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Kiss Me, Stupid: Sophistication, Sexuality, and "Vanity Fair"

1996; Duke University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1345860

1945-8509

Joseph Litvak,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

At the end of Vanity Fair (1847-48), Becky Sharp hires solicitors to challenge the insurance company that, suspecting her of having killed Jos Sedley for his life insurance policy, refuses payment of it. Since the challenge succeeds, we are led to conclude that Becky not only gets away with murder, but profits from it. The fact, however, that her solicitors are Messrs Burke, Thurtell, & Hayes (796)the names of three notorious murderers--doesn't just make Becky look even guiltier: it signals the murderousness of the law itself, its implication in the violence it seeks, if not to punish, then to excuse or deny. But if the law's violence thus gets figured as a killing literality, the end of the novel merely thematizes the subtler brutality of a law that pervades, even constitutes, Vanity Fair as a whole: the brutality that, while seeming to assume the mitigating disguise of sophistication, more fundamentally is sophistication, the fatal sophistication of the novel's narrator, the man about town whose famous irony extends an iron fist all the more powerful for being inseparable from the velvet glove that covers it. That sartorial image suggests the mode in which Thackeray's narrative violence most tellingly operates: the mode, in fact, of la mode. Enforcing the law of sophistication with a vengeance, the Thackerayan narrator reminds us that the most sadistic of the police, if not the most abusive, are the fashion police, those arbiters of taste whose profit, that is, whose cultural authority, doesn't come without a certain risk of its own: the risk of a distinctly problematic relation to the norms of middle-class heterosexual masculinity. Is there something inherently gay about the role of arbiter of taste? Without unpacking the question's numerous historical and theoretical implications, and without addressing the more local issue of Thackeray's sexuality, I would simply point out that he was obviously not gay-identified and-as my second