Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  The text I counterpose to Jane Erye is Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. “Panoramic,” according to the critic Percy Lubbock, a “large, loose baggy monster” for Henry James, it includes in its extensive cast of characters the other most renowned female orphan-turned-governess in English literature, the pointedly named Becky Sharp. Vanity Fair is a much less serviceable book to slip into syllabi than Jane Eyre. Too lengthy for any general education course, too ironic for a course in women’s studies—Thackeray’s wry, ambiguous humor seems not especially compatible with feminist approaches—the novel might be a good choice for a course in postcolonialism, a vehicle to consider the reaches of Empire since the East India Company more than hovers in the background of the text. But in the final analysis this book works best for students of the nineteenth-century novel. And even with these, whatever their presumed tolerance for the genre, experience has prepared me to brace for the complaints.

  “Too many words,” said one bold older woman, a former nurse and returning student, referring perhaps less to the length of Vanity Fair than to its pace and chattiness. The intrusive—and elusive—narrator bothers some. Others are troubled by the characters’ flawed nature in this novel, as its subtitle announces, “without a hero.” George Osborne is a cad, who but for dying on the battlefield at Waterloo would have deserted his young wife; that innocent wife, Amelia, is a simpering nitwit, grieving all those years over the dead George and failing to see what’s real around her; William Dobbin is a fool—a “spooney,” as Thackeray calls him—for his thankless loyalty to Amelia; and Becky Sharp, from beginning to end of the ploys that we follow over nearly two decades, is a conniving, some would say heartless, social climber.

  I’m grateful for those students who do appreciate Vanity Fair, for I am a committed enthusiast. My love of this novel goes back to that annus mirabilis of my reading life, sixth grade—the year I also devoured David Copperfield and Bleak House, learning to savor the pleasures of seemingly endless immersion in such intricate fictional worlds. Thackeray won me from the opening sentence of Chapter I when “two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig,” arrive at the gate of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for young ladies. Within a few pages I had met snobbish, hypocritical Miss Pinkerton and her silly, well-meaning sister, Jemima, sentimental Amelia, and her knowing “best friend,” Becky Sharp. And under Thackeray’s authorial tutelage, I had grasped their social and moral standing. I also understood that Becky, and Becky alone, is endowed with the wit to penetrate the vanities and weaknesses of those around her. And even before her awesome revolutionary gesture of throwing Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary out the window of the carriage speeding her away from the school she despises, this character had me in thrall. Thackeray calls her his “famous little Becky puppet,” an acknowledgment of her power to fascinate as well as an assertion of his power as her maker. She has remained one of my favorite characters in English fiction, unwaveringly through the more than half century of my reading life.

  My colleague, who also teaches the nineteenth-century novel course, argues that we are allowed to love Becky because the balance tilts towards the good in her morally complex nature—after all, she helps Amelia in the end to give up her illusions about George and marry Dobbin. I’m not so sure of my colleague’s judgment; I’m not sure the good in Becky Sharp prevails over her amorality, some would say over her wickedness. Doesn’t Thackeray stack the deck against her by making her an uncaring mother? It may be amusing that “whenever Mrs Rawdon wished to be particularly humble and virtuous,” she hems the little shirt “for her dear little boy” that “had got to be too small for Rawdon long before it was finished.” But when she boxes his ears after she catches the boy listening rapt on the staircase as she sings to her aristocratic “benefactor,” Lord Steyne, and Thackeray tells us that “after this incident the mother’s dislike turned to hatred,” it’s hard as a reader not to shudder and condemn her. But despite my maternal scruples, I don’t let this damning incident tip the scales. Becky has already won me. Perhaps I side with her all the more readily because she’s not aspiring to be good. She’s a rogue who plays the game of life, uncomplaining when she loses a hand, just anteing up again. I love her zest and resilience, her wit and irreverence. Even in the face of my better judgment, I forgive her everything.

  AS I look back on myself as a girl reader of these novels, I see someone who was herself more a Jane Eyre but who admired and wanted to be like Becky Sharp.

  To begin with appearance, Jane is small and plain. Mrs. Gaskell, Brontë’s first biographer, tells us that “Jane Eyre was naturally and universally thought to be Charlotte herself, but she always denied it, calmly, cheerfully, with the obvious sincerity which characterized all she said,” asserting “the basis was no more than thus: she determined to take in defiance of convention a heroine as small and plain as herself who should nonetheless be interesting.”

  I was small and, in ways I shall explain, plain as well. After sizing up my seventeen-and-a-half-inch length and head of dark hair at birth, my mother decided I wasn’t a Penelope, the name she had reserved for an imagined long-legged blond. Maybe my mother would have named baby Blanche Ingram Penelope, even though Blanche, Jane’s seeming rival, is a brunette. Growing up in Southern California, I was surrounded by Blanche Ingram types, at least in terms of their stature—long-legged California girls, who always stood in the rows behind me in class photographs. At one point, I remember worrying if I was going to be a midget, a concern I’m happy to report that proved unfounded—by fifteen, I had reached my adult 5’3 ¾” height. Still, I remained permanently shorter than most of my friends and classmates, and shorter, too, than my mother who was 5’5”. Long-legged as well, she loved to show she could still do the high kicks she had performed in the twenties as a chorus girl on the London stage.

