Becky Sharp

The story is framed as a puppet show taking place at an 1814 London fair and is narrated by a highly unreliable master of ceremonies who repeats gossip at second or third hand. Vanity Fair tells the story of Rebecca ("Becky") Sharp, the orphaned daughter of an English art teacher and a French dancer. She is a strong-willed, cunning, and moneyless young woman determined to make her way in society. After leaving school, Becky stays with Amelia ("Emmy") Sedley, the good-natured and ingenuous daughter of a wealthy London family.

At Amelia's house, Becky meets the dashing and self-obsessed Captain George Osborne — actually engaged to Amelia — and Amelia's brother Joseph ("Jos") Sedley, a clumsy and vainglorious but rich civil servant home from the East India Company. Hoping to marry Sedley, the richest young man she has met, Becky entices him, but she fails. Osborne's friend, Captain William Dobbin, loves Amelia, but, putting her happiness first, does not attempt to compete with Osborne. Sharp goes into service with the crude and profligate baronet Sir Pitt Crawley, as governess to his daughters; she soon gains his favour. Sir Pitt's wife dies and he proposes to Becky. By then, though, she has married his son, Rawdon, which she soon regrets.

Thackeray's illustration of Becky and Emmy as girls

News arrives that Napoleon has escaped from Elba, and the stock market crashes, bankrupting Amelia's father. George's rich father forbids George to marry Amelia, because she is now poor. Dobbin persuades George to marry Amelia; George is disinherited. George, Dobbin and Rawdon are despatched to Brussels for the campaign. Osborne, tiring of Amelia, grows attracted to Becky.

At the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels, Becky embarrasses Amelia by making snide remarks about the quality of the latter's frock; meanwhile, the army receives marching orders to Waterloo. The battle can be heard from Brussels, but Becky is indifferent to the result, making plans for whoever wins (for example, if Napoleon wins, she decides, she intends to become the mistress of one of his marshals). Osborne is killed, while Dobbin and Rawdon survive. Amelia lives in genteel poverty caring for their son.

Becky also has a son, to whom she is cold and distant, being far more interested in first Paris and then London society where she meets the wealthy Marquis of Steyne, by whom she is eventually presented at court to the Prince Regent. She charms Steyne at a game of "acting charades" where she plays the roles of Clytemnestra and Philomela. This point is the peak of Becky's social success, but Rawdon is arrested for debt, possibly at Becky's connivance. Steyne had given Becky money, jewels, and other gifts, but she makes no effort to free her husband.

When Rawdon is released, he finds Becky entertaining Steyne, whom Rawdon beats up, assuming the two to be having an affair. Steyne is indignant, having assumed the £1,000 he had just given Becky was part of an arrangement with her husband. Rawdon finds Becky's hidden bank records and leaves her, expecting Steyne to challenge him to a duel. Instead, Steyne arranges for Rawdon to be made Governor of Coventry Island, a pest-ridden location. Becky, having lost both husband and credibility, leaves England and wanders the continent, leaving her son in care.

Amelia, Jos, George and Dobbin go to the fictional Pumpernickel (based on Weimar, Germany), where they find Becky destitute. She lives among card sharps and con artists, drinking heavily and gambling. Becky enchants Jos Sedley all over again, and Amelia is persuaded to let Becky join them. Becky decides that Amelia should marry Dobbin, notwithstanding that Dobbin is Becky's nemesis, the only person to ever see through her before it is too late. Amelia and Dobbin return to England, while Becky and Jos stay in France. Jos dies in suspicious circumstances — likely poisoned — shortly after signing much of his wealth to Becky, giving her an income. She returns to England and lives as a demi-mondaine. Her former associates refuse to have anything to do with her.

Born in Soho, Becky Sharp is the daughter of an impoverished English artist and a French "opera girl" — possibly a prostitute[17] — and is thus half-French herself.[2] To the English in the novel, her English ancestry is invisible; to them, she is wholly a Frenchwoman.[18] She appears to have loved her father: Thackeray tells how, as a girl, she would sit with him "and [hear] the talk of many of his wild companions — often but ill-suited for a girl to hear",[19] and when he dies Sharp misses both his companionship and the freedom that she had living with him.[19]

Portrait photograph of Minnie Maddern Fiske as Becky Sharp, c.1910.

