Fetishizing the flunkey: Thackeray and the uses of deviance

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

To help us see the difference, even if he cannot tell us what it is, Thackeray displaces the problem from the field of economic relations to the field of sexual relations, where the gentleman's character, viewed from a different angle, might show up more clearly. Another reiterated and parallel subplot then emerges: the servant as a sexual rival to the master. In the very early Yellowplush Papers (183738), the flunkey Yellowplush and his master Deuceace lust after the same women, and this pattern continues in the later stories: Pendennis and Mirobolant, a French cook, both pursue the coquettish Blanche Amory (whom Morgan the valet also ogles); Jeames de le Pluche vies with Captain Silvertop for the hand of Lady Angelina; Bedford, the butler in Lovel the Widower (1860), pays court to Bessy, the governess whom both Lovel and his friend Batchelor admire. In each of these cases, the narrative deflates the servant's presumption: Yellowplush's nods and winks are never reciprocated; Pen publicly humiliates Mirobolant; Angelina spurns the ex-footman in favor of the Captain; and Bessy firmly rejects the advances of Bedford. No matter how rich, educated, or dandified the servant becomes, women instinctively perceive and respond to the innate superiority of the gentleman; their sexual choices make visible and tangible a subjective difference whose existence otherwise remains very much in question.

This solution can only be provisional, however, because Thackeray's fiction also illustrates the ways in which the commodity form has already invaded and occupied the realm of sexuality, rendering the notion of female choice problematic. In Vanity Fair, as both Carey and Miller have demonstrated, sexual desire circulates and finds expression only through objects; the physical lust for bodies and the material lust for goods cannot readily be distinguished. Romance becomes a form of speculation; marriage, a long-term mutual fund; divorce, bankruptcy:

Warm friendship and thorough esteem and confidence ... are safe properties invested in the prudent marriage stock, multiplying and bearing an increasing value with every year. Many a young couple of spendthrifts get through their capital of passion in the first twelve months, and have no love left for the daily demands of after life. Oh me! for the day when the bank account is closed, and the cupboard is empty, and the firm of Damon and Phyllis insolvent! (Thackeray, Newcomes 393)

As romantic and economic interests become conflated, women find themselves positioned between men as objects to be shared, exchanged, or fought over. Jeff Nunokawa has argued that the Victorian novel expresses anxiety about the traffic in women "not because they are thus cast as property, but rather because such property is thus cast among the uncertainties of the marketplace" (7). At the moment the domestic angel becomes a commodity to be exchanged between father and fiance, she also becomes caught up in the vicious economic cycle of possession, loss, and frustration that mesmerized Thackeray. Her sexual choice therefore cannot be trusted to last: choosing the gentleman over the servant may be more of a temporary dalliance than a permanent alliance. Furthermore, because not only the female body but also female desire itself has been commodified, her sexual choice necessarily involves economic motives: even if she does cling to the gentleman, it may have more to do with his clothes than with his character. There is always the possibility that a well-dressed servant will get the girl and cuckold the gentleman. When the appalled Major Pendennis wonders aloud if Blanche Amory may have "encouraged" the French cook's attentions, his valet replies with a sinister double negative: "Servants don't know them kind of things the least" (Pendennis 387).