Shut Up the Box and the Puppets
A Review of Mira Nair’s Film, Vanity Fair
Some people like to read the book before they see the movie, but I prefer the opposite. After I’ve read a book, especially a masterpiece such as William Thackeray’s 1848 novel, Vanity Fair, I always have the feeling that everything in the film version is rushed and chopped to pieces. Thackeray’s huge novel, covering 30 years, is difficult to condense into two hours. After having read the novel, one is always aware of what is missing in the movie.
Mira Nair’s film version of Vanity Fair has the beautiful sets and costumes that we have come to expect from such period pieces. In this film we see the opulence of the rich in 19th century England along with the squalor of Victorian poverty. Seeing something of the foul atmosphere that the lower classes had to endure, helps us to understand why a clever young woman such as Becky Sharp, played by Reese Witherspoon, would try anything to escape her station in life and become a social climber, or “mountaineer” as one character describes her.
Thackeray’s novel was a satire designed to show the hypocrisy, foibles, and cruelty of the rich and aristocratic. Thackeray personifies the rich as “Dives”(205), the traditional name given to that wealthy person in Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man. At one point, Thackeray’s narrator sermonizes: …do you ever step down from your prosperity, and wash the feet of these poor wearied beggars? The very thought of them is odious and low. ‘There must be classes—there must be rich and poor,’ Dives says, smacking his claret—(it is well if he even sends the broken meat out to Lazarus sitting under the window). Very true; but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is—that lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen, and sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.” (662)
Yet, it is this world of Vanity Fair, that the main character, Rebecca Sharp, desires to enter at all costs. Becky is determined to break into this world despite her impoverished origins. While we may understand her zeal, we cannot countenance her methods. For the narrator of Vanity Fair, Rebecca Sharp is a dangerous woman. Miss Pinkerton, Rebecca’s school mistress thought of her as “this rebel, this monster, this serpent, this firebrand” (52). The analogy of monster and serpent is used frequently to describe Becky. She is also called Delilah (204), and truly, she emasculates her Samson. She is a “dauntless worldling” (365), a “wretched woman” (620), a “hardened little reprobate” (763), “the little devil” (766), “the little Circe” (767). Becky’s hypocrisy abounds as she will pretend concern for her immortal soul if she might profit monetarily by such a show around the wealthy religious (491). While in the film version, we may be left wondering if Becky did, in actuality, care for her husband, Rawdon, the book leaves us in no doubt. When they are separated, we read, “Indeed, she did not miss him or anybody. She looked upon him as her errand-man and humble slave. He might be ever so depressed or sulky, and she did not mark his demeanour, or only treated it with a sneer. She was busy thinking about her position, or her pleasures, or her advancement in society” (605).
One of the most common metaphors used in Victorian art and literature to describe the dangerous woman is that of the siren. Thackeray’s narrator makes abundant use of this analogy throughout the novel to described Becky Sharp. For example:
In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tale above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? When, however, the siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour lost to look into it ever so curiously. They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twangling their harps and combing their hair, and sing, and beckon to you to come hold the looking glass; but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, reveling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims. (738)
The film calls frequent attention to Becky’s singing. It is through her singing that she lures men to her, and even wins women to her side. In Nair’s film, perhaps by design, we love Becky’s singing just as those foolish sailors who were lured to their deaths by other sirens. Thackeray’s Becky feeds on men, and leaves nothing but their bones. Thackeray leaves a strong hint in the novel that Becky murdered Joseph Sedley for his insurance money. The ending of this film does not leave us with that impression of what Becky has in store for Jos.
Some critics have maligned this film as not being vicious enough in its satire. While Reese Witherspoon gives an admirable performance in her role as Becky Sharp, the script makes her a little nicer than Thackeray’s Becky. Granted, Witherspoon’s Rebecca Sharp is a conniving, hard-hearted woman, but in Nair’s film she comes across almost affable, almost a failed hero to be pitied. The subtitle of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is: A Novel without a Hero. Truly, there are no heroes or heroines in his book. All of the characters are held up as flawed, foolish, and selfish. One of the major criticisms of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair when it was first published was that the characters had no good qualities mixed in with the bad. Most of the characters in this new film version come across as pretty likeable—proud, silly, and manipulative, but in the long run, not too bad. It does seem to me that the novel is more of a biting satire than this film. Nair’s film is funny, but it doesn’t carry the heavy irony of Thackeray’s work.
