Ironically, my mother achieved money and position—and acceptance in her chosen milieu, whereas Becky ultimately holds onto none of these. My mother set herself the goal of earning $5,000 a week, an income she achieved in 1954 when she had her daily television show, though, granted, the $5,000 was her gross budget for the show. Becky, as she drives away from Queen’s Crawley, the estate that got away from her, muses that she “could have been a good woman on 5,000 pounds a year.” We never get to know if this might have been true because Becky never reaches her level of imagined financial stability. Still, it’s not the ultimate success or failure, or even the particular details of the ascent or descent that seem to me the main point of the comparison.
What I responded to at age eleven in Becky Sharp and recognized in my own family experience—not knowing then that Sheilah Graham was really Lily Shiel who had spent six years in a Jewish orphanage, not knowing that the paired, framed pencil drawings of my mother as a small girl, daffodil in hand, in a sweet blue dress and her “dead brother David” in a sailor suit were fakes, reworked to create an impression of genteel ancestry from childhood photographs of herself and her first husband Johnny—were Becky’s qualities of wit and zest and resourcefulness and a bizarre underlying honesty. It is the honesty of the rogue who may fool others but ultimately does not fool herself. I could sense these qualities in my mother—and also, buried beneath my serious Jane Eyre side, lurking somewhere in myself.
Part of our “honesty” as a family is that we acknowledged the gamesmanship of our taking advantage of Hollywood. Becky and her husband Rawdon, in the famously titled chapter, show us “how to live well on nothing a year.” In our family’s case there were no bill collectors pounding at the door, but we were no less engaged in a scam. “We weren’t millionaires,” said my mother, looking back on it all, “but we lived like millionaires.” Lunches and dinners at the Beverly Brown Derby, at Trader Vic’s, and Chasen’s, and then when we started traveling, in all the best restaurants of New York, Paris, London, and Rome were always free. By the time I was in college and our family had moved to New York, the game was winding down. Still, we could count on dinner every Sunday at Luchow’s—a staple of sauerbraten and red cabbage or maybe wiener schnitzel –and at the beginning of every new season—fall, winter, summer, spring—a meal for the three of us along with maybe a couple of awed, grateful friends at The Four Seasons. The maitre d’ would glide obsequiously to my mother’s table—always a good table or she would get it changed. “Tell me who’s been here lately,” she would ask. “Ah, last week Marlene Dietrich . . .” he would begin as my mother, keeping pace with him, would scribble in her little spiral notebook. At the end came the anticipated reckoning. “The check, please” my mother would propose, her voice at once firm and uncertain. “Oh no, Miss Graham, please, it’s on the house.” We enjoyed this little ritual immensely.
While we were still in California, there were also the getaway weekends. In Palms Springs, Ojai, and Santa Barbara, a range of hotels—which if not the best at least had swimming pools—offered us either low rates or free accommodations. Also, beginning in the mid ’50s, as more movies were made on location abroad, there were the free plane trips and hotel stays in Europe, or in New York, all the way through the ’60s, a pair of free tickets to every Broadway opening. When my mother wasn’t in town, I would take a friend. I attended hits and busts, the 1958 opening of Camelot and long-forgotten plays that closed almost the night they opened. It was a scam, a game, a performance, perhaps all the more zestfully fraudulent for me since I derived its benefits without even putting in my mother’s labor.
My mother showed me the zest of calculated performance in an imperfect world, the same lesson taught by Becky Sharp, and it’s hard for me not to conflate the two of them. Being equal to the moment at hand. Knowing what to say when threatened. Becky knows how to humiliate Miss Pinkerton by speaking to her in French or to rebuke the prying Mrs. Bute by her “honest” admission that she was never a Montmorency. When my mother, in the late ’30s, encountered Constance Bennet on a studio set and Bennet accosted her—“At last I get to meet the biggest bitch in Hollywood!”—my mother was equal to the occasion and retorted with barely a pause, “Not the biggest bitch, Connie, the second biggest bitch!” We also loved her guile and gusto, when threatened with a lawsuit by Jane Wyman, in making a radio show “retraction” that managed to repeat the offending item. “It is not true that Jane Wyman wears long sleeves and high collars to cover up hives.” Poor Jane Wyman! But such were the family stories we thrilled to as children. How could I not adore Thackeray’s witty, embattled character?
