Vanity Fair in Frau Jenny Treibel: A comparative analysis of Fontane’s and Thackeray’s realist novels

Abstract

While critics are in agreement when it comes to England’s and especially Thackeray’s influence on Fontane, no study has shown how much Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) is inspired by Vanity Fair (1848), particularly when it comes to the discourses of money and marriage. Several decades lie between the novels, as do different socio-cultural and political circumstances. However, the Gründerjahre bore resemblance to the Victorian mid-century as both middle classes had acquired the necessary wealth, education and political power to transcend established boundaries of class and gender. Fontane had studied Vanity Fair and its vision of a new Europe and a changing society which Thackeray saw well advanced during his lifetime, as did Fontane in late nineteenth-century Prussia. Fontane had also studied the poetics of realism — in Britain and Germany — and had thought about modern heroism, the novel’s social critique and the ‘bad’ heroine. In front of the backdrop of history and poetics, this article focuses on Becky Sharp, Amelia Sedley, Jenny Treibel and Corinna Schmitz to not only suggest that Fontane’s women inherit character traits and attitudes from Thackeray but that nineteenth-century realism must once again be read beyond national traditions and in the wider context of transnational cross-fertilization and debate.