Volume 51, Number 18 · November 18, 2004
Becky in the Movies
By Robert Gottlieb
Vanity Fair
a film directed by Mira Nair
No major nineteenth-century novel—unless you count Dracula—has been filmed as often as Thackeray's Vanity Fair. There have been five versions since sound came in, the first released in 1932, the latest just now, and yet the book consistently eludes filmmakers. Not one of them catches its essence, which has less to do with the plot or the characters than with the author/ narrator's voice. The novel has frequently been seen as the model for Gone with the Wind (no one believes Margaret Mitchell's claim that she never read it), but although there are obvious similarities, the two books are utterly unalike in intention and result. Gone with the Wind is feverishly romantic, despite its famously anti-romantic heroine; it's a passionate celebration of the Old South, soaked in nostalgia and regret—it's a novel with a fierce private agenda. Vanity Fair is the most anti-romantic of nineteenth-century novels, and its famously anti-romantic heroine is the real thing. Nobody sweeps Becky Sharp up the stairs, à la Clark Gable, and crushes her into submission (and orgasm), and she wouldn't be interested if somebody did. Becky is interested in money and social status, not love, although she's casually fond of Rawdon Crawley, her husband, and 'was always perfectly good-humored and kind to him.' Indeed, 'If he had but a little more brains, I might make something of him.'
Review, 2932 words
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