Vanity Fair and Syon Park




I did promise I'd discuss Vanity Fair and here I am. The ITV series starring Olivia Cooke is underway and so far it seems to have captured rather well Rebecca Sharp who is a very complex character. Will she continue to be likeable, as the series unfolds? Thackeray was always ambivalent about her.
I do not regard Becky Sharp as a feminist character, it is highly incongruous to think of her as a feminist, though she can be and has been  read in a feminist key. She was created by a 19th century man as a comic character, Thackeray envisioned her as an anti-hero, the female equivalent of Barry Lyndon, the subject of another one of his novels. She is mostly a type, an adventuress, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman and a  manipulator.  Thackeray even hints at her as a possible murderess, just as we are never quite sure of her adultery.  No character is ever black and white, in Vanity Fair. Thackeray loves his Becky and makes her perform an  uncharacteristic act of unselfishness, when she finally brings together Dobbin and Amelia by revealing George Osborne's shallowness.
 Talking of ambivalence, I too am somewhat ambivalent about newer interpretations of Becky as a strong role model, a self made woman who uses what in the 19th century was the only way women would advance: marriage, sex and manipulation. Becky is lively and highly motivated, intelligent, indeed, sharp, as she has been aptly named, but terribly  vain too, cruel and abusive - her behaviour to her son is abominable. She is not the kind of woman one would really like to have as a friend, though in her own way she loves Amelia with whom she has been friends from their schooldays. Amelia is her opposite,   the Victorian  'angel of the house' and a rather boring little woman, pathologically obsessed with her husband George Osborne, a cad, whom she worships and who dies early on in the novel, one of the thousands who fell  at the battle of Waterloo.



The film Vanity Fair by Mira Nair (2004) completely reinvented Becky, glossing over her dislike for her son, turning her into a much softer version of herself and giving a happy ending to the story - Becky teams up with  Joseph Sedley, Amelia's rich brother,  and goes to India, which is not what happens in the novel at all, where she indeed teams up with Joseph but in Belgium and eats up his fortune and possibly has a hand in speeding up his death, from which she benefits financially.
Nair magnified all references to India that are present in the novel, giving it a postcolonial and postfeminist slant. Reese Witherspoon who starred in the  film was a delightful Becky, with a hint  of southern belle à la Scarlett O'Hara, though her diction was impeccably English, thanks to her coach.
Olivia Cooke  is lively and brings out Becky's sexiness. She is a girl who wants to have fun. Rawdon, her gambling aristocratic husband comes across, in Nair's film, and also in the ITV series,  as less stupid than what Thackeray makes him out to be, a little more articulate and feeling.
 Thackeray's novel is a penetrating and unrelenting satire of his contemporary Victorian society. With due changes, it is still relevant today, as class, appearances and social climbing  have not ceased to  matter, only we do it in a different way.  Thackeray tells us “This is Vanity Fair. A world where everyone is striving for what is not worth having.” And this is , essentially, the enduring message of the book and what makes it  relevant.

The Great Conservatory at Syon Park where much of the ITV/Amazon  series was filmed. Image from Syon Park website

I have re-read this classic novel and am eagerly watching the series.  One of the highlights of the series for me was to discover Syon Park,  where much of the filming has taken place. It's also wonderful to walk around Russell Square, Warren Street, and other places mentioned in the novel and feel somewhat transported back in time.
Syon Park is really worth a visit and I plan to go at the weekend.



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