THE ENDING AND LITERARY SATIRE
THE HAPPY ENDING
Several pages before the novel actually ends, Thackeray writes a fake
ending, to satirize conventional happy endings. He deliberately throws
in a repetitious series of cliches often used for endings–the vessel is
in port, the hero gets what he yearned for all his life, and the bird
comes home and sits on his shoulder billing and cooing. Then
Thackeray's prose swells into a crescendo of sentimentality and more
repetition: "This is what he has asked for every day and hour for
eighteen years. This is what he pined after. Here it is–the summit, the
end–the last page of the third volume" (page 817). Then he bids goodbye
to Dobbin and Amelia, and of course slips in the reference to her as a
parasite. The repetition points up the lack of real meaning and the
indulgence of emotion for its own sake. Unwary readers, in his day and
ours, accept his statement and emotion at face value, ignore the
parasite reference, and so miss the satire. Not even the fact that the
novel was published in two volumes, not three, alerted some of his
contemporaries. The style and sentimentality of Thackeray's false
ending are similar to passages that Dickens wrote.
The actual ending bears no resemblance to conventional
happy endings. Dobbin no longer loves Amelia, and she knows it. There
is no poetic justice, i.e., the virtuous are rewarded and the wicked
are punished. The resilient Becky has wormed her way back into
respectable English society, presumably on the money she may have
murdered Jos for. The novel at last concludes with a pessimistic
statement which may be applied to almost all, if not all the
characters: "Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum!" which of us is happy in
the world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"
(page 822). Consider....
- Dobbin gets his desired Amelia after acknowledging
that she is not worth his devotion and that he wasted his life yearning
for her.
- Amelia's desire to marry Dobbin is fulfilled, but her
desire arises far too late, for she has worn out his love for her.
- In little more than a week after Amelia's marriage to
George, the narrator can ask about her, "Was the prize gained–the
heaven of life–and the winner still doubtful and unsatisfied?" (page
303).
- Becky may have regained her respectability again, but
will her Bohemian nature, with its need for excitement and risk, be
satisfied for long with a staid conventional life?
With the last sentence of the novel, Thackeray reduces
his characters to puppets, artifacts which are controlled by the puppet
master or the narrator as stage manager . Ordinarily such a puppet
image would undercut our sense of the characters' reality, but does it
in this case? Is Thackeray deliberately juxtaposing different levels or
kinds of reality? The literal reality is that the characters, like
puppets, are created, but at the level of truth to human nature and
fidelity to society's functioning are the characters real? Or
have the characters taken over their own lives and become "real"?
There is evidence that Thackeray had a sense of their physical
existence; he wrote, in a letter to a friend,
I am going today to the Hotel de la Terass (at
Brussels) where Becky used to live, and shall pass by Captain Osbornes
lodgings where I recollect meeting him and his little wife who has
married again somebody told me: but it is always the way with these
grande passions. Mrs. Dobbins or some such name she is now: always an
overrated woman I thought O–how ludicrous it is! I believe perfectly in
all these people & feel quite an interest in the Inn in wh. they
lived.
AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Ironically, Vanity Fair does end conventionally with the
marriage of two major figures, Amelia and Dobbin, and certainly the
course of "true love" does not run smooth in this novel. But Amelia
and Dobbin do not, finally, feel true love for each other.
Rather, Dobbin feels true love
for his daughter and next, perhaps, for his book on India. If
Amelia has finally
come to experience true love, has it brought her happiness?
It is not in marriage that Dobbin and Amelia achieve
the acme of happiness in their lives; that may have happened much
earlier in the novel, during their stay in Pumpernickel. Thackeray
suggests, "Perhaps it was the happiest time of both their lives,
indeed, if they did but know it–and who does? Which of us can point out
and say that was the culmination–that was the summit of human joy?"
(page 740). Of course, novelists have no hesitation in presenting
marriage at the end of their novels as the culmination of human
happiness, and they have been doing it since the mid-eighteenth
century.
Furthermore, Thackeray violates the
marriage-as-happy-ending by having his four major characters marry
early in the book. He contrasts the experience of real life with the
falseness of literary conventions:
As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial
barrier, the novelist generally drops the curtain, as if the drama were
over then: the doubts and struggles of life ended: as if, once landed
in the marriage country, all were green and pleasant there: and wife
and husband had nothing to do but to link each other's arms together,
and wander gently downwards towards old age in happy and perfect
fruition. But our little Amelia was just on the bank of her new
country, and was already looking anxiously back towards the sad
friendly figures waving farewell to her across the stream, from the
other distant shore. (page 303)
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