Vanity Fair

On my last visit to London, I took a walking tour of Kensington. The guide stopped us in front of a house and told us that it was the location where William Makepeace Thackeray wrote the greatest book in the English language: Vanity Fair.

To an unfortunately large percentage of today's youth, the words Vanity Fair probably mean nothing more than a fashion magazine. But once upon a time, it was THE novel about female connivance.

Becky Sharp rises and falls through society and fortune powered by nothing more than her own ability to manipulate people and circumstances. Her name has become a byword for the kind of woman we don't want to leave our men alone with. She was Scarlet O'Hara before there was Scarlet O'Hara. And no soap opera or CW teen drama is complete without at least one character who operates in the Becky Sharp school of getting what you want.

The full title of the book is Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. And the subtitle, which doesn't even appear on most modern editions, proves true in more than one way. It is a novel without a hero in the sense that the character with which the story is most concerned, and also most remembered by readers, is a woman. It is without a hero in the sense that Becky is not likable enough to be considered the hero of the story. And it is heroless because there are entire chapters where we don't see Becky at all. The focus shifts to her 'friend' Amelia and on to other characters, giving a full description of the experiences of many interconnected people during the years leading up to and winding down from the Battle of Waterloo.

In so many ways, Thackeray's masterpiece seems modern. Becky seems made for something like Gossip Girl, or even a reality show. And the practice of following multiple characters is popular these days, as in the movie Crash or the book A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks. In 2004 Resse Witherspoon starred in a film version of Vanity Fair that turned Becky into a heroine. She becomes less calculating and controlling in the film and is instead a high-spirited girl who is just trying to get along on very little. She is the victim of circumstance rather than the mistress of it. The book which, at the the time of its publication, shocked people with its sarcastic take on society and depiction of Becky's moral depravity, had to be toned down for its last film adaptation. A version truer to the actual story would have left us too disgusted with Becky and possibly ourselves.