An Impossible Bildung and the Bounds of Realism and Britishness in Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) covers the period from the last years of the Napoleonic Wars up to 1832, the year of the first Reform Act. The novel portrays the era of the Bourbon Restoration, a time when the British Empire was climbing to its unprecedented global prominence. The rapidly widening and mobilizing world forced the then-burgeoning British realism to challenge continuously the limits of its representation in both empirical and psychological dimensions, and Thackeray's monumental work was a representative literary attempt. Equally noteworthy is the fact that the novel was serialized from 1847 to 1848, during the very same years when revolutionary fervor ignited the Continent, especially France. Vanity Fair is a literary response to and reflection of both these historically decisive moments. Thackeray's novel not only reflects but also ideologically attempts to contain the revolutionary spirit that presumably threatens to compromise Britishness.

In the formative years of both realism and a new national consciousness centering on the rapidly-emerging middle class, Vanity Fair engages in discursively drawing a map of Britishness as well as the scope of realist literary representation. To investigate the implications, this essay focuses on how this novel transforms the classical Bildungsroman to serve its own meta-generic purpose as well as both the geographical and socio-economic mobility of the problematic and ambitious female protagonist, Becky Sharp. This revolutionary female upstart unsettles British high society and is eventually banished from the territories of Britain as well as from the representable scope of British realism. The results structure the entire narrative in a way that contributes to testing and mapping the boundaries of realism as well as Britishness. Here, I examine the liminality of Becky's position, which is crucial in highlighting and monitoring multivalent borders of Britishness and of realism and thereby undertaking what I call the "cartographic" project of this novel.

Recent literary scholarship about Vanity Fair tends to explore how the novel ultimately uncovers contradictions in Britishness and British national culture. Patricia Marks, for instance, argues that the ebb and flow of Becky's success mimic the disruptive effect of French on the British linguistic field. For Corri Zoli, the novel suggests that French and Indian elements are already part and parcel of British culture in the context of the world economy and that the nationalist attempt to homogenize British culture cannot but fail. Cheryl Wilson also explores the presence of French influence in British national consciousness by focusing on British social dance while Julia Kent turns to how the novel portrays French "amoral" culture as part of Britishness, debunking the British illusion of the separate spheres of domesticity and market. Although well situating Vanity Fair historically, such scholars have not investigated fully how Becky's coming of age not only informs the plot of this self-fashioned realist novel but also maps Britishness, even though the novel is apparently Becky's "failed" Bildungsroman. Also, with a few exceptions, scholars interpret the novel as debunking British national culture by focusing on its inherent heterogeneity. In response, I want to suggest the novel's performance as a disciplinary power that tracks, monitors, and contains Becky's radically alien nature and thereby argue that the novel eventually aims at being part of the discursive procedure to establish a normative national culture.

Section One: Thackeray's Use of Absent Childhood in Characterizing Becky

The earliest noticeable fact regarding the problematic nature of Becky's coming of age is the absence of her childhood. Thackeray tells us Becky "never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old" (12). The absence of childhood derives from "the dismal precocity of poverty" (12). Everything that she finds in her boarding school bores her because "her father, reprobate as he was, was a man of talent; his conversation was a thousand times more agreeable to her than the talk of such of her own sex as she now encountered" (14). According to Nancy Armstrong, modern fiction "helped to formulate the ordered space we now recognized as the...