Becky Sharp: The Anti-Heroine of Vanity Fair

Thackeray subtitled Vanity Fair ‘A Novel without a Hero’ — and then gave it one of the great anti-heroines in all of fiction. Becky Sharp is poor, clever, charming, and utterly without scruple, and she is far more alive than any virtuous character in the book. We are not supposed to admire her. We cannot help it.

Born with nothing in a society that rewards only birth and money, Becky decides to climb, and the novel is the dazzling, appalling spectacle of her climb: the flattery, the lies, the men used and discarded, the debts left behind. Thackeray’s genius is to make us complicit — to let us enjoy her wit and daring so much that we half-cheer the schemes we know are ruining decent people. Beside her, the good and gentle Amelia can seem merely dull, and that discomfort is exactly the point.

Because Vanity Fair is a satire on a whole society, not on one adventuress. Becky only plays the game everyone is playing; she is just better at it, and honest with herself about the rules. Thackeray holds up a mirror to a world that worships money and status and then is scandalized by the woman who pursues them nakedly. She is the truth the drawing-room will not admit.

Read her beside the economics of Austen.

Read Vanity Fair — the Erato Press edition →