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AMELIA: PAGES 131-305
Like Becky, Amelia marries a man who is inferior to her,
though unlike Becky she refuses to admit this fact to herself.
Becky manipulates her husband to try to mold her own destiny;
Amelia submits to whatever situation arises and accepts
whatever George wants or does. Interestingly, Thackeray
repeatedly refers to Amelia as "little," even though she
is taller than Becky, as the illustration of their entering
the Sedley drawing room indicates.
AMELIA'S UNEVENTFUL LIFE (Chapter XII,
pages 128-137)
Portraying Becky's active full life and Amelia's passive empty
life presents a technical problem. If Thackeray presents their
lives as parallel and moves between them in real time, he
will have a wealth of detail for Becky and almost nothing
to write of Amelia. Amelia, with her "Poor little tender heart...
goes on hoping and beating, and longing and trusting" in her
misplaced love for George (page 132, chapter XII). Because she thinks
only
of him, her life offers little to write about. But her obsession
with George is not the only reason her life is dull; Amelia leads an
ordinary, repetitious life and is protected by her parents from active
participation in the world, as girls from upper class homes usually
are.
...the life of a good yong girl who is in the
paternal nest as yet, can't have many of those thrilling incidents
to which the heroine of romance commonly lays claim. Snares
or shot may take off the old birds foraging without–hawks
may be abroad, from which they escape or by whom they suffer;
but the young ones in the nest have a pretty comfortable
unromantic sort of existence... Amelia lay snug in her home
of Russell Square; if she went into the world, it was under
the guidance of the elders; nor did it seem that any evil
could befall her or that opulent cheery comfortable home
in which she was affectionately sheltered (page 133, chapter XII).
Thackeray is now free to write at great detail about Becky
without having to deal with Amelia at the same time.
This passage does more than just solve a technical
problem. It is ironic, as are similar passages (see the connection
of her life to Napoleon, Chapter XVIII, pages 200-1). Amelia, like
everyone else, is affected by and vulnerable to events
outside her narrow world. Her security and protection are
illusory. Her father's wealth and her prospect of marrying
George are destroyed by political and military events in
Europe. With characteristic self-centeredness, Amelia is
unaware of battles in which 200,000 men are reported killed,
nor does she notice how grave her father looks once or twice.
In her selfishness, all that matters to her is George. This
passage also contrasts her typical life with the unrealistic
portrayal of young ladies' lives in popular romantic and sensation
novels.
The fact that the passive, oblivious Amelia is
vulnerable and powerless is emphasized by the references to the clock
portraying
the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which ticks away in the Osborne
living room (page 144, chapter XIII; pages 258 and 259, chapter
XXIII). She is being sacrificed
because her father is a bankrupt, an unforgivable transgression
to Mr. Osborne. Ironically, the Iphigenia clock is connected
with Mr. Osborne's sacrifice of his older daughter to tend
his needs and run the house (page 506, chapter XLII).
SELFISHNESS AND SELF-DELUSION
(Chapter XXVI, pages 300-308)
 Little Amelia is
typically described as tender, loving, weak,
and selfish. This mixture of positive and negative traits
has confused readers since the beginning. Readers who have
a stereotypical view of love as a near-magical, ultimately-happy
experience reject the possibility that a truly loving woman could be
selfish
or weak. Similarly, those who see her as a heroine ask how
the heroine could be weak, let alone selfish. Clearly, such
readers reason, Thackeray must have made a mistake, due to
some personal confusion or ambiguity. But has he? Is he perhaps
presenting unpalatable truths, a psychological reality that
less subtle observers cannot or will not see?
Amelia's obsessive love for George, which is presented
as
admirable and natural in popular romantic fiction, does not bother
conventional
readers. It is the cause (e.g., vanity, weakness, and self-delusion)
and the results of her love which upset them. Such a love isolates the
lover, even when there is no external reason to
be cut off from others, "In the midst of friends, home, and kind
parents,
she was alone" (page 202, chapter XVIII).
Her loyalty to George regardless of circumstances does
not
spring from love, as sentimentalists expect. Intelligent, if naive,
Amelia
is early aware of George's selfishness, his shallowness, and his
superficial
feelings for her.
And she had misgivings and fears which she
dared
not acknowledge to herself, though she was always secretly brooding
over
them.
Her heart tried to persist in asserting
that
George Osborne was worthy and faithful to her, though she knew
otherwise. How many a thing had she said, and got no echo from him. How
many suspicions
of selfishness and indifference had she to encounter and obstinately
overcome. To whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily
struggles and tortures.
Her hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare to own that
the man she loved was her inferior; or to feel that she had given her
heart
away too soon. Given once, the pure bashful maiden was too modest, too
tender,
too trustful, too weak, too much woman to recall it. (page 203, chapter
XVIII)
Her loyalty is based not only on the virtues of tenderness and trust
but
on her weakness; in other words, she lacks the strength and courage to
face
the truth. The fourth source of her loyalty is being "too much woman."
