William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Balzac's Human Comedy: Some Thoughts

As I remarked when discussing William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon a while back it was the comparison of William Makepeace Thackeray with Balzac that made me think Thackeray worthwhile. While I did indeed find it worthwhile, Barry Lyndon made quite a different impression on me than Balzac--Grimmelshausen the writer I constantly found myself in mind of as I read that book.

Reading Vanity Fair one might think of Balzac because of that novel's greater proximity to Balzac's post-Revolutionary France in that period, and the role played by financial operations and inheritance in the plot. In fairness the book does, as is the case with Balzac, depict a society where all that was solid was melting into air in the cash nexus, but very differently. The copy on the back of my volume describes the story's pace as "leisurely"--and the book is indeed too much so to feel properly Balzacian, Thackeray never quite conveying that desperate intensity of his characters in the pursuit of their objects that Balzac so often did, exemplified by how as the story approaches its finish he does not check in on one of his two principals, Becky Sharp, for over a hundred pages (!). Rather than a mad chase their path through the story feels like a lackadaisical stroll, all within a story that, compared with Balzac, or even Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon, is far more domestic (even the portion about the Battle of Waterloo giving us more about the wives and other hangers-on back in Brussels than the events on the battlefield!) and genteel (Thackeray himself remarking his "wish . . . deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended").

At the same time Thackeray never seems quite so invested in the goings-on as the often cold-eyed Balzac could be in the stories of characters for which he often seemed to feel more, and I think, made the reader feel more than Thackeray does.