as a Siren: half sweet and compliant angel and, hidden below the waterline, half monster. Becky’s performance as a proper lady is effective because it relies on the universal human desire to be loved and, if love is not forthcoming, flattered. Like Adam Smith, Becky Sharp understands the power of vanity, the corrupted cousin of sympathy. To explain how sympathy works, Adam Smith refers to the heroes in tragedy and romance. We enter into their situation and experience feelings analogous to theirs. In real life as in the theater, we enjoy the harmony of sentiments that exists between actor and spectator. We like to be able to bring someone else’s case home to ourselves just as we expect others to experience fellow-feeling with us in both our sorrow and our joy. This desire for sympathy can lead us to play a part in hopes that our spectators may like us better or admire us more. For the vain, outward praise and recognition are more important than an inner sense of praiseworthiness. Becky Sharp knows, as does Smith, that most people are vain and therefore easily manipulated through flattery. But unlike Smith, Becky seeks to exploit the vanity of others for her own gain. Men in particular make for willing victims as they are less used to playing a part the way women are and fail to see through the “arts” Becky and other women employ to use men to better their own condition.
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Notes
- 1.
Nikole King argues that Thackeray offers “multiple, often conflicting ideals associated with what it meant to be a middle-class Victorian man” and “challenges the assumption, and literary convention, that outer beauty reflects inner beauty.” More importantly for the purpose of this chapter’s argument, “Jos’s corpulent body and overeating suggest he lacks manly self-restraint and discipline” (107). His “slavish devotion to fashion… raises questions about his masculinity.” Vanity marks both Jos Sedley and George Osborne as ungentlemanly men not because they are well dressed but because they too obviously took great pains to look good (King 2011, 110).
- 2.
Mark Neocleous describes and compares the work of various Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on the connection between effeminacy, war, luxury, and (masculine) virtue. He argues that thinkers like Ferguson and Smith hold that “martial virtue is somehow threatened by new forms of accumulation” and the resultant “rise of effeminacy.” Like Smith’s “man of fashion,” the “dandy” and the “fop” are “emblematic of the crisis of masculinity” (Neocleous 2014, 92–93).
- 3.
Chapter II of Vanity Fair bears the title “In which Miss Sharp and Miss Sedley prepare to open the campaign” (VF 13).
- 4.
These texts not only had a profound influence on the history of the novel but also fill in the cultural backdrop against which Smith wrote about effeminacy and, just as importantly, did not write about women. For a thorough discussion of eighteenth and nineteenth century conduct literature and the way it helped shape society, see Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1990). The conduct book authors Armstrong discusses include Timothy Rogers, Thomas Gisborne, T.S. Arthur, Rev. Thomas Broadhurst, Dr. Fordyce, and Dr. Gregory. Female authors of conduct books include Sarah Tyler, Miss Catherine E. Beecher, and the Countess Dowager of Carlisle, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, and Mafia Edgeworth.
- 5.
As Ann Jones observes, “If marriage is a woman’s only career, it might as well be her profession” (Jones 1981, 129).
- 6.
Robert W. Dimand, Evelyn L. Forget, and Chris Nyland provide a helpful overview of the work women did for pay in Smith’s Scotland and elsewhere in Europe. Women worked as ironmongers, plumbers and glaziers, buttonmakers and brass manufacturers. They were often widows who had taken over their husbands’ businesses (Dimand et al. 2004).
- 7.
“The novel, together with all manner of printed material, helped to redefine what men were supposed to desire in women and what women, in turn, were supposed to desire to be” (Armstrong 1990, 258). This common knowledge is the subject of much of Austen’s signature irony.
- 8.
As Gilbert and Gubar observe: “Austen does characteristically explore the specific ways in which patriarchal control of women depends on women being denied the right to earn or even inherit their own money” (Gilbert and Gubar 1980, 136).
- 9.
Jane Austen’s novels can be read as a lighthearted discourse about romance and domesticity, but fundamentally her works deal with “the failure of the father, the emptiness of the patriarchal hierarchy, and, as Mary Burgan has shown, the inadequacy of the family as the basic psychological and economic unit of society” (Gilbert and Gubar 1980, 137).