The major missing piece of this film version of Vanity Fair is Thackeray’s narrator, who is a character as important as any other in the novel. Vanity Fair’s narrator preaches, moralizes, spoofs, and lampoons. The reader is never quite sure what to make of this narrator. Does he have a true, moral message he is trying to convey, or does Thackeray hold up even the moralizing and preaching for ridicule as well?
The very title, Vanity Fair, implies a moral message: the temptations of the world (Vanity Fair) lure us to disaster. The title is taken from that section of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian and Faithful journey through the town of Vanity Fair, described as a fair wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity… therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.
Here are to be seen too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false swearers, and that of a blood-red color. (127)
Almost every item on this list of merchandise in Vanity Fair is sought after by the characters of Thackeray’s work. The names of the jurymen in Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, Mr. Blind-man, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable, are echoed in Thackeray’s character names, such as: Pitt Crawley, Mungo Binkie, Lord Binkie, Old Miss Toady, Mrs. Briefless, Mr. Hammerdown, Mr. Stubble, Ensign Spooney, Lady Blanche Thistlewood, and Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone, Thackeray seems to share Bunyan’s view of his own 19th century Vanity Fair: “But my kind reader will please to remember that this history has ‘Vanity Fair’ for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions” (117). One of the purposes of Thackeray’s novel is to show that the people who have rank and position are the least qualified to hold those places of adulation and authority. Describing Sir Pitt Crawley, he writes:
“Vanity Fair—Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging; who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue. (123)
It is this kind of piercing satire that we never quite get from this new film version.
Nair’s film does an excellent job of portraying loveless marriages, echoing Thackeray’s narrator’s opinion that love itself is a mask for greed. For Thackeray’s narrator, brotherly love and romantic love are actually pretenses for the love of money: “These money transactions—these speculations in life and death—these battles for reversionary spoil—make brothers very loving towards each other in Vanity Fair. I, for my part, have known a five-pound note to interpose and knock up a half-century’s attachment between two brethren; and can’t but admire, as I think what a fine and durable thing Love is among worldly people” (132). The narrator’s heavy irony shows that love among the rich lasts as long as there is a possibility of gaining or inheriting money by such love. Nair’s film succeeds in presenting the shallow forms of love in Vanity Fair, especially those involving the displays of affection toward those who are about to die in order that these “affectionate people” might inherit a fortune. For Thackeray’s narrator, “nobody does anything for nothing” (176). “Love” lives or dies according to the possession or lack of money:
Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your dear friend’s of ten years back—your dear friend whom you hate now. Look at a file of your sister’s! how you clung to each other till you quarreled about the twenty-pound legacy! Get down the round-hand scrawls of your son who has half broken your heart with selfish undutifulness since; or a parcel of your own, breathing endless ardour and love eternal, which were sent back by your mistress when she married the Nabob—your mistresss for whom you now care no more than for Queen Elizabeth. Vows, love, pomises, confidences, gratitude, how queerly they read after a while! There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written document (except receipted tradesmen’s bills) after a certain brief and proper interval. Those quacks and misanthropes who advertise indelible Japan ink should be made to perish along with their wicked discoveries. The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and the left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else. (231)
In Vanity Fair, all love is selfish. The narrator observes: “Which of us is there can tell how much vanity lurks in our warmest regard for others, and how selfish our love is?” (421).
