In continental Europe, in the work of Gustave Flaubert, for example, as in L’EDUCATION SENTIMENTALE, 1848 is patently hard to ignore. In America one experiences 1848’s hulking presence, covert and overt, as a kind lietmotif in Herman Melville’s THE PIAZZA TALES—from the operatic mutiny staged aboard the San Dominick in “Benito Cereno,” to the specific historical reference in the title story, “It was not long after 1848, and, somehow, about that time, all round the world these kings, they had the casting vote, and voted for themselves.”

For me, what is particularly interesting about this date, and the events it summarizes, apart from its decidedly historical or social ramifications as reflected in the literature of the period, is that it marks at once the apex and the beginning of the decline of literary realism.

This is not a new idea for anyone familiar with the theories of George Lukács. Within a few short years around 1848, we see published such “realistic” novels as WUTHERING HEIGHTS, DOMBEY AND SON and MARY BARTON, not to mention a proliferation of “sociological” studies in the vein of Friedrich Engels’ CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND. At the same time, the period surrounding 1848 gives rise to THE PIAZZA TALES and MADAME BOVARY, works which signal the deterioration of realism while pointing forward to a literature that will question and finally shatter realism’s basic premise, put so wonderfully by Stendhal, that the novel should be like a faithful mirror traveling along a road.

When I use the term “realism,” I mean to imply an intentionality (problematic as the term may be) to create fiction capable of mirroring reality, establishing referentiality, and conveying to the reader an undeniable sense of the “real” world. Realism is a fiction in which signifier and signified are supposed to exist in one-to-one relationship, a happy marriage of symbol and thing. Pure realism would be excessively naïve; fortunately, literature is a mutt, bred of many inconsistencies and outright paradoxes, and such a thing as “pure realism” exists only as a critically useful concept.

Roland Barthes has convincingly argued that “what we call ‘real’ (in the theory of the realistic text) is never more than a code of representation ... it is never a code of execution.” Even Stendhal, that paragon of realism, often dashes to bits our willing suspension of disbelief. In LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, for example, in one of several passages that sound more like TRISTRAM SHANDY than the work of a realist, Stendhal writes, “Ici l’auteur eût voulu placer une page de points. Cela aura mauvaise grâce, dit l’éditeur.”

Among the historical factors impacting the development of the English novel around 1848 include, but are not necessarily limited to: the revolutionary events in France; the failure of Chartism at home; the crystallization of England as the quintessence of capitalist culture; the growth of divided urban centers as a result of capitalist economics and policies; and the proliferation of photography as a means of apprehending “reality” and documenting “history.” Of these influences on the novel, the most interesting, and in a formalist sense the most convincing, is the last: the impact of photography.

In France this abrupt cultural dependence on photographic documentation, as well as its mirroring in the novel—which becomes increasingly “realistic,” at least in that disillusioned form of romanticism called naturalism—is perhaps easier to understand than in England. That during the Second Empire a Félix Nadar should desire to capture on film the Paris that soon will not be after Haussmann’s sweeping changes, or that a Victor Hugo should undertake a similar mission in prose, seems a rather natural human response to change.

And yet, clear as history may at times seem from our perspective, looking back, we are left with a fundamental problematic concerning the enmeshed triangle photography-literature-history: does the “realist” novel, that supple mime, mimic photography, or vice versa? Did realism somehow come about as a result of the development of photographic technology, or was that very technological development somehow a product of the increasing demands of a culture devoted to realism?

I propose that this question is essentially unanswerable. I tend to think of photography and literary realism—which were culturally prepared for, technologically and aesthetically speaking—as being born out of a particularly human need to arrest change in the face of the unprecedented dynamism of industrialism, revolution, colonialism and urbanization that transformed Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Yet, from the opposite side of the looking glass, that transformation itself might be seen as engendering new modes of representation, aesthetic as well as technological, leaving out the human element altogether.

The sudden, irresistible obsession for turning objects into their visible traces. Why the explosion of pictorialism in England? And why, although visual culture remains the rage in the form of photography throughout the Nineteenth Century, does the novel, immediately on establishing itself as a kind of “visual” document through its presumed ability to convey a “picture” of reality, begin to question, however unconsciously at first, its status as “mirror”?

For Lukács as well, 1848 marks the decline (if not the end) of realism and the beginning of literary décadence. After this date, according to his theory, in contrast to the great historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac, European fiction increasingly conceals matters of utmost historical and political importance. Flaubert, in MADAME BOVARY, commits the first sin against society—followed by his disciple Emile Zola who succeeds in cementing literary decadence in the form of naturalism.

