Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:06:13.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

LYING EPITAPHS: VANITY FAIR, WATERLOO, AND THE CULT OF THE DEAD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2012

Julian Jimenez Heffernan
Julian Jimenez Heffernan*
Affiliation:
University of Córdoba, Spain
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The significance of the Waterloo episode in Vanity Fair remains somewhat obscure. Early reviewers of the novel either ignored it or suggested its downright insignificance: “The battle of Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death, and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred of other ways” (Rigby 79). Furthermore, when compared to Stendhal's La chartreuse de Parme and Hugo's Les misérables, two novels where a report of the battle is at least attempted, Vanity Fair looks exceptional. The novel's mimetic elusiveness vis-à-vis the battle has been a source of puzzle and the object of some critical contention. In line with John Carey, who argued that “Vanity Fair is built round a thunderous void” (189), John Sutherland suggested that “Thackeray's battlefield reticence” impinged on the novel's “historical fabric” producing “gaping, but evidently carefully placed, holes” (15), the larger being (no pun intended) Waterloo. Some critics explained away this omission by invoking Thackeray's anti-heroic restraint, a position best expressed by Tolstoy: “For an historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men” (1309). Other readers blamed the silencing effect of an elegiac trauma – an “agony of glory,” in Coleridge's terms – not uncommonly affecting the winning side in a violent conflict. One could also adduce reasons of epistemological honesty, in line with Tolstoy's blunt assertion that “in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie” (1310).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 25 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2002.Google Scholar
Barnaby, Edward T. “Thackeray as Metahistorian, or the Realist Via Media.” Clio 31.1 (2001): 33–55.Google Scholar
Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. London: Pimlico, 2003.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. “Letter to W.S.Williams (29 March 1848).” Ed. Tillotson and Hawes. 52.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. Pelham. The Works of Edward Bulwer Lytton. Vol. 8. London: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1892.Google Scholar
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.Google Scholar
Byron, George Gordon. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Carey, John. Thackeray: Prodigal Genius. London: Faber & Faber, 1977.Google Scholar
Cole, Sarah Rose. “The Aristocrat in the Mirror: Male Vanity and Bourgeois Desire in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.2 (2005): 137–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lay Sermons. London: Routledge and Princeton UP, 1972.Google Scholar
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1991.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel. A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. London: Penguin, 1971.Google Scholar
De Lancey, Magdalene. A Week at Waterloo. London: Reportage, 2008.Google Scholar
DiBattista, Maria. “The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair.” PMLA 95.5 (1980): 827–37.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. London: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Fisher, Judith L.Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. L’éducation sentimentale. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2002.Google Scholar
Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1971.Google Scholar
Fraser, Russell A., “Pernicious Casuistry: A Study in Character in Vanity Fair.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12 (1957): 137–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.Google Scholar
Gilmour, Robin. “Thackeray: From Europe to Empire.” Creditable Warriors: 1830–76. Ed. Costell, Michael. London: Ashfield, 1990. 97–110.Google Scholar
Fontane, Theodor. Effi Briest. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2004.Google Scholar
Gore, Catherine Grace F.Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb. La Vergne: Kessinger, 2007.Google Scholar
Hagan, John. “A Note on the Napoleonic Background of Vanity Fair.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15.4 (1961): 358–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammond, Mary. “Thackeray's Waterloo: History and War in Vanity Fair.” Literature and History 3rd series 11.2 (2002): 19–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Barbara. The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray. London: Peter Owen, 1972.Google Scholar
Houston, John. “Waterloo: From Fact to Myth.” Yale French Studies 26 (1960): 45–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howarth, David Armine. Waterloo: Day of Battle New York: Atheneum, 1968.Google Scholar
Hugo, Victor. Les misérables. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1998.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel. “An Essay on Epitaphs.” The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Jones, David. In Parenthesis. London: Faber & Faber, 1963.Google Scholar
Kantorowicz, Ernst. “Pro patria mori in Medieval Political Thought.” Selected Studies. New York: Augustin, 1965.Google Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Litvak, Joseph. “Kiss me, stupid: Sophistication, sexuality, and Vanity Fair.” Novel 29.2 (1996): 223–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longmuir, Anne. “‘Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium?’: Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64.2 (2009): 163–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marks, Patricia. “‘Mon Pauvre Prisonnier’: Becky Sharp and the Triumph of Napoleon.” Studies in the Novel 28.1 (1996): 76–92.Google Scholar
McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Andrew H.Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Musselwhite, David. Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. London: Routledge, 1987.Google Scholar
Nora, Pierre. “Entre Mémoire et Histoire.” Les Lieux de Mémoire, Vol.1. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.Google Scholar
Ousby, Ian. “Carlyle, Thackeray, and Victorian Heroism.” Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982): 152–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paths of Glory. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker. Bryna Productions, 1957. Film.Google Scholar
Prost, Antonie, “Les monuments aux morts.” Les Lieux de Mémoire, Vol.1. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 199–223.Google Scholar
Rawlins, Jack P.Thackeray's Novels: A Fiction that Is True. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Google Scholar
Ray, Gordon. Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity 1811–1846. New York: McGraw Hill, 1955.Google Scholar
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Rev. of Vanity Fair. Quarterly Review Dec 1848, lxxxiv.” Ed. Tillotson and Hawes. 79.Google Scholar
Ruskin, John. “M.S. Note to Modern Painters.” William Thackeray: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1996. 87.Google Scholar
Schad, John. “Reading ‘Vanity Fair’ the Long Way Round.” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 26–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Walter. The Antiquary. London: Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. The Field of Waterloo. The Poetical Works. London: Henry Frowde, 1904.Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. Old Mortality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Sebald, W.G.Austerlitz. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Semmel, Stuart. “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo.” Representations 69 (2000): 9–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Philip. Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. London: Palgrave, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloterdijk, Peter. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985.Google Scholar
Southey, Robert. Journal of a Tour in the Netherlands in the Autumn of 1815. London: Heinemann, 1902.Google Scholar
Southey, Robert. The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. London: Longman, 1816.Google Scholar
Stendhal. La Chartreuse de Parme. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.Google Scholar
Stevens, Joan. “Vanity Fair and the London Skyline.” Costerus II (1974): 13–41.Google Scholar
Sutherland, John. “Introduction.” Vanity Fair. London: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. The Book of Snobs. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. 11. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. History of the Next French Revolution. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Vol. 11. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. The History of Pendennis. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. 3. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. The Irish Sketch Book. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Vol. 9 and Vol. 10. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. “Letter to Robert Bell (3 September 1848).” Ed. Tillotson and Hawes. 68.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. Little Travels and Road-Side Sketches. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. 11. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904. 267–98.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Vol. 10. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. The Paris Sketch Book. The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Vol. 9. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. “Phil Fogarty: A Tale of the Fighting Onety-Oneth.” The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Vol. 12. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William. Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Thomas, Deborah A.Thackeray and Slavery. Athens: Ohio UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Tillotson, Geoffrey, and Hawes, Donald, eds. William Thackeray: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. “Some Words about War and Peace.” War and Peace. London: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. Thackeray. London: Macmillan & Co, 1882.Google Scholar
Watson, Nicola J. “Introduction.” The Antiquary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Wheatley, James H.Patterns in Thackeray's Fiction. Cambridge: M.I.T. P, 1969.Google Scholar
Whiton, F. E. “Thackeray and the Army.” The Nineteenth Century and After 110 (1931): 613–25.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973.Google Scholar
Wood, William. An Essay on National and Sepulchral Monuments. London: W. Miller, 1808.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. London: Penguin, 1992.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936.Google Scholar