Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world?
Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—come, children, let us
shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
So ends Thackeray’s 1847-8 Vanity Fair, a novel that defies our
desire for happy endings and near resolutions. When we think about novels we
may divide them into two categories, those with tear-jerking endings and those
with endings that satisfy in their neatness in a way that is rarely replicable
in real life. Or we may reject unhappy endings entirely and agree with Oscar
Wilde’s joke: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad
unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’
![]() |
The final illustration in Vanity Fair |
Yet, after nearly 900 pages,
Thackeray’s ending doesn’t subscribe to either of these models. As in many
Victorian novels, we are presented
with a picture of domestic serenity after preceding drama—the Dobbins and
Crawleys live side by side with hope of further marriage ties between the
younger generations. But the complete happiness we have longed for with
readerly naivety is not forthcoming. Rebecca will not be punished, Amelia will
remain insipid, even when freed from the tyranny of her dead husband’s memory,
and the fair will play on, with its falsehoods and frivolities, even if we
abandon the particular characters we have toyed with.
Nowhere is this dissatisfaction
more obvious than when in comes to Dobbin. Vanity
Fair is ‘a novel without a hero’ but the Major has all the qualities we
might associate with such a character. He is a military man of outstanding
morals, a loyal lover and a just friend. He protects Amelia for years without
hope of her reciprocating his feelings and the culmination of their
relationship in a marriage (and child) is the ending we are encouraged to look
forward to.
The ending is there, the marriage
comes to pass and the child is forthcoming so why isn’t this resolution as
happy as we had hoped? Dobbin’s kindness, constancy and frequent romantic
gestures do not win his bride. Instead he can only woo Amelia when he
recognises the folly of wanting her at all:
“Have I not learned in that time to read
all your feelings and look into your thoughts? I know what your heart is
capable of: it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a fancy, but
it can't feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate with, and such as I
would have won from a woman more generous than you. No, you are not worthy of
the love which I have devoted to you. I knew all along that the prize I had set
my life on was not worth the winning; that I was a fool, with fond fancies,
too, bartering away my all of truth and ardour against your little feeble
remnant of love.”
Our desire for a
happy ending is shown to be as delusional as Dobbin’s unrequited love. Instead
of the passionate climax we have hoped for we are given a marriage based on the
submission of one party and the tolerance of the other. Dobbin loves the child
(little Janey) now more than anyone (presumably Amelia included) and, even
then, she is only slightly more important to him than a history book.
Ending such a
sweeping novel is hard, and, with masterful skill, Thackeray chooses to draw
attention to the device’s artificiality while wrapping up all loose ends. If
you’re writing an ending it might be worth thinking outside the binary of
happy/sad and interrogating the possibilities of the unsatisfactory ending.
After all, it’s always good to leave your readers wanting more…
What would you like
to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
No comments:
Post a Comment