Are
we to interpret her womanliness as a positive or a negative trait? is
it
virtue or vanity?
The Victorians assigned men and women to separate
spheres
because of their different (assumed) physical, emotional, moral, and
intellectual
qualities. Men had the freedom of the public sphere and returned to the
haven of their
homes and to their wives, who were idealized as
the angel in
the
house; women were confined to the private sphere or the home.
Thackeray's
attitude toward the Victorian construct of gender roles and the
male-female
relationship is not simple; consider the rest of the paragraph on
Amelia's
wilfully deluding herself about George.
We are Turks with the affections of our women;
and
have made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go
abroad
liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise
them
instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by only one
man,
and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our
slaves–ministering
to us and doing drudgery for us. (page 203, chapter XVIII)
As the pronouns "we," "us," and "our" indicate, the narrator
(Thackeray?) is speaking to
men as a man and identifies himself with their views and treatment of
women. The
Turks were synonymous with brutality and tyranny for Thackeray's age.
Does
his comparison of men to Turks and women to slaves indicate that
Thackeray
disapproves of the treatment of women, or does he intellectually see
the
repressiveness but emotionally accept the system? Does he admire the
voluntary
martyrdom of women? Answering these questions may require looking at
other
passages revealing Thackeray's attitude toward
women's
role and natures.
Is Thackeray's final judgment on Amelia's self-delusion
expressed in the phrase, "of the crime she had long ago been guilty–the
crime
of loving wrongly, too violently, against reason" (page 206)? Even if
her
deluded love is a crime, are the general lovelessness of her society
and
its emphasis on wealth and status as a basis for marriage worse
crimes?
Is there any admiration, warmth, or compassion in Thackeray's view of
Amelia's
loving? Is she misguided? or capable of learning and maturity?
AMELIA AS BRIDE AND WIFE (Chapter XXVI,
pages
300- 308)
When Amelia returns home only nine days after her marriage, she looks
at her "little
white
bed," an action suggesting her innocence, childishness, and virginity;
she
thinks "with terror of the great funereal damask pavilion in the vast
and
dingy state bedroom" she shares with George at the Cavendish Hotel
(page
304, chapter XXVI). What is Thackeray suggesting about her response to
and experience
of marriage? Is she mature enough for marriage, or she is still too
much a child? Is she comfortable with
the extravagance and ostentation of life with George? Is there a hint
about
sexual inadequacy and/or disappointment? It is only nine days after her
marriage,
yet Amelia is looking yearningly at the time she previously spent
unhappily waiting for George and brooding in her
virginial bedroom, "Dear little white bed! how many a long night had
she wept on its
pillow!" (page 304, chapter XXVI). Does the repetition of "little"
suggest anything
about Amelia?
"Wounded and timorous," Amelia kneels by her bed
looking
for consolation, which she does not find. Her self-centeredness has
isolated
her from God, to whom she seldom turned: "Love had been her faith
hitherto;
and the sad, bleeding disappointed heart began to feel the want of
another
consoler" (page 305, chapter XXVI). Thus, spiritual alienation is
another consequence
of selfishness, of her having focused solely on her adoration of and
sacrifice
for George. When she goes downstairs to her parents, she
uncharacteristically
tries to please them and in so doing has a pleasant visit: "And in her
determining
to make everybody else happy, she found herself so" (page 305, chapter
XXVI). She
does
not generalize from this experience and stop selfishly thinking of
herself
and selfishly indulging in her suffering. She grieves and
suffers, alone and silent, while George neglects her during their
honeymoon
in Brighton, in London and in Brussels. It is a mistake to attribute
Osborne's
neglect to
Becky
rather than to his selfish nature; his neglect begins immediately after
the
honeymoon.
As she sits by her bed in her virgin bedroom, she
remembers
fondly that image of George to which she had
knelt
before marriage. Did she own to herself how different the real man was
from
that superb young hero whom she had worshipped? It requires many, many
years–and
a man must be very bad indeed–before a woman's pride and vanity will
let
her own to such a confession. (page 304, chapter XXVI)
Thackeray again stresses Amelia's emotional dishonesty and moral
cowardice;
she sees George's moral, intellectual, and emotional inferiority–and,
out
of vanity and weakness, deliberately chooses to ignore the truth about
him
and to cling tenaciously to her false view of him as glorious hero and
magnificient prince.
In
this passage, is there approval in Thackeray's tone with his reference
to
women in general? or, if not approval, then sympathy? or is he pointing
out the vanity of Amelia's loyal devotion to her husband as well as the
vanity
of the loyal devotion which wives showed–and were expected to
show–toward their
husbands? |