And also make her my own model. Despite my avowed dislike for masks and disguises, I find that much that I have done and sought to do has been conceived in terms of performance. In seventh grade I had to give an oral book report on a Dorothy Parker short story. Standing before the class and talking from my index cards, I managed to keep everyone laughing throughout the presentation. That was the beginning of my aspiration to panache.
In college and a bit afterwards, I acted in plays—largely Shakespeare, a bit of Shaw and Christopher Fry—and thought I might like to be an actress. My mother asked if I were willing to starve. I said no. Choosing, instead, to teach, I entered a sober profession but also one that is theatrical. Even participating in department meetings can seem so. Making the right comment at the right moment. Entering the play, assuming a role, as much caught up in the zest of the occasion as concerned with its purpose or content. And always a bit detached. When I was a college dean, another job people take seriously, I think I kept signaling that I held myself at an ironic distance from the role. That may be why, ultimately, I was fired. But no matter. The performer looks to new roles, new opportunities. Losing my job as dean meant a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary decrease. Within months I had a book contract to write a family memoir. The book advance I received offset the drop in salary. My mother had recently died, but I imagined she would have been proud of my resourcefulness. It was in the mode of Becky Sharp: scrambling to stay on top of things yet viewing any set of circumstances as a drama which could ultimately run to its end; engaged in events but also impervious to them; feeling oneself inextinguishable because there is no essence of self to extinguish—only one role after another, and one’s abiding energy to keep playing them.
But having said all this, I must pause to remember my mother’s remark. Becky Sharp is “somewhat like me,” she wrote. The qualifying “somewhat” is important, and all the more so if I think of Becky as myself. Even more markedly than my mother, I have never sought wealth or social status and certainly never sought them through men. Also I do not forget that Becky Sharp is an imposter, an interloper, someone quite disreputable, a gambler, a character without a loving heart, a venal conniver, and, to top it all, a bad mother. Were I to meet her, I probably wouldn’t trust her, just as I’d have to be wary of Moll Flanders or of Arabella in Jude the Obscure. These are women who’d sell you out as soon as look at you. Women who use men. Who know only how to take care of themselves and survive. Why make such a character as Becky one’s heroine when Thackeray expressly says she isn’t heroic? Why prefer her to plain Jane?
I have two answers.
One: Becky Sharp has a sense of humor, and Jane Eyre doesn’t. Imagine having tea with one or the other. “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,” Jane would confide, proudly straightening her posture as she raises her teacup to her lips. What could one say? “I’m very happy for you after all you’ve gone through.” But I’d feel ill at ease, as if I were intruding on something too private. I think I’d also feel a bit bored.
Becky, on the other hand, could be counted on to amuse me with gossip and practical good sense. Leaning forward confidentially, she’d call a cad we both knew “that selfish humbug, that low bred cockney dandy, that padded booby. . . .” and I’d delight in her description. Perhaps she’d relate her woes, d
ramatizing herself as a “poor castaway scorned for being miserable.” I’d sympathize while at the same time seeing through her schemes and her poses. I’d have fun with Becky, even if I couldn’t trust her. It would be hard to have fun with Jane.
Two: more than finding Becky a lot more fun than Jane, I also judge her as ultimately the less self-referential, the less selfish of the two characters. To put this differently, Jane’s finest moments are ones of self-assertion—“I love, I hate, I suffer.” I claim my due; Becky’s, on the other hand, are ones of surprising disinterestedness.