The last paragraph of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair begins, “Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum!” which is the Latin translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” In many ways, Thackeray’s narrator resembles the cynicism of Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes. Like Solomon, Thackeray’s narrator believes that those things which we pursue so ardently, do not last long, not even love and friendship. After Rawdon Crawley marries Becky, the narrator remarks that he no longer went to the places where he used to drink and gamble, but he was not missed: “They asked about him once or twice at his clubs, but did not miss him much; in those booths of Vanity Fair people seldom do miss each other” (211). In another section of the novel, the narrator remarks, “…in this vast town one has not the time to go and seek one’s friends; if they drop out of the rank they disappear, and we march on without them. Who is ever missed in Vanity Fair?” (712). As Solomon observed in Ecclesiastes, the dead are soon forgotten. When Pitt Crawley dies, the narrator of Vanity Fair remarks, “Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth, have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled. And so Sir Pitt was forgotten—like the kindest and best of us—only a few weeks sooner” (493). Even Becky comes to realize that her ambitious life has led to a kind of emptiness:
She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely, and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to—have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs? The French maid found her in this position—sitting in the midst of her miserable ruins with clasped hands and dry eyes…. All her lies and her schemes, all her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this bankruptcy. (622)
As far as characters within the story, this cynicism toward society is displayed most often by Lord Steyne, played by Gabriel Byrne in the film version. Gabriel Byrne, while probably too handsome to be Thackeray’s Lord Steyne, does a great job of playing the part of a world-weary Solomon type. Lord Steyne is admired by Becky as having everything that anyone could want, but he is neither happy nor content:
So there was splendour and wealth, but no great happiness perchance, behind the tall carved portals of Gaunt House with its smoky coronets and ciphers. The feats there were of the grandest in London, but there was not over-much content therewith, except among the guest who sate at my lord’s table. Had he not been so great a Prince very few possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very great personages are looked at indulgently. (552)
Lord Steyne warns Becky, “Well,…you are bent on becoming a fine lady. You pester my poor old life out to get you into the world. You won’t be able to hold your own there, you silly little fool…. You’ve got no money, and you want to compete with those who have…. All women are alike. Everybody is striving what is not worth the having!” (562-3). Of course, Solomon’s message in Ecclesiastes is, that after bitter personal experience, he and the rest of world pursue “vanity,” “things of no value.”
As I pointed out earlier, even during the narrator’s sermonizing, it is difficult to distinguish sincerity from satire. One of the long narrative lectures on death could have been delivered by a conservative, evangelical clergyman:
But, without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and the gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball-triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success of the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view., about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This dear friends and companions, is my amiable object—to walk you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private. (229)
Yet, we are not sure how to take this moralizing about the emptiness of Vanity Fair. The narrator is so cynical, we don’t know when we can trust his sermonic asides. Imagine David Letterman delivering a sermon. We are so used to his cynicism, if he preached a sermon, we would think, “He’s pulling our leg even now.”
Vanity Fair does seem to be a sermon against the vanities of the world, but we also find that the narrator is sometimes sympathetic toward those who live in Vanity Fair and toward those who want to be a part of it:
It is all vanity to be sure: but who will not own to liking a little of it? I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef? That is a vanity; but may every man who reads this have a wholesome portion of it through life, I beg: aye, though my readers were five hundred thousand. Sit down, gentlemen, and fall to, with a good hearty appetite; the fat, the lean, the gravy, the horseradish as you like it—don’t spare it. Another glass of wine, Jones, my boy—a little bit of the Sunday side. Yet, let us eat our fill of the vain thing, and be thankful therefor. And let us make the best of Becky’s aristocratic pleasures likewise—for these too, like all other mortal delights, were but transitory. (584)
Again, we are reminded of Solomon who said, “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his laboour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God…. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou goest” (Eccl. 2:24; 9:10-1). Thackeray and Solomon appear to be saying that though these things may be transitory, let us enjoy them while we can.
So, what was Vanity Fair designed to be? Was it a secular sermon to be taken seriously in all its parts? The narrator, at times, seems to rant and rave against Vanity Fair, and then, admit that there are pleasures in Vanity Fair which we should not scorn altogether.
Perhaps the theme of Vanity Fair could be described best by the words of the narrator as Miss Crawley is about to die: “The last scene of her dismal Vanity Fair comedy was fast approaching.” Vanity Fair was designed to be a comedy, but it is a dismal comedy. It is here where I think the film fails most. Thackeray calls his work a “comic history” (575). Nair’s film portrays the comic aspect, but we don’t see Thackeray’s dismal viewpoint. Gabriel Byrne’s Lord Steyne says at one point, “The chief benefit of being born into society is one learns early what a tawdry puppet play it is.” Thackeray’s novel ends with the words, “Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out” (797). Thackeray’s dismal comic history is an account of how the people of Vanity Fair are puppets, manipulated by greed, selfishness, and the incompetent rulers and trend-setters of a decadent society. Mira Nair’s film lacks that quality of cynicism that should make us despise Vanity Fair, and at the same time, cause us to laugh at ourselves for being so foolish as to want to be a part of it.
Works Cited
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1848. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Copyright © 2004 by Stephan R. Toms
