Waterloo in Vanity Fair or the Art of not Representing War

Abstract

The narrator of Vanity Fair, warns his reader just as he is about to start his description of Waterloo, “We do not claim to rank among the military novelists.” This is so true that none of those involved will ever speak of it. The impression remains, however, that everything has been said about the event. A close reading of the chapters concerned with the event will reveal how the victory heralding British supremacy in the nineteenth century is in fact persistently undermined in the novel. Thackeray’s contempt for anything military is well known and the writing strategies used here to attack the institution are as efficient as they are varied. The narrator intervenes directly to point at human silliness and cowardice. But more often he prefers the indirect or refracted manner (to use the mirror image he liked so much). He shows, for example, the impossibility, to write the history of war, by giving us all the different versions of it: rumour, newspapers, official history books with their biases and contradictions. He concentrates on the life of civilians. Looking at it from different angles he shows the folly, the cruelty and, above all, the disorder which war encourages among them (the movements of panic, the mad rise of prices or the breakdown of the social hierarchy for example). But most striking is probably what one could call the feminisation of war which in the double and subtle way he weaves it into the narration acts as a sort of secret weapon against the military and nationalistic ideology of the time.