In the scene in which Rawdon, released from prison through the kind intervention of his sister-in-law, Lady Jane, returns home to shock a glittering, bejeweled Becky dining à deux with Lord Steyne, Becky gives a “faint scream,” musters a “horrid smile,” and protests her innocence, all to no avail. Steyne accuses Rawdon of complicity with Becky, then moves to make his exit. At that point Rawdon rips the brilliant from her breast, twice strikes the peer with his open hand, and flings him bleeding to the ground. “It was all done,” writes Thackeray, “before Rebecca could interpose. She admired her husband, strong, brave, and victorious.” Steyne slinks out. Rawdon makes Becky open her little desk and discovers how much she’s been hiding and hoarding. “You might have spared me a hundred pounds, Becky, out of all this—I have always shared with you,” he reproaches her. “I am innocent,” Becky repeats weakly as Rawdon leaves her without a word.
Everything in this enjoyably dramatic, even melodramatic scene strikes me as predictable except Becky’s admiration for Rawdon’s moral and physical bravery in the very moment of her own downfall. That feeling goes completely against her self-interest. It is an instance of aesthetic appreciation, the recognition of a supreme performance: Rawdon acting his best self in the exchange with the corrupt Lord Steyne. But it is also her acknowledgment of Rawdon’s moral superiority to Steyne and perhaps even to herself. I think this moment prepares the reader for the climactic exchange between Becky and Amelia at Pumpernickel (the two meet again by chance in the wonderfully named German ducal town), which brings the relations of the pair we have followed since their departure from Miss Pinkerton’s Academy to their final reckoning.
Not just spontaneously but with premeditated resolution Becky determines to rescue Amelia from the Pumpernickel riffraff. “She shall marry the bamboo cane [Dobbin]. I’ll settle it this very night,” she “reasons to herself.” Acting on her good intentions, she produces the letter George Osborne gave her seventeen years before, on the night of the Duke of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, the night before his death on the Waterloo battlefield, in which he asks her to run away with him. And she produces it, Thackeray tells us, “with provoking good humor.” One might argue that getting Amelia out of the way will allow Becky freer room at long last to ensnare Amelia’s brother, Jos Sedley. The cynical reader can make that connection, but Thackeray doesn’t. Without regard in that instance for herself, Becky urges Amelia to write Dobbin. “She treated Emmy like a child and patted her head,” this woman who hasn’t managed to love her own child. This is the closest Thackeray comes, not to redeeming Becky Sharp, for she certainly doesn’t stay redeemed, but to giving her a moment of transcendence. Then learning that Amelia has already written to Dobbin, Becky, ever the actress, ends the scene “screaming and singing.” “‘Un biglietto’ she sang out with Rosina. ‘Eccolo qua.’” In Rossini’s Il Barbiero di Seviglia when Figoro proposes Rosina should write a letter to Count Almaviva, she produces after some hesitation the letter she has already written. Uppermost in Becky’s response to Amelia’s admission is the understanding not that her self-exposure was unnecessary but that she finds herself in a recognizable opera buffa. “The whole house,” writes Thackeray, “echoed with her shrill singing.” Presumably Mrs. Crawley’s voice is not now what it was of yore. But her zestful sense of the game is undiminished.
ii
I ADMIT TO ZEST of my own in championing Becky Sharp over Jane Eyre, in taking sides with the witty rogue against her poor plain foil. A friend expressed her reservations. “I don’t think you’ve resolved this yet,” she cautioned me. Probably she’s right. I know I’m not at peace with my inner Jane Eyre, that serious dark-eyed girl (Jane Eyre actually has hazel eyes; Becky’s are green) with her penetrating stare, a person who can be so demanding and willful. I’d like to laugh away her somberness, her sense of being hard done by, her inability to be teased. Alas, she won’t go away. She abides in my psyche, sometimes even in my adult behavior. For the moment, though, as Thackeray might say, let’s draw the curtain on her and leave her to her private sorrows. I’d like to change tack. For all that I’ve done to contrast them, I have another way of thinking about Jane and Becky—in terms of the themes and patterns of the mid-nineteenth-century English novel—that actually shows them to have a lot in common. Both are orphans. Both become governesses. Both marry the master, though in Becky’s case it’s the master’s son. Both prove themselves to be indomitable survivors and tamers of men. Both are exceedingly smart. Both are cultural brokers, agents of change. Were I to teach Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair together in a course, I would take pleasure in developing these parallels,
If we think of the Victorian-era orphan as male, he is Oliver in Fagin’s den of thieves or Pip shivering in a graveyard, or ten-year-old David being told on his tenth birthday that his mother is dead.