Sharp is a "flamboyant coquette"[2] with bright green eyes.[10] She is waif-like and attractive although not necessarily beautiful.[20] A picara,[21] she has talents for, and enjoyment of, acting,[2] and is an excellent mimic. [22] She has been described as "ever-adaptable"[23] with a will to live and a vitality.[24] However, she is also a duplicitous trickster,[10] — "an outlaw, female insubordination personified", says Marion Meade — with an aggressive streak in her,[17] who, however, never loses her femininity.[10] She also has, says the Narrator, "wit, cleverness and flippancy", and a gift for "fun and mimicry".[25]

Sharp is, says Harold Bloom, "famously a bad woman, selfish and endlessly designing, rarely bothered by a concern for truth, morals, or the good of the community."[24] E. M. Forster describes Sharp as being "on the make";[26] for example, when she first sees Amelia's brother Jos, who is a revenue collector for the East India Company in Calcutta, she immediately asks Amelia whether he is very rich, because, "they say all Indian Nabobs are enormously rich".[27][note 3]

She is obsessed by money; unlike Amelia, who thinks that £2,000 (equivalent to £157,601 in 2021) will last her a lifetime, Sharp thinks that nothing less than £5,000 (equivalent to £394,003 in 2021) a year would be sufficient. Sharp's selfishness is even more highlighted when her husband is preparing to leave on the Waterloo campaign; she is more concerned that he has protected her income in case he is killed than over the risk to his life. Her subsequent attempt at appearing sorrowful at his departure is unrealistic to both her husband and the reader. The only time she cries for real is when she learns she could have married Sir Pitt Crawley, rather than, as she did, his son, whose fortunes were far less prosperous.[28] "Her financial gains are always achieved through the exploitation of the affections of others", wrote Ulrich Knoepflmacher; Sharp understood, very early on, that sentiment is a profitable commodity and one to be used and disposed of when circumstances demanded it.[29]

Sharp knows what an English lady should look like, and her impersonation is impeccable: "dressed in white, with bare shoulders as white as snow—the picture of youth, unprotected innocence and humble virgin simplicity".[30] She understands the power that a fashionable appearance brings; "and revels in it", says Montz; thus she deliberately stages tableaux and parlour games in order to take centre stage, and as an excuse to dress even more flamboyantly.[31] Her English companions consider her obsession with fashionable clothes the product of her French blood.[2] Clothes, though, for Sharp, are an essential tool; they enable her to blend in with her upper-class associates.[2] Sharp's "desire for fashion and worldliness"[2] is in tune with the snobbish affectations[32]—which she emulates[2]—and hypocrisies of English society, which she identifies immediately.[32] She is, however, sufficiently socially adaptable as to be able to blend in with the Bohemians she later meets in Germany.[33]

Amelia Sedley's husband, George Osborne, wants to seduce Sharp: he too fails to see through Sharp's projected image, "blinded by Becky's constructed self".[2] Sharp has sexual adventures,[31] but Thackeray never makes the connection between Sharp's sexual relationships and rise in social status explicit.[47]

For Becky Sharp, sexuality and femininity are primarily tools with which to improve her social and financial position in both the short- and long-term. She is unmotivated, says Claudia Nelson, "by either heart or libido".[55] Sharp herself comments, early in the book that "she never had been a girl ... she had been a woman since she was eight years old."[56] Any capacity for love she does possess is narcissistic,[57] and similarly, she puts her financial and social advancement before motherhood.[58]

Early edition of Vanity Fair, c. 1850s

Mid-Victorian literature was still somewhat orientated towards "young ladies' literature" where the readership was morally sensitive. Thackeray took a degree of risk in presenting a character such as Sharp, says Michael Schmidt, but he remained within boundaries, and whilst he was satirical, he broke no taboos.[59] Sharp, then, was a new phenomenon in Victorian fiction, which until Vanity Fair knew only of insipid heroines bound by convention or Smollett-esque grotesques.[10] Amelia herself was one of the former, but Sharp was an original creation.[10] Sharp has been called a "love to hate her and hate to love her" character, and this was radically different from previous representations of young women in literature.[2] Thackeray has been described as "radical" in making his heroine(s) not only female, but also one of them conventionally wicked in character yet sympathetic to the audience.[60]

Sharp's way of intruding her life into that of others has led to comparisons by one scholar to other Victorian literary characters. Both Joseph Conrad's Mr Vladmir in The Secret Agent, and in a comic rather than serious setting, Trollope's Mr Slope in Barchester Towers, play similar roles.[61] In a modern sense what made her dangerous to contemporary eyes was her ambition; women did not, in nineteenth-century England, climb the social ladder—at least, not in an obvious manner.[3]

That Sharp survives, and at times, thrives, despite her moral ambiguity indicates that Thackeray believed society was no longer able to cure wrongdoing.[9] Sharp was, according to Hughes, "a measure of how debased society had come".[62] Sharp's machinations can only work within the world of Vanity Fair — and Victorian society more broadly — because vanity and artificiality make it susceptible to her.[63] Another plot device favoured by Victorian writers was that of children playing adult roles in society, and vice versa,[note 7] and Sharp's comment that she had not been a girl since she was eight years' old has led to her being identified as one such "child-woman".[65]

Vanity Fair was the first major novel to have a governess, whether a heroine or an anti-heroine, as its main character. They had always been in the background, but Sharp was the first time a governess' ambitions to break out of her limited society were placed centre stage.[4] Sharp's orphan status reflected a common theme in writers of the period; as Kathryn Hughes notes, for Emily Morton from Amy Herbert, Charlotte Brontë's eponymous character from Jane Eyre, and Jane Fairfax from Emma, their positions as orphans are central to the books' subsequent plots. Similarly central are their roles as governesses, but whereas for Emily and the two Janes it symbolised class distinctions and the gap between the governess and her employers, for Sharp it was a means of role reversal.[66]