What Lukács understandably fails to remark—given the Marxist ideology underlying his theory—is that this famous “concealment” of history which begins with Flaubert, rather than signaling a turning away from history as such, might be thought of instead in terms of an epistemological shift away from the realist method of “knowing.” (That, in the work of Flaubert, who many consider a kind of proto-postmodernism, our ability to “know” anything is deeply problematized, is an issue I will not enter into here.) Realism is predicated on the notion that seeing is believing; the realist implicitly equates sight and knowledge. Eyewitness accounts are privileged alongside the omniscient narrator who sees and therefore “knows” all: think of Engels penetrating the depths of the city (much like Nadar, in Danteesque fashion, photographing the sewers of Paris) to reveal the literally shitty truths hidden there in his version of the “historical novel.” In short, at its apex, the realist novel considers itself—with or without justification, whether modeled on photography or not—to be on a par with photographic documentation.

This belief in the novel as camera will not die easily. Zola, for example, will insist on stretching the metaphor like a rubber band until it snaps in two and creates its own backlash. But unlike Lukács, unlike most literary historians, indeed, unlike Zola himself, I by no means think of naturalism as descending in linear fashion from Flaubert. (Nor did Flaubert, it should be remarked.) Nor do I consider naturalism the undisputed dominant aesthetic of the second half of the Nineteenth Century.

Alongside naturalism, we must consider such patently unnaturalistic works as Flaubert’s BOUVARD ET PECUCHET, Melville’s THE CONFIDENCE-MAN and Oscar Wilde’s THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, ironically titled given the picture’s virtually organic mutations that render it more like a surrealist movie than a realist portrait. Instead of casting naturalism as the principle literary movement after realism, I tend to think of naturalism as a kind of aberration, a frantic and would-be dictatorial last attempt to live up to realism’s “photographic” premise—whereas literary as well as historical currents were well on their way to carrying the novel into troubled seas fraught with epistemological uncertainties.

With the foregoing history as a backdrop, I would now like to consider William Makepeace Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR in relation to the changing face of realism around 1848. My theory is this: VANITY FAIR, “baggy monster” that it is, represents a kind of pontoon bridge connecting the epistemological self-assurance of realism with the more problematic (and in some ways, troubling) notions about knowing we find in decadent and early modernist literature. Put another way, VANITY FAIR is perhaps the most internally contradicted novel of the period—not only at the level of form, but equally self-negating at the level of content—and it is in these very contradictions that we can see the epistemological tides changing.

Formally, Thackeray’s ponderous tome is indeed a monster. Monster here should be taken in its etymological sense as something to be shown. For VANITY FAIR, from its preface forward, is presented as pure show or spectacle. Owing to its overarching and structurally essential theatrical metaphor, VANITY FAIR might be considered the greatest example of the “visual” novel in Europe. Thackeray clearly took Shakespeare at his word: in VANITY FAIR all the world is indeed a stage.

Although the novel’s narrator is at times coy concerning his viewpoint—as when he asks “who can tell you the real truth of the matter?”—there is never any real doubt as to the presumed omniscience of Thackeray’s Godlike Manager of the Performance. The narrator’s playful denial of omniscience, as elsewhere his admission of the same, serves to normalize and universalize his point of view—a point of view which, as the phrase implies, is implicitly and explicitly visual.

VANITY FAIR is a surface world glittering with hypocrisy and injustice and notoriously lacking in depth. Thackeray’s narrator views and recounts the characters’ actions and thoughts from a higher, superior, moralizing position. Nowhere in the text do we find presented an alternative perspective on the narrated events. The characters are repeatedly represented as marionettes dangling from authorial strings. Even Becky, arguably the most “full of life” of Thackeray’s creations, is referred to as the “famous little Becky Puppet.”

And yet, striking at the very heart of this apparent objectivity, destroying the realistic stage illusion, Thackeray’s narrator insists on stumbling onto the stage with a rhythm that soon becomes predictable. He does this in a variety of ways—the most common being first person commentary and the use of metafictional devices typically designed to jolt the reader into an awareness of the fictionality of the text at hand.

Punctuated with chapter titles such as “Quite a Sentimental Chapter” and “A Cynical Chapter,” and assertions such as “But ... good chance was denied to [Rawdon and Becky], doubtless in order that this story might be written, in which numbers of their wonderful adventures are narrated,” VANITY FAIR often reads more like TOM JONES than LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME. Toward the end of the novel Thackeray himself (or his persona) makes an appearance as a character in his own text and subtly comments on the novel he has been writing. Thus, through a continual disruption of the novel’s otherwise objective frames, the narrator attempts to blur the picture, problematize the notion of realist perspective, even as he strives to construct a text whose aim is specifically to scrutinize and critique contemporary “reality” with the precision and accuracy of a magnifying glass.

