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The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Maria DiBattista
Maria DiBattista*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
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Abstract

The charades of Vanity Fair represent an important but little understood fable of demonic and outraged womanhood as a subtext of Thackeray's larger historical fiction. In marking the culmination of Becky Sharp's career in the world of vanity—her triumph as Clytemnestra and her impersonation of the plaintive Philomele—the charades imply a corrupt sexual ideology threatening both violence and violation. But from the perspective of Thackeray as narrator, the verbally compressed and designedly opaque charades repress as much as they expose. His uncharacteristic narrative reticence in presenting the charades without comment reveals an uneasiness on Thackeray's part about the powers of the authorizing mind to know and to represent the darker laws that govern history and society.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 5 , October 1980 , pp. 827 - 837
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), iii, 391.

2 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston: Houghton, 1963), p. 494. Subsequent references are to this edition, and page numbers are cited in the text.

3 Van Ghent, “Vanity Fair,” in The English Novel:Form and Function (New York: Holt, 1953), p. 151.

4 The charade in Emma is as follows:

To Miss_________
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But, ah! united, what reverse we have!
Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown;
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.

Although Emma has little trouble puzzling out the charades and supplying the talismanic word—“courtship”—she is unable to interpret them as a parable of power and freedom compromised by love (see Emma, ed. Lionel Trilling [Boston: Houghton, 1957], Vol. I, Ch. ix, p. 54). For the charades in Jane Eyre, see Jane Eyre (New York: Norton, 1971), Ch. xviii, pp. 160–62.

5 Brontë's Rochester assumes a similar character in the charade he performs as “the very model of an eastern emir,” but Brontë proves her talent for equivocation by refusing to specify whether he is “an agent or a victim of the bowstring” in a pantomime drawn from “the patriarchal days” (Jane Eyre, p. 161).

6 Romances portraying the sexual subjugation of women are codified in their most engaging form in The Arabian Nights, the oriental collection of tales that Thackeray identifies as the primary text of childhood. Dobbin loses himself in daydreams inspired by the oriental magic of the tales (p. 47), and Becky, too, seems to fashion her dreams of glory and prosperity on the model of “charming Alnaschar visions” (p. 28). Alnaschar's “charming” visions of fantastic wealth, however, generate more volatile fantasies of criminal sadism and sexual omnipotence. Moreover, the frame story of the Arabian Nights also concerns a reign of terror pursued by a once benign pasha who, disillusioned in love, systematically sets out to depopulate the ranks of womanhood. Scheherazade is the clever, scheming woman who, like Becky, weaves fictions to buy time to circumvent or redirect the violence that may eventually claim her as its victim.

7 John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 61.

8 J. Lemprière, Bibliotheca Classica (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), p. 740.

9 See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (New York: Braziller, 1957), pp. 165–69. The two versions are at the heart of the “confusion” in Arnold's poetic treatment of the myth in his “Philomela.” Both Swinburne (“Itylus”) and Eliot (The Waste Land) conform to the Ovîdian reinterpretation of the myth.

10 Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton, 1956), Bk. i, Ch. xi, p. 71.

11 See Edgar F. Harden, “The Fields of Mars in Vanity Fair,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 10 (1965), 123–32.

12 The Oresteia, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), 11. 1377–78. All further citations will be to this translation.

13 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1962), p. 202. Lukács does not specify, though he might, that it is primarily the classical allusions that undermine the apologetics of the current historical regime. As a meditation on vanity that eschews, even as it competes with, the “braggart heathen allegories” of classical myth, the novel's Christian moralizing addresses a more pervasive malaise: contemptus mundi. Thackeray's classicism is more culture-bound than his “Christian” stance because it is more involved with the specific orders of time.

14 Thackeray explicitly addresses and implicitly deplores “the moral world” of readers whose Pharisaic habits force the narrator to adopt euphemy for plain speaking, innuendo for declaration: “We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that lightness and delicacy which the world demands—the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name” (p. 617). Since this well-known passage only serves to introduce the infamous description of the Becky-siren, Thackeray seems to be indulging in his own brand of feigned delicacy.

15 Out of the catastrophic union of Semele and Zeus is born—or rescued—the infant Dionysus, who becomes the tutelary god and founder of orgiastic rites dominated by, and appealing primarily to, women. These Bacchic rites play a role in the tragedy of Tereus, Procne, and Philomele. Leo C. Curran points out that in the later Ovidian version of the Semele myth the association between sexual and divine violence is clear: “Ovid's language is explicit in indicating that Semele's immolation takes place during the act of intercourse and not merely when Jupiter approaches her” (see “Rape and Rape Victims in The Metamorphosis,” Arethusa, 11 [1978], 239, n.).

16 John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884; rpt. in Thackeray: The Critical Heritage, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968]), p. 87.

17 Thackeray, “Swift,” The English Humourists, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Cornhill ed. (New York: Scribners, 1911), xxi, 171.

18 Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1951), p. 169.

19 See Charlotte Brontë's preface, dedicated to Thackeray, in Jane Eyre, 2nd ed. (London, 1847).