Material Ambitions by Rebecca Richardson;

Author:Rebecca Richardson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Undercutting and Belittling Ambition in Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair

Barry Lyndon and Becky Sharp stand out as unscrupulously ambitious characters in Thackeray’s work—and characters that highlight how Thackeray imagined ambition across genders. In comparing these characters, I’m participating in a long-standing interest in tracing Becky’s character type and structural role across Thackeray’s writing. For example, John Carey has argued that “Amelia and Becky, the good and evil angels of Vanity Fair, were originally the same person” in Ravenswing, the character of Morgiana Crump. Carey sees little of Becky Sharp in the later novels, instead arguing that “not until the end of his career do we get a faint reflection of Becky in Elizabeth Prior, the ballet-dancer turned governess of Lovel the Widower.”33 Meanwhile, Katharine Rogers has explored Thackeray’s tendency to include opposing female types—like Becky and Amelia Sedley—across his novels.34 Such readings are suggestive for thinking about how Thackeray uses these ambitious character types and how he stuffs these energies into a single character or splits them up and counterbalances them across a character system. By limiting the field of comparison to female characters, these arguments have neglected to compare Becky Sharp to Thackeray’s other ambitious upstarts and thus to the ways ambition is differently gendered and embodied. Indeed, Rogers draws attention to this fact in a footnote: “Barry Lyndon and Denis Duval have been omitted from this discussion of Thackeray’s novels because neither has important female characters: Barry Lyndon does not really have a heroine.”35 But comparing these characters across gendered lines suggests how Thackeray uses different subject positions to imagine ambition and its tendency to manifest in competitive or even violent self-seeking.

On the surface, Thackeray’s two novels about ambitious upstarts do indeed appear irreconcilably different. Barry Lyndon of course showcases a male character’s voice, it is in first person rather than third, and it is only a fourth the length of Vanity Fair. Although we might assume that Barry’s and Becky’s paths will take disparate courses according to their genders, their narratives parallel one another in significant ways. Both novels are set in the past during Continental wars, and both feature ambitious characters that begin life poor and under the care of an opposite-sex parent. Both characters thus capitalize on the interest and narrative potential of an underdog.36 Compounding this, they are “othered” via their nationality (Becky’s mother is French, Barry is Irish) even as they attempt to reimagine their heritage (none too accurately) as springing from aristocratic connections. Across their respective novels, both rise through advantageous marriages, engage in potentially or outright criminal acts to pursue money and power—usually by taking it from others—and subsequently fall from grace. These differences and similarities across the two novels suggest Thackeray’s interest in tracing the forms that ambition can take when embodied in men or women, and what these forms can do in the space of a longer or shorter novel, as narrated from different perspectives. Taken together, these novels suggest how the socioeconomic world, with its many pursuits of fortune and fashion, function like zero-sum games, with scarce titles and inheritances to go around.

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