I recall Robert Alter making a similar observation about Thackeray in PARTIAL MAGIC. But whereas Alter sees this internal contradiction in VANITY FAIR as a metafictional failure almost purely at the level of form, I prefer to think of Thackeray, as I stated above, in terms of an epistemological shift that was accompanied—whether as cause or effect—by an aesthetic shift.

VANITY FAIR is by no means the only Victorian novel in which we witness such a perspectival shift. I invite the reader to consider the narrator Lockwood in WUTHERING HEIGHTS, a novel eminently more down-to-earth than VANITY FAIR. Though an eyewitness, seemingly possessing the realist’s privileged viewpoint, Lockwood nevertheless manages to misread, in certain crucial aspects, the very story he narrates. This is long before Henry James wrote using the technique of the “center of consciousness” and Joseph Conrad developed that much overworked type, the “unreliable narrator.”

At the level of form, VANITY FAIR effectively cancels itself out—the novel’s “metafictional” devices, occurring with almost mind-numbing regularity, instead of shattering the normative frame of reference, come to resonate as a purely stylistic device and are thereby subsumed into the otherwise “realist” narrative. At the same time, these devices water down the novel’s realism just enough to render its intended social critique conspicuously hollow and insincere.

At the level of content as well, as I will elaborate in my discussion of the problem of Thackeray’s “satire,” there is finally little that is truly radical about VANITY FAIR—and much that is profoundly conservative. Indeed, despite its veneer of liberalism and stylistic play, VANITY FAIR may very well be the most deeply conservative of all “classic” Nineteenth-century novels. (I use the terms conservative and liberal not in their political sense, but to denote a text’s adherence or lack thereof to its period’s aesthetic and in particular social ideologies.)

In other words, Thackeray was anything but a postmodernist (or a modernist, for that matter). If VANITY FAIR at times seems to pull in opposite directions due to internal stresses—or due to external forces, if you prefer—I sincerely doubt Thackeray was conscious of the contradictions flowing from his pen, the manner in which his ostensibly monolithic, bourgeois world view is subtly undermined by his means of representation, and vice versa.

By definition the satirist is a moralist. Thackeray is more of a moralist than most—he refers to himself time and time again, in fact, as just that—and yet when, after several months of laborious reading, we finish the last page of his masterpiece and replace the book on the shelf, do we have a very clear idea at all as to what the moral of the story was?

Thackeray giveth even as he taketh away. Having dissected his characters one by one, surgically exposed their hypocrisy or cruelty or just plain stupidity, we are left at the end of the novel without redemption, without hope, and certainly without a hero—unless it be the smugly moralizing narrator himself. Dobbin a hero? Despite Thackeray’s apparent sympathy for the Major, he everywhere suggests that Dobbin needs to get a life. The same might be said for Amelia, and with greater emphasis. Even Becky, the most convincing (and for that matter, likable) character in the novel, is ultimately brought low by the satirist’s swordlike pen.

I will return to Becky and her problematic status as both woman and “artist,” but for now I would like to focus on the question of satire. The Eighteenth Century elaborated two very different—indeed, diametrically opposed—conceptions of the genre. On the one hand, Henry Fielding wrote, “The satirist is to be regarded as our physician, not our enemy.” Jonathan Swift, however, defines the genre as “a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended by it.”

Opposing Fielding’s notion of satire as a social curative, Swift conceives of satire as basically an ineffectual form of moralizing. (The Dean’s pessimism, it should be noted, did not stop him from writing the Drapier’s Letters; nor did it keep the letters from successfully carrying out their worldly mission.) Where exactly does Thackeray fall on the Fielding-Swift satirical spectrum? Does the author of VANITY FAIR actually intend to improve the world by mocking it, or does he—complacent in his unattainable “normative” position—merely stick his tongue out at the world, as if to say, “I told you so”?

It should be obvious by now that the answer to both these questions is, “Yes.” Such is the nature of Thackeray’s narrative of paradoxes. It is as if the author of VANITY FAIR was suffering from split personalities. One personality clearly rings Fieldingesque in its avowed intention to lay bare English society’s evils so as to stir his readers’ sympathies and awareness. This is particularly the case when the narrator climbs on his soapbox and holds forth, as he so often does, on the fate of women: Lady Crawley’s “heart was dead long before her body. She had sold it to become Sir Pitt Crawley’s wife. Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair.” This example is one of dozens of such sermons in the novel. Yet, in contrast to the curative notion of satire, VANITY FAIR also abounds in more or less overt references to Swift’s definition—as the pervasive image of the harlequin (that representative denizen of Vanity Fair) contemplating himself in a cracked (and therefore distorting) mirror should leave little room to doubt.

