page_title: Becky Sharp
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Becky Sharp / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Becky as Napoleon, after Benjamin Robert Haydon's Napoleon Musing at St Helena, an untitled image from the novel. The number indicates the Djvu page number of the Wikisource transclusion.
context_page_description: Rebecca "Becky" Sharp, later describing herself as Rebecca, Lady Crawley, is the main protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–48 novel Vanity Fair. She is presented as a cynical social climber who uses her charms to fascinate and seduce upper-class men. This is in contrast with the clinging, dependent Amelia Sedley, her friend from school. Becky then uses Amelia as a stepping stone to gain social position. Sharp functions as a picara—a picaresque heroine—by being a social outsider who is able to expose the manners of the upper gentry to ridicule. The book—and Sharp's career—begins in a traditional manner of Victorian fiction, that of a young orphan with no source of income. who has to make her own way in the world. Thackeray twisted the Victorian tradition, however, and quickly turned her into a young woman who knew what she wanted from life—fine clothes, money and a social position—and knew how to get them. The route was to be by marriage, and the novel follows Sharp's efforts at snaring a wealthy, but simple, husband, and being outdone by fate in her attempt. Eventually, she achieves her aims, but her husband catches her with a member of the aristocracy.
context_section_description: Educated at Miss Pinkerton's Academy, Sharp was an orphan. With no parents to guide her, either towards a good marriage or a career, she set out on her own to take what she could get from life. Her opening scene has her leaving the academy in a coach and throwing her copy of Johnson's Dictionary — given her by Miss Pinkerton — out of the window as she goes. As a penniless young lady of marriageable age alone in the world, hers is a traditional Burneyean entrance to the adult world. She starts on her career with the degenerate English gentry, and moves in with Sir Pitt Crawley  as governess to his daughters.
  Sharp is dissatisfied, seeing herself as capable of far greater things: "in her imagination ... the princess de jure is only the governess de facto". She ends up in a more equal relationship with Crawley, who was described by Roger B. Henkle as "rascally, wenching, brawling ... drinks to all hours with Horrocks the Butler and smells of the stables". 
  She makes herself indispensable to the soon-to-be-widowed Sir Pitt as his amanuensis, by doing his accounts and other paperwork. Partly due to this reliance on her, he proposes marriage after his second wife dies. She soon, however, realises the limitations of Crawley's position, and moves out when invited to London by Crawley's rich half-sister.
  She successfully insinuates herself into the British ruling class with almost nobody noticing. When she first meets Mr Sedley, she tells him her story, of her penniless orphanhood and he gives her gifts; the only character who ever sees through her now well-to-do English facade is Dobbin, who says to himself, "what a humbug that woman is!" Sharp's debut is at the Duchess of Richmond's ball, held on 15 June 1815 in Brussels, which celebrates the Duke of Wellington's army on the eve of the Battle of Quatre Bras against the exiled Napoleon who has returned to France and raised an army. However, she had no means of transport to the ball, and eventually only manages to travel by simpering to the owner of the only carriage available and flattering him over "the courage he does not possess". The ball is a perfect opportunity for Sharp to dress up in her finest, offset against the glamour of a military campaign and the presence of an entire officer corp. Compared to Amelia Sedley — whose own appearance there is described as being an abject failure — Sharp's "debut was, on the contrary, very brilliant. She arrived very late. Her face was radiant; her dress perfection". In Brussels, everyone is panicking due to the proximity of Napoleon's army and the unexpected arrival of the French King, Louis XVIII of France into Brussels exile, yet Sharp's main interest is in humiliating Amelia at the ball over her — in Sharp's eyes — poor quality gown.
  Soon after, Jos wants to propose to Sharp, but he loses his nerve and subsequently disappears  — escaping back to Calcutta  — and by the time he eventually does propose, comments Knoepflmacher, "both Becky Sharp and our attitude toward her have moved on". Meanwhile, for Sharp, "he has become her last straw, not her first". Rawdon and Sharp have wed and have a son, also named Rawdon, but his role in her life is more in the manner of being a prop for Sharp to demonstrate her marital bliss. She makes her sitting room a salon — with "ice and coffee ... the best there is in London — where she can be surrounded by admirers, among whom she ranks men of a "small but elite crowd". It is no surprise, suggests Frazee, that Sharp eventually meets the King — who had been regent, now George IV—and in his "high presence Mrs Rawdon passed her examination, and as it were, took her degree in reputation" from him: the King, suggests Thackeray, had created the very conditions which allowed Sharp to flourish.
  Sharp's marriage to Rawdon Crawley is a major step up the social ladder, although, comments Bloom, this "ladder was a magic one and could withdraw itself at will". When her husband is arrested and held for a £100 debt, she writes to him from bed, insisting that she is doing everything in her power to release her "pauvr
caption: Becky as Napoleon, after various portraits both on Elba and Saint Helena.
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