- 10.
Mrs. Sarah Ellis, “Victorian England’s foremost preceptress of female morals and manners,” 1844, cited in Gilbert and Gubar (1980, 24).
- 11.
Similarly, John Ruskin stated in 1865 that the woman’s “power is not for rule, not for battle, and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet orderings” of domesticity (Gilbert and Gubar 1980, 52).
- 12.
Julia Bninski points out that Amelia is a victim of the sentimental literature popular at the time. She cries at the drop of a hat and persists in a romantic but completely misplaced love for George (Bninski 2011).
- 13.
Women publicly selling goods (like Becky in the bazaar at the end of Vanity Fair) are similarly suspect (Womick 2011).
- 14.
Lisa Jadwin notes that “ambitious women … have little choice but to refashion “virtuous” discourse by reinflecting and exaggerating its rhetoric and concealing their unacceptable ideas beneath an acceptable surface. … These women mimic the discourse of the “paragon of virtue,” deliberately enlisting the true believer’s acquiescent, self-minimizing discourse to camouflage their disbelieving defiance and to achieve power denied them by the masculine declarative discourses they are forbidden to use” (Jadwin 1992, 664). Stephanie Womick argues that Thackeray’s “broadest critique” in VF “is of middle-class femininity.” “By consciously performing and subverting markers of ideal domesticity, Becky uses them to her own benefit, employing female accomplishments and postures in her arsenal of strategies to seduce, entrap, and manipulate.” This makes Becky “both dangerous and fascinating” (Womick 2011, 67).
- 15.
As Jadwin puts it: Becky throws the dictionary back into the yard “where it belongs:” she will “define her own wor(l)d” (Jadwin 1992, 678).
- 16.
Maria Dibattista draws attention to Thackeray’s awareness of a “culture whose model of angelic womanhood” creates “freaks” like Becky. “Becky’s “disreputable” character represents the potential for a demonic and malevolent female sexuality in contrast to the respectable but no less selfish “love” of her true opposite and double, Amelia, the martyr to the Victorian feminine ideal who dedicates her life to the “corpse” of her love.” Dibattista is here referring to Amelia’s devotion to the unworthy George years after he dies on the battlefield (Dibattista 1980, 833).
- 17.
Micael M. Clarke discusses Thackeray’s awareness of the cultural construction of (female) identity, arguing that “Thackeray anticipates modernism: he was acutely aware of the way personality, including gender-associated characteristics, may be socially constructed” (1995, 49). It is therefore no coincidence that Thackeray compares Becky and his other female characters to mythological creatures and works of art. “Thackeray’s novels were indeed a protest … against an entire system of false social values, including false ideas of male honor and female virtue, and of the role of the novel in shaping a culture” (1995, 47).
- 18.
For a discussion of the sexual contract described in the conduct literature of the late 18th and early nineteenth century, see Armstrong 1990.
- 19.
Vanity is a vice for women and for the effeminate, which is why Jos Sedley and George Osborne are mocked in Vanity Fair. But these men are ridiculous not only because they behave like women but also because they assume a vice reserved for the aristocracy. As Sarah Rose Cole argues, “Thackeray implies that effeminacy and male vanity are appropriate for idle aristocrats, while middle-class men who are vain must be condemned as snobs” (Cole 2005, 152). The middle class man who looks in the mirror thus violates both gender and class norms. Vanity is natural only for aristocrats like Rawdon, but not for city men like George (Cole 2005).
- 20.
Gilbert and Gubar argue that female authors in the nineteenth century had to apply a similar, even more complicated strategy. They told “their own stories” but “allayed their distinctively female anxieties of authorship by following Emily Dickinson’s famous (and characteristically female) advice to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-” (1980, 51). “In short, like the twentieth century American poet H. D., who declared her aesthetic strategy by entitling one of her novels Palimpsest, women from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpsestic, works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning. Thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards” (1980, 73).
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Slegers, R. (2018). To Be Quiet and Very Much Interested. In: Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments in Vanity Fair. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98731-6_3
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