  I wasn’t an unattractive child, but I felt myself to be plain. Not ugly, just plain. And plain is also what I sought to be. From age six or seven, for a stretch of years, I insisted on a daily uniform of jeans, a checked flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and brown oxfords—with cowboy boots reserved for special occasions. These clothes couldn’t be worn to school–skirts were required there—but my skirts were always as plain as possible. When I was in sixth grade, my mother tried to upgrade my wardrobe by taking me off to the Saks on Wiltshire Boulevard and helping me choose two outfits—one red and one yellow. The red outfit had a flared skirt to be worn with a crinoline; the skirt of the yellow outfit was straight with a pleat in the back. Both had color-coordinated cotton print blouses and cardigans. When I wore the red outfit to school, classmates asked me if I was dressed for something special. Their assumption mortified me. I was only trying to be more like them. But anything at all fancy seemed a betrayal of my true self.

  Jane Eyre, as I did, feels violated in being adorned. In the period of their engagement, Rochester tries to shower her with jewels and dress her in satin and lace. “And then you won’t know me, sir,” retorts Jane. “And I shall not be your Jane Eyre any longer but an ape in a harlequin’s jacket—a jay in borrowed plumes.” I don’t know if I paused over this exchange as a child reader, but, thinking now about both Jane and myself, I find it telling. Jane feels as if fancy clothes and jewels will diminish, not enhance her. Her plainness is a point of pride. She is Rochester’s “plain Quakerish governess,” and that should be sufficient. In my own life, I think, plainness was also a means of holding onto myself in a milieu that thrived on artifice. “You want to be plain!” accused my mother in exasperation over my hair when I was twenty-five. By then I had long softened towards nice clothes, but to this day I wear little makeup and do not dye my hair. The one time I put in blond highlights, I felt like Jane Eyre’s jay in borrowed plumes.

  It would be easy to build a contrast between me and my glamorous Hollywood-columnist mother. Just imagine a typical scene: me on a couch in the corner of the beauty salon at Max Factor, idly thumbing through movie magazines, while my mother’s hai
r is lightened to platinum, then teased, and, finally, heavy makeup is applied to her face for a television appearance. Yet my mother underwent such transformations only for her work. At home she never wore makeup, and she didn’t drink or smoke. She got up early and worked hard. In a sense, she was plain, too. “Just a plain girl at home,” is how our old Swiss housekeeper remembered her when I sought this woman out for her recollections thirty years after she had left my mother’s employ. Perhaps in the artificial milieu of Hollywood, to be plain becomes the only possible expression of authenticity.

  Jane Eyre’s plain external appearance, which the novel is very insistent in keeping before us, at once hides her inner self and reflects a Wordsworthian insistence on her “soul’s immensity.” The soul is camouflaged by that plainness; yet it also shines through it in a way that it could never shine through artifice. Thus, to look at and see plain Jane Eyre, as Rochester manages to do, is to penetrate to her authentic self. Meanwhile, the reader also comes to know Jane Eyre’s soul from the inside out, drawn in by means of the character’s intense first-person narrative to her desires and resentments, her dreams and her principles, her strategies for coping in inimical surroundings, her passions, and her self-restraint. I resembled Jane in my subjectivity as well as in my appearance. I resembled her in my own intensity, ferocity, and bluntness, in my reserve and discipline, and in my sense of deprivation I also resembled her in the solace I sought in reading.

  Whereas Becky Sharp throws Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary out the carriage window, Jane Eyre is introduced reading Bewick’s History of Birds, though that very book is shortly thrown at her head by the nasty John Reed. Jane has taken refuge in the window seat of the breakfast room, drawing the red moreen curtain to ensure her seclusion as well as underscore her exclusion from the family hearth, while the clear panes of glass on her other side protect without separating her from the “drear November day.” The bird book paradoxically warms her by allowing her to escape in imagination into an Arctic realm—of frost and snow and a ghastly moon. She likes stories, having listened to the housemaid Bessie’s fairy tales and “passages of love and adventure,” drawn, she later understands, from the pages of Pamela and Henry Earl of Norland. Goldsmith’s History of Rome has taught her about Roman tyrants, thus giving her the frame of reference that allows her to denounce John Reed as unjust.

  I was never excluded from my family hearth. Indeed, one of my fondest early memories is of sitting on a beautiful quilted sofa in the warmth of the gas jets of our artificial fire while my mother read to me from the pages of Black Beauty, a book I then completed on my own, the first full-length book I ever read independently. When I think of reading, both being read to and reading myself, I have an image of a river, of myself flowing into stories, empathic and unbounded. In my everyday life, though, I was stern and bounded. I was also quick to decry injustice. I defended the dog against Bow Wow. I defended my mother when with her I met Errol Flynn. He was rude to her over something she’d written in her column. Placing myself protectively in front of her, I glared at him with my serious dark-brown eyes. Errol Flynn threw back his double chin and laughed. “The cub defending its dam,” he said. I was then eleven.

