Eyes Across the Channel by Clare A. Simmons

Author:Clare A. Simmons [Simmons, Clare A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: European, Europe, Literary Criticism, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, France, History
ISBN: 9789058230485
Google: q8FicxxvpIQC
Goodreads: 209149
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-01-15T09:09:59+00:00

The French Revolutionist Miss Crawley is in her mature years highly materialist in her emulation of France, firmly committed to an aristocracy of blood, and hence not likely to bring about radical change. Becky herself presents far more of a threat to the establishment by claiming nobility of birth when it suits her (to the Crawleys she poses as of aristocratic emigre stock), but being essentially classless: she herself represents liberty and equality.

But liberty and equality here must be qualified as referring to opportunity. The second reason for Becky’s success is that she understands money—and here the novel is less clearly historical, but rather reminiscent of both Britain and France in the period of the July Monarchy, already historicized by Blanc and others as the age of commerce. Becky is a social threat because she is moving in a world where traditional aristocracy is becoming secondary to money—where a mixed-race Miss Swartz, with the wealth of West Indian estates, can marry a Scottish nobleman, and where Becky and her husband can live “on nothing a year,” provided that they present the appearance of possessing wealth.

Becky and Rawdon can live well “on nothing a year” because they are part of a society that grants credit to those that it believes to be creditworthy, and Becky is quite capable of manipulating her self-presentation to show that she is. Becky is initially presented as a speculator; her first gamble is for Jos Sedley’s Indian riches, and this she loses; her investment of self in a marriage with Rawdon Crawley also fails to earn interest as rapidly as she anticipates. Towards the end of the book she is literally a gambler, playing the gaming tables in her true milieu, cosmopolitan Europe.

Becky’s earlier speculations, however, may be a means of making her attractive to an age fascinated by the possibility of investment. Obviously, the novel makes an association between gambling and vice. Yet gambling is a form of speculation that also contributes to mobility between classes, and may even have a bearing on international politics. For example, at Gaunt House in the late eighteenth century:

Egalite Orleans roasted partridges on the night when he and the Marquis of Steyne won a hundred thousand from a great personage at ombre. Half of the money went to the French Revolution, half to purchase Lord Gaunt’s Marquisate and Garter. ... (Vanity Fair, pp. 545-546)

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