Abstract
Adam Smith encourages us to regard our actions in an impartial light and to look at ourselves the way we imagine a fair-minded third person would. Society holds up a mirror for us and we can infer from other people’s reactions to our behavior whether we are acting appropriately or inappropriately. Over time, we learn to restrain our natural self-love and come to judge ourselves the way an impartial spectator would. Partial spectators are a threat to this learning process because with their flattery they encourage us to think more highly of ourselves than we should. Vanity Fair is full of partial spectators who encourage the vanity of the already vain for personal gain. They are the opposite of the person Smith describes who is forced to develop a sense of impartiality and strong self-command because he lives with strangers who care nothing for him. Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre both develop strong self-command under difficult circumstances, living with partial spectators who never let them forget their inferior place in society. Their stories raise questions about the mirror society provides to women and about the impartiality of Smith’s impartial spectator.
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Notes
- 1.
Charlotte Brontë was a great admirer of Thackeray and dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him: “There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears…. Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day, as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent” (Brontë 2016, 149).
- 2.
But she does so in a letter written in English, which the Paris lady does not understand. Miss Crawley’s attempt to hurt Becky’s reputation fails.
- 3.
Smith holds that a perfect union of sentiments may be impossible but we can reach a “concord” and that is enough to make society harmonious (TMS 72).
- 4.
It is more difficult to imagine Becky sharing in Dorothea’s generosity: “Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this fettering want of income. Why should not people do these things? It is so difficult to make shares at all even. This is one way” (Eliot 1996, 722).
- 5.
Many years later Becky shows this note to Amelia to prove to her that her revered dead husband was never worthy of her devotion.
- 6.
In a 1859 piece in the Saturday Review titled “Queen bees or worker bees,” an anonymous author observes: “Married life is a woman’s profession; and to this life her training – that of dependence – is modeled. Of course by not getting a husband, or losing him, she may find that she is without resources. All hat can be said of her is, she has failed in business; and no social reform can prevent such failures. The mischance of the distressed governess and the unprovided widow, is that of every insolvent tradesmen” (Hollis 2013, 11).
- 7.
In her analysis of Jane’s self-portrait of a “disconnected, poor, and plain” governess, Millicent Bell points out that “the first two attributes are social and economic, and the third prohibits the hope of any escape from such disadvantages…. her lack of the requisite beauty of such a heroine is stressed continually” (Bell 1996, 263).
- 8.
Esther Godfrey observes: “Brocklehurst’s position expressed a middle-class interest in preserving the economic status quo, and that position required clearer divisions between the classes themselves. Bronte carefully portrays Brocklehurst as one who, like the owners of the mines, sees femininity as a construct afforded by middle-class luxury and working-class androgyny as a necessary, though clearly distinct, part of the hierarchical social order” (Godfrey 2005, 857).
- 9.
Richard A. Kaye describes the difficult relationship between Thackeray and Brontë. Though the two admired each other’s work, they did not get along on the few occasions they met in person. Kaye detects a stab at Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the passage that describes Becky’s musing about being a country gentleman’s wife: “Thackeray clearly had Jane’s inheritance in mind when he assigned Becky her soon-to-become-infamous remark on an ideal income. He was writing chapter 41 of Vanity Fair in the very weeks in which he had completed his reading of the novel he soon championed.” Furthermore, “What for Bronte’s highly ethical heroine is a figure denoting financial freedom for life becomes, for her fictional counterpart, merely a reasonable prerequisite for ethical action, provided it is multiplied annually in perpetuity” (Kaye 1995, 723). The relevant passage in JE reads: “It would please and benefit me to have five thousands pounds… it would torment and oppress me to have twenty thousand; which, moreover, could never be mine in justice, though it might be in law”(Brontë, 8387).
References
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Slegers, R. (2018). Partial and Impartial Spectators in Vanity Fair. In: Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments in Vanity Fair. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98731-6_7
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