Unlike Jane Eyre, Sharp is aware of the ways of the world from a very young age.[67] Henkle suggests that Sharp, with her carefree and radical approach to social barriers, is symbolic of the change that Victorian society was undergoing in the mid-19th century.[33] There was greater fluidity than ever before as a result of the massively increased wealth among the middle class as a result of the Industrial Revolution,[8] and this fluidity allowed the courtesan to flourish in the Regency era.[68][note 8]

Thackeray's illustration of Becky as Circe

The events portrayed in Vanity Fair are described by narration, but the narrator is uninterested in Sharp's thoughts, only her actions. For example, when she goes to bed wondering whether Jos will call on her the next morning, the very next sentence informs us that he did. What Sharp thought, in the meantime, is deemed irrelevant to the reader's enjoyment and understanding of the novel.[70] However, although the Narrator repeatedly draws attention to Sharp's immoralities, he does recognise that her behaviour reflects the hypocrisy of the world — "that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name".[13] Writes Montz, "Becky Sharp is artificial because she chooses to be so: the reader never sees any sign that there is a real Becky beneath the facade of the performer, the flirtatious lover, the good wife, the social climber, the capricious friend".[15] Such women as Sharp, writes Frazee, contributed "nearly as much to the pungent flavour of the period as did the regent himself".[68]

Margaret Atwood has praised Sharp as a character, writing how she "makes no pretensions to goodness. She is wicked, she enjoys being wicked, and she does it out of vanity and her own profit, tricking and deluding English society in the process". She compares Sharp to Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country: both live on their wits "and use men as ambulatory bank accounts",[71] although the latter did not have the spirit or sense of humour that Sharp is portrayed with.[49] More personally, suggests Henkle, to Thackeray himself she represented the power of the artist and the writer, in how she overcomes obstacles to achieve her aims.[33] Her entire career, says F. M. Salter, is "one supreme irony",[72] and Patricia Marks suggests that Becky, although a rounded character, remains "nothing without her finery",[73] and compared with her, the other characters appear "tattered".[74]

Commentator Heather L. Braun describes Becky at the end of the novel as akin to a Rhine maiden, a Clytemnestra: "she has become 'an apparition' that 'glides' rather than walks into a room; her hair 'floats' around her pale face, framing a 'ghastly expression' that elicits fear and trembling in those who look upon her". Braun compares Becky's wanderings around Europe to the toils of Circe.[75]

Thackeray personally disapproved of Sharp's behaviour,[76] and contemporaries would have understood how, from Sharp's actions, she was a bad woman. However, their judgement would be based as much on actual expectations of real social morality as on what they read in Thackeray's pages. More, that they thought she was bad need not have meant they were necessarily unsympathetic.[77] Thackeray himself compared Sharp's career as "resembling the slitherings of a mermaid",[7] and Bloom says that she is enough of a character to make her fundamentally likeable, to the extent that "any reader who does not like Becky is almost certainly not very likeable herself or himself".[7] Poet Dorothy Parker—herself orphaned at age nine[78]—"strongly identified" with Sharp,[79] and effectively treated her as a role model.[80] Meade, in her biography of Parker, says Sharp became Parker's alter ego, and that it was from her[76] that Parker learnt "the rules of the game".[81]

To Eva M. Dadlez, Sharp is a character to be admired, particularly for her intelligence — which is more acute than any of the other characters (aside from Dobbin, who sees through her) — her overcoming a difficult childhood, and ultimately "her talent to survive disasters". She notes that Sharp looks better when the general unprincipled foolishness of the rest of the cast is taken into account.[82]

Thackeray's character made a strong impression on contemporaries. Elizabeth Browning's protagonist of Aurora Leigh (1856), Marian Erle, is a similar character to Sharp.[53] In 1872 The Spectator reviewed Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds and made an unfavourable comparison between Trollope's main female lead, Lady Eustace, and Becky Sharp. The reviewer wrote how "we had supposed that in Lady Eustace we were to have Mr Trollope's equivalent for Thackeray's Becky Sharp, but we hardly think that we have got it; or if we have, Mr Trollope's equivalent for Thackeray's Becky Sharp is but a poor one."[83] Henry James called Sharp an "epic governess" of literature.[84] In 1848, writing in The Spectator, R. S. Rintoul wrote

Rebecca Crawley (formerly Sharp) is the principal person in the book, with whom nearly all the others are connected: and a very wonderfully drawn picture she is, as a woman scheming for self-advancement, without either heart or principle, yet with a constitutional vivacity and a readiness to please, that saves her from the contempt or disgust she deserves. As a creation or character, we know not where Rebecca can be matched in prose fiction.[85]

In the 21st century, Sharp's character has been used in diverse ways. For example, it has been the subject of a book on business ethics,[86] and a work of fiction by Sarra Manning transposes her life and adventures onto a contemporary woman.[87]