Fetishizing the flunkey: Thackeray and the uses of deviance

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999 by McCuskey, Brian

Broad and universal enough, in fact, that both servant and master find themselves equally objectified under capitalism-the servant at the hands of his master, of course, but also the master at the hands of his servant. Through the ministrations of servants, the commodity form reaches from the public sphere into the private chamber and transforms the occupant who dresses there. When Thackeray introduces us to Major Pendennis at the opening of Pendennis, we barely get a glimpse of him through all the window-dressing. Instead, we are called upon to admire the work of his dexterous valet:

One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a certain Club in Pall Mall, of which he was a chief ornament. At a quarter past ten the Major invariably made his appearance in the best blacked boots in all London, with a checked morning cravat that never was rumpled until dinner time, a buff waistcoat which bore the crown of his sovereign on the buttons, and linen so spotless that Mr Brummel himself asked the name of his laundress.... Pendennis's coat, his white gloves, his whiskers, his very cane, were perfect of their kind as specimens of the costume of a military man en retraite.... His nose was of the Wellington pattern. His hands and wristbands were beautifully long and white. On the latter he wore handsome gold buttons given to him by his Royal Highness the Duke of York, and on the others more than one elegant ring, the chief and largest of them being emblazoned with the famous arms of Pendennis. (37)

The touch of the servant utterly commodities the master's body, which fragments and eventually disappears-accessorized into oblivion. We see rings but not fingers, boots but not feet, cravat but not a neck. However, the master's body has not actually disintegrated; it has instead become indistinguishable from the commodities it proudly displays. In the description of the Major, the list of flashy accessories includes his whiskers; his features fit a certain reproducible "pattern,' much like a set of china or cut of cloth; gloves and hands and wristbands fuse together into a uniform whiteness. Later in the novel, we learn that the Major's decaying body parts are promptly replaced by the valet with over-the-counter goods: the Major has "a little morocco box, which it must be confessed contained the Major's back teeth," and "Morgan, his man, made a mystery of mystery of his wigs: curling them in private places: introducing them privily to his master's room" (Pendennis 101). The commodification of the gentleman is complete once he becomes an "ornament" whose chief function is to circulate in society as the hollow signifier of his own wealth and status.

Victorian commodity culture therefore calls into question any essential difference between gentleman and servant; the flunkey-powdered, silk-stockinged, and bespangled-announces himself as a grotesque but recognizable double of his master. "My dear Flunkeys," as Thackeray says in The Book of Snobs, "are but the types of their masters in this world" (15). Male servants model not only liveries but also a cynical theory of subjectivity under capitalism: in Vanity Fair, you are what you wear. If Thackeray's characters, as john Carey has observed, tend to "regard their fellow men as a kind of mobile boutique" (76), they do so because there is little else to contemplate. Strip away the clothes and accessories of any man-servant, Snob, or master-and one finds only "underwaistcoats, more underwaistcoats, and then nothing" (Thackeray, Four Georges 108). This particular description targets the foppish and corrupt George IV, but Thackeray's representation of the objectified and emptied self prompts us to wonder more generally whether there is "nothing" to distinguish one man from another apart from commodities that refuse identification with any one man for very long.