Thackeray's Gourmand: Carnivals of Consumption in "Vanity Fair"

Abstract

This essay on Vanity Fair (1848) focuses on the character of Jos Sedley, William Makepeace Thackeray's carnivalesque embodiment of gourmandise, to explore the argument that Thackeray's representation of runaway consumption expresses acute anxieties over the commodity's unnerving power to seduce and mesmerize the social imagination. The essay's near-exclusive focus on Jos and his relationship with material goods is not intended to obscure or dismiss all the other figures of consumer seduction populating Vanity Fair. Rather, the idea is to zero in on one of Thackeray's most explicit and outrageous articulations of consumer seduction-one, moreover, that has received far less critical attention than the more obvious candidate found in Becky Sharp. As an embodiment of mercenary female duplicity, Becky is only one of several key figures such as old Dobbin or young Crawley who clearly merit a place in the argument alongside Thackeray's gourmand. Informing this essay is the idea that the commodity should be understood not as a dead object belonging to a vacant cultural space but instead as a category for cultural analysis alive with crisis, conflict, tension, debate, and possibility. The discussion that follows sees the commodity as a register of desire-as an almost semiotic medium thick with the cultural signs of consumerism. Such a view of the commodity and its status within Victorian culture is not entirely new; it is indebted to a long line of literary and cultural criticism that most notably includes Thomas Richards's landmark study of nineteenth-century advertising, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, and Andrew Miller's farreaching analysis of the tangled relationship between fiction and consumerism, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.1