  My mother often took me along with her when she went to interview the stars. Some—including Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe—were nice. Mostly they didn’t notice me. It was my role to sit in the corner of, say, the Beverly Hills Brown Derby and to eat my filet mignon. How terrible is that, you might ask? Well, it’s terrible, even as a child, or maybe particularly as one, to seem invisible. Once we went in a limousine to a premiere at Graumann’s Chinese. The car drove up to the entrance. Fans strained behind the ropes to see who’d be arriving. “Who’s in there, who’s in there?” they pressed as I stepped in my Mary Janes and bobby socks onto the red carpet. Well, I’d been in there. But that didn’t count.

  So I understand how Jane Eyre feels at Gateshead or at Thornfield when Rochester has all his fashionable guests, who hardly know if she’s in the room. I understand her loneliness and her rage. I understand her terrible, frightening sense of deprivation—and her indomitable sense of self-worth in the face of all the neglect she experiences. When she makes her passionate declaration of love to Mr. Rochester, it is driven by her conviction of radical equality. “I am not talking to you now,” she declares to the man she believes has spurned her, “through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal as we are.”

  Growing up in Hollywood, I refused to be judged by its standards. The milieu, as my mother encouraged me to assess it, though she was part of it herself, was phony. My time would come, she told me, just as we know Jane Eyre’s time will come. I clung to that expectation. I clung to unadornment, to plainness if you will, as a synonym for self. I was a self, a not very popular self at school, an invisible self in Hollywood, but a self that I sensed would some day be acknowledged.

  Yet isn’t this all rather tiresome? Virginia Woolf says it well in her essay on the Brontës in The Common Reader: “When Charlotte wrote, she said with eloquence and spendour and passion, ‘I love,’ ‘I hate,’ ‘I suffer.’” But Woolf’s implication is that Charlotte’s focus is narrow, that to be so consumed in intense first-person emotions is both limiting and exhausting. Suggesting broader ways to engage with the world, Woolf cites the perceptual and intellectual range of characters in Austen and Tolstoy. She does not speak of Thackeray. His characters, after all, are “puppets”; he never lets go their strings. Yet Thackeray, too, offers an alternative, perhaps more than one, to “I love, I hate, I suffer.”

  The alternative, I’d hazard, of Vanity Fair’s intrusive narrator is: “We love, we hate, we suffer.” Vanitas vanitarum. And Becky Sharp’s alternative—she does hate Miss Pinkerton but soon learns to be more dispassionate—is: “You love, you hate, you suffer, not I—and I will take advantage of your folly.”

  My mother as a Hollywood gossip columnist can be seen as a combination of Thackeray and Becky. She chronicled the vanities of a superficial world: the loves, feuds, and risings and fallings of the stars. The stars were in a sense her puppets. “My paragraphs,” she called them. They were fodder for her column; she didn’t take them too seriously because she knew all were playing a game. Like Becky, she saw through the world she was scrutinizing while at the same time aspiring to be part of it. And also like Becky, she was an interloper. To anyone who knows anything of the story of Sheilah Graham, the parallels between her life and Becky Sharp’s must be obvious. Before she came to America, my mother gained entry to the highest circles of British society. Like Becky she concealed her background, in her case early poverty and Jewishness. Her entry card, like Becky’s, was her mix of beauty and brains—and a certain unscrupulousness about the means of getting ahead. Neither my mother nor Becky can be imagined as ever stopping to worry about being true to oneself, the pursuit of sincerity that Lionel Trilling sees as an essential value of Western culture from the Renaissance onward. For both Becky and my mother such scruples would have seemed a luxury. Respectability has its importance but only as appearance, not as moral essence. I think of both of them as driven, not as Jane Eyre is by the outsider’s loneliness, but by the outsider’s pragmatism. The pinnacle of Becky’s achievement is attending Lord Steyne’s party at Gaunt House. The pinnacle of my mother’s “English society period” was being presented at the court of George V and Queen Mary. We have the pictures to prove it. When everything collapses for Becky, she removes herself to the continent. My mother also changed continents—running from entanglements of one sort or another, she came to America. People in America, she said, judge you by what you can do, not by who you are.

  My mother acknowledges the parallel between herself and Thackeray’s character in her book College of One. Scott Fitzgerald chose Vanity Fair as the first novel my mother should read in the College of One curriculum (was he thinking she remi
nded him of Becky Sharp?), and my mother comments:

  It seems incredible that before Scott’s College of One I had not read Vanity Fair, the first of the novels in the curriculum. It was easy to read in the good edition Scott bought me in three volumes with good paper and strong print. . . . I did not consider the “how” of Becky Sharp. I found her interesting and she was somewhat like me. I much preferred her to the meek Amelia, who was put upon repeatedly without protesting. Becky fought for what she wanted, as I did. Her ambitions had been somewhat different from mine; she had wanted money and position, I had wanted acceptance. Perhaps they are related.