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"Becky Sharp's Children": Criminal Heroines in Vanity Fair and the Sensation Novels of the 1860s by Alexandra Doeben Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2009 © Copyright by Alexandra Doeben, 2009 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et !•! 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IV TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 THE REALISM OF VANITYFAIR 1 1.2 SENSATION FICTION 6 CHAPTER 2: PERFORMING IDEAL FEMININITY: BECKY SHARP AND LUCY AUDLEY 15 2.1 NARRATORS 16 2.2 CLASS 22 2.3 BEAUTY 25 2.4 PERFORMING THE ROLES OF SINGLE WOMEN 29 2.5 PERFORMING THE ROLES OF WIVES AND MOTHERS 35 CHAPTER 3: "UNNATURAL HEROINES" : BECKY SHARP AND AURORA FLOYD 43 3.1 CLAIMING REALISM 44 3.2 NOVELS AND EDUCATION 46 3.3 "UNNATURALHEROINES" 49 3.4 ABSENT MOTHERS .57 3.5 AMELIA SEDLEY AND LUCY FLOYD 63 CHAPTER 4: CRIMINAL FEMININITY: BECKY SHARP AND LYDIA GWTLT 72 4.1 LETTERS AND DIARIES 73 4.2 GOVERNESSES 78 4.3 FEMININITY AND CRIME 88 V CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 98 BIBLIOGRAPHY 104 VI ABSTRACT This thesis challenges genre definitions of realism and sensationalism established by nineteenth-century critics and maintained throughout the 20th century. When sensation fiction emerged as a literary genre in the 1860s, critics established realism as thematically and aesthetically superior to sensationalism, as realist novels dealt with social and moral "truths." Anxieties surrounding the genre of sensationalism were rooted in the sensation novel's immense commercial success, its unconventional depictions of femininity, and its inability to provide its readers with eligible role models. Strict distinctions between realism and sensationalism emerge to be part of elaborate Victorian ideologies that supported the assumed stability of Victorian culture. An analysis of Thackeray's realist Vanity Fair in conjunction with Braddon's sensational Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora Floyd and Collins's sensational Armadale challenges firmly established generic boundaries and points to the cultural significance of Victorian genre definitions and gender ideologies. VII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Rohan Maitzen, for making this project so rewarding. I could not have completed my thesis without her guidance, support, and encouragement. I am sincerely grateful for the helpful suggestions and advice of my second and third readers, Dr. Marjorie Stone and Dr. David McNeil. Special thanks to Mary Beth Maclsaac for all her kind help throughout the year. VIII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This thesis challenges genre definitions of realism and sensationalism established by nineteenth-century critics and maintained throughout the 20 century. When sensation fiction emerged as a literary genre in the 1860s, critics soon established realism as thematically and aesthetically superior to sensationalism; they asserted that realist novels dealt with social and moral "truth[s]" (Bronte 51) and depicted society and characters according to "nature" (Masson 15) and "experience" (Eliot, qtd. in David 3). However, my thesis demonstrates that the plot-based, exaggerated, and "unnatural" stories and characters—especially heroines— of sensation novels express social and cultural "truths" equally well or even better than realist novels. Analysing Thackeray's realist novel Vanity Fair in conjunction with Mary Elizabeth Braddon's and Wilkie Collins's sensation novels and considering the sensation heroines of the 1860s as "Becky Sharp's children" (Mitchell76) calls generic boundaries into question and exposes the cultural anxieties that determined Victorian genre definitions and gender ideologies. 1.1 THE REALISM OF VANITY FAIR When Vanity Fair was serialized from January 1847 to July 1848, the novel was generally received positively by contemporary critics and readers. In response to Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronte writes: "The more I read of Thackeray's works the more certain I am that he stands alone—alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling, [...] alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control" (51). George Henry 1 Lewes states that "knowledge of life, good humoured satire, penetration into motive, power of characterization, and great truthfulness are qualities in fiction as rare as they are admirable; and no work that has been published for many years past can claim these qualities so largely as 'Vanity Fair'" (758). Critics were pleased with Thackeray's "unapproachable quickness, fineness, and width of observation on social habits and characteristics, a memory the most delicate, and a perfectly amazing power of vividly reproducing his experience" (Roscoe 178). It was primarily Thackeray's "truthfulness" and "reproduction of experience," then, that made critics and readers regard him as a "unique" "genius" (Bronte 751). Nineteenth-century reviews indicate that it was this truthfulness, together with a literary reproduction of what was "natural," that defined literary realism. In his 1851 review of Dickens and Thackeray David Masson writes that "in the real style of art, the aim is to produce pictures that shall impress by their close and truthful resemblance to something or other in real nature or life" (15). Similarly, George Eliot, the "doyenne of realism" (Pykett "Sensation and the Fantastic" 192) explicitly articulates the principles of realist aesthetics in Adam Bede, when she writes that it is her goal to "give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind [...] I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath" (qtd. in David 3, omission in original). Kenneth Graham argues that "the major theme running through George Eliot's comments on her art is the necessity to avoid exaggeration, conventionality, and all literary affectation" (20). Furthermore, Graham establishes Trollope as "the High Priest of Victorian realism" and states that "'realistic,' 'truthful,' 2 and 'natural' are [Trollope's] favourite words of commendation; ordinary human nature is always held up as the lodestar of the novelist" (21). Like Eliot and Trollope, Henry James demands an "air of reality" from fiction. For him, "solidity of specification" is "the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit in which all its other merits [...] helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life" (qtd. in David 3, omission in original). George Levine points out that this demand for an "illusion of life" was reinforced (but also complicated) by the nineteenth-century assumption that realist writers, as opposed to authors of romance and melodrama, dealt with '"things as they are' rather than as [they] 'would like them to be for [their] own convenience'" (Levine "Realism