“There was no real need to tell me so,” writes David the narrator. “I had already broken out into a desolate cry and felt an orphan in the wide world.”
But what if the orphan is female? Jane Eyre comes at once to mind, and Dickens’s Little Nell. I wouldn’t think immediately of Becky Sharp—we don’t get much of her childhood in the novel, and Thackeray also tells us she never really was a child, by which comment he surely means that she has always been sharp and savvy, adept in the ways of the world. Still, Becky is first encountered as an orphan, living on sufferance at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, not so different from the way the orphaned Jane lives with the Reeds.
Probably my mother’s story of incredible survival colors my thinking, but I would argue that the female orphans of Victorian fiction are generally tougher than their male counterparts. While Pip shivers, both Becky and Jane get on with what they need to do. Becky, as we’ve seen, is awesome in her resourcefulness and resilience. As for Jane, small and plain though she may be, it’s still the case that at every crisis in the novel from her first encounter with John Reed to her resistance to St. John Rivers’ proposal that she become a missionary’s wife, we feel her drawing strength from the one thing she can count on—herself. “Who in the world cares for you? Or who will be injured by what you do?” her own “Feeling” urges, when Rochester, revealed as a would-be bigamist, pressures her to stay on as his mistress. “Still indomitable was the reply, ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” In truth, it’s a stretch to see Jane as friendless. She has Bessie at Gateshead, Miss Temple and Helen Burns at Lowood, Rochester at Thornfield, the Rivers sisters at Moor House. But when these die or fail her or circumstances change, that bedrock self abides. And how different is this, really, from Becky Sharp? Becky—brilliant player of roles—might seem more to exemplify panache and wiliness and Jane sincerity, but both, as I perceive them, have the constancy of self-reliance. They move along, propelled by circumstances, not quite daring in Jane’s words to ask for liberty but seeking at least new servitude.
Jane and Becky both become governesses, perhaps the one respectable employment available in the 1840s to genteel women in distress. In fiction the governess like the orphan finds herself in an unresolved position. She has worth but needs it to be recognized. She’s vulnerable to possible mistreatment but also well placed to overcome her disadvantages. Jane Fairfax in Emma refers to the life of a governess as “the slave trade,” but for Becky and Jane it’s a “career open to talent,” to borrow that revolutionary phrase. Becky’s good French, her si
nging and her wit, Jane’s drawings, which express her almost vatic power as do her bold retorts to Rochester, help gain them their one possible prize. Both exemplify how the narrative of the nineteenth-century female orphan invariably merges—unless like Little Nell she dies in childhood—with the narrative of the heroine who must marry. The list expands from Becky and Jane to Esther Summerson, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, Clara Middleton, Laura Fairlie, Eustasia Vye, and Sue Bridehead—all orphans though not all introduced as children. But their orphaned (read unprotected) condition is relevant to the key task before them. “I must be my own Mama,” says Becky. She is speaking not in current self-help parlance of her need to “mother herself,” but of that to find her own husband.
But then aren’t heroines always more or less on their own when it comes to this task, even if they have living parents? Think, for example, of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot. In the story of the young woman about whom Henry James says the novel makes that “ado,” parents, if not dead, are usually absent, tyrannical or foolish. Or if both parents aren’t dead, then one is, so that the heroine without a father lacks standing and protection and the heroine without a mother lacks guidance. Able to count only on herself, our young woman must muddle through, and the qualities she shows in choosing and winning a husband define for us who she is.
The whole of Jane Eyre builds to Jane’s marrying Rochester. Becky Sharp, on the other hand, has her series of campaigns, failing first with fat foolish Jos Sedley, then missing the chance to marry the master, Sir Pitt Crawley, because she has already married the master’s son. Thackeray mocks both Becky and the expectations of novel readers in the way he depicts this supposedly climactic event. Far more dramatic than Becky’s marrying Rawdon is the “tableau,” as Thackeray calls it, in which she must refuse Sir Pitt.
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