In VANITY FAIR the troubling “oppositional” status of satire is overtly thematized; the novel’s “satire” effectively negates itself in a manner that directly parallels the “canceling out” we experience at the level of form. One is tempted to conclude, given the novel’s purely stylized ending, that Thackeray’s novel transforms satire into melodrama: Becky seems to lose value as the performance goes along and is duly chastised for her iniquity, even as the goody-goody Amelia’s star is constantly on the rise. Through its elaborate self-contradictions, VANITY FAIR cloaks and universalizes middle-class values while purporting to offer a critique of those same values. The notion of satire, in Thackeray, is thus exploded by an anti-subversive content.

VANITY FAIR is a world in which seeing is not believing. Here we return to the novel’s basic premise of stage illusion and the epistemological rift between seeing and knowing we discussed as incipient in Thackeray: his theatrical text reads, in an important sense, as the story of the conflation between seeing and failing to see, reading and blindness, knowing and not knowing. It is by examining Thackeray’s “satire” in this light that we can discuss his novel in relation to British aestheticism. In her essay “Beauty’s Body: Gender Ideology and British Aestheticism,” Kathy Psomiades writes,

Aestheticism can sustain itself for so long in Britain because of the way in which it makes its own institutional nature its content: through iconic images of femininity. What is important here is not only that femininity, because of the development of middle-class gender ideology, can signify apartness from the praxis of everyday life (and thus apoliticality), but more significantly that femininity allows for the coincidence of institution and content without provoking “the self-criticism of art.” Because of the intricate structure of mid-Victorian gender ideology, iconic images of femininity not only figure or represent the “social ineffectuality” of art in bourgeois culture, but also disavow or cover over this ineffectuality and its consequences.

Thackeray, we might theorize, was able “to get away with” his satire by imaging it in terms of a marginalized feminine space that belied—thanks to a tacit cultural agreement as to the apoliticality of the feminine—its own status as political discourse, a discourse that must be hidden anyway in order to conceal its rhetorical emptiness. It is precisely this “feminizing” of satire that allows Thackeray to cover his tracks and sustain the ideology of knowing and not knowing which, as Psomiades shows, is the very linchpin of British aeshtheticism.

That VANITY FAIR is, thematically speaking, a novel about women, I take to be a universal truth. By his own admission Thackeray has abandoned the traditional masculinist historical novel; in so doing, he has written a new kind of historical novel in which, as we suggested above, the political is by and large subsumed into a discursive yet ultimately harmless (because biologically and socially invisible) feminine space.

The real war, in other words, within the self-contradictory perspective of the novel, is fought between its opposing conceptions of femininity as embodied in Becky and Amelia, respectively: between a subversive feminine identity that dangerously and visibly encroaches on the male sphere of power and domination, on the one hand, and a quietly submissive, tractable, hidden, “English” femininity on the other. The outcome of this contemporary battle, it need hardly be noted, is just as much a foregone conclusion as that of Waterloo some decades earlier. Becky is routed and sent packing back to France where she belongs; Amelia triumphs in her saccharine marriage to the good English officer. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Why is Becky, clearly the character with whom Thackeray most closely identifies, so cruelly punished? We observed that she encroaches on masculine power. She does this by consistently—until the very end—beating men at their own game, using them to her ends instead of the other way around. That much is obvious. It should be remarked, however, that Becky, “the little mimic,” also steps over the line by playing the artist on center stage.

Becky consistently employs stereotypes to her own advantage very much like a satirist. She writes novelistic letters complete with dialogue and commentary. She exhibits a kind of pragmatic Bovaryism: being nothing, she must create something for herself out of that nothingness—like the novelist creating believable fiction and getting paid for it. And she very nearly succeeds in transforming reality by her effort of will. But like Emma Bovary, whom Charles Baudelaire for one interpreted as a failed romantic artist, and about whom Flaubert purportedly remarked, “Madame Bovary, c’est Moi!”—I say, much like Emma’s, Becky’s dreams are finally dashed. In both characters, the figurative artist is simultaneously feminized and punished, empowered only to be rendered impotent in the final analysis.

Consistent with its internal (il)logic of contradictions, which we have traced through both formal and thematic levels, VANITY FAIR succeeds in effacing the role of the artist, who is relegated to a powerless (because voiceless) feminine position. We might even go so far as to interpret the American novel around 1848 in this light. In conceiving Pearl by herself, as it were, metaphorically an extremely radical act, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in THE SCARLET LETTER might be thought of as an artist figure who has become dangerous to the community’s code of feminine silence and who must therefore be punished. Might the scarlet letter, then, around 1848, in America as well as Europe, stand for Art?