Originally Posted by
Pompey Bum
WARNING: SPOILERS
I just finished rereading Vanity Fair after a period of many years, and I found it even better than I remembered. Thackeray's wit is extremely sharp and I had thought of him as being a little mean-spirited at times. I think now that nothing could be further from the truth. I found his voice wise, a little bemused, but ultimately rather sad about the society he described. (His satire was devastating, though, and laugh-out-loud funny. We had a long stagecoach ride together (to borrow Fielding's famous metaphor) and I was genuinely sorry to say goodbye.
I remembered Becky's marital fidelity and sexual morality discussed on this thread and had some new ideas about them. First of all, yes, most modern readers would say that Becky was having adulterous sex with Lord Steyne, that she was a prostitute in Germany, and even (I think) that she was Jos' mistress near the novel's end; and that Thackeray was not able to be more explicit given his times. But of course we have only what he wrote, and he knew Becky better than we do.
Ecurb made the interesting observation that Becky was adulterous whether she was having sex with Lord Steyne or not, since adultery is more than just the mechanics of intercourse. I decided that Thackeray would have agreed, although not entirely as ecurb had intended. Becky was cuckolding Rawdon if only because she was perceived to be doing so by others. She was dating and receiving Lord Steyne and using Rawdon as a convenient fool (at her apex he is described as a big-booted side show barker announcing her next performance); and all the tongues in Vanity Fair were wagging about it. And that's because in Vanity Fair, it's not what you do or don't do that matters, but what you can get away with; and that's because Vanity Fair is all about power.
Once Becky loses access to Lord Steyne's Power--when she falls foul of it, in fact--she is a whore whether she lives in a Bohemian garret in Germany or not. Did she really wind up Jos mistress? Maybe. Or maybe she just followed him around to bully and use him--the facts didn't really matter n Vanity Fair. Even the shocking possibility that Becky may have murdered Jos is quickly glossed over. Who knows what really happened?
Given all the things that a left ambiguous (and Vanity Fair's need to leave them ambiguous), I was surprised by the flashback in which George, just before his death at Waterloo, confesses to Dobbin that he is having an "intrigue" with a woman, and that he would prefer for Amelia not to know. But Amelia (and Dobbin, too) already knew where things stood between George and Becky. George humiliated Amelia over her publicly; Aemelia took Becky to task for it during the battle; and the women broke their friendship for many years over it. I think a careful reader has to conclude that there was something sexual going on, and that the flashback confession (much later in a lengthy book) was Thackeray's way of being as discreet as possible about it.
The book's resolution, of course, depends on Amelia's eventual disillusionment with George. Oddly this comes with the disclosure by Becky of a note in which George had proposed that they run away together. This is a strange detail given George's wish that Amelia not find out about the intrigue (perhaps he meant not until he could arrange things), but it seems to have been important for Thackeray to let the reader know that where Becky and George was concerned there was no ambiguity.