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Fetishizing the flunkey: Thackeray and the uses of deviance
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999 by McCuskey, Brian
"The devotees of fetishes regard them as abnormalities, it is true, but only rarely as symptoms of illness; usually they are quite content with them or even extol the advantages they offer for erotic gratification."
-Freud, "Fetishism" 198
I.
Midway through William Thackeray's History of Pendennis (1848-50), the narrator stops for a moment in the street to admire Lady Clavering's London mansion:
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One of the leaves of the hall door was opened, and John-one of the largest of his race-was leaning against the door pillar, with his ambrosial hair powdered, his legs crossed; beautiful, silk-stockinged; in his hand his cane, gold-headed, dolichoskion. Jeames was invisible, but near at hand, waiting in the hall, with the gentleman who does not wear livery, and ready to fling down the roll of haircloth over wich her Ladyshio was to step to her carriage. These things and men, the which to tell of demands time, are seen in the glance of a practised eye. (393)
Thackeray takes in the spectacle of servants who conspicuously display and consume their employer's wealth; all dressed up with no place to go, these footmen perform symbolic rather than domestic duties. "Their role was not in basic material production as such," John Gillis explains with reference to male servants in Victorian society, "but in the elaboration of the social and cultural symbols appropriate to the social status of their employers" (152). Ever watchful for a chance to satirize the pretensions of the leisure classes, Thackeray suspends his narrative to point out the utterly objectified servants whom Andrew Miller has described as "a logical extreme of a culture fashioned from commodities" (14). Thackeray's eye, "practised" in decoding the semiotics of urban life, calls attention to a scene that illustrates the excesses and idiosyncrasies of Vanity Fair.
The narrator moves on, but the passage is curious enough to tempt us to lag behind and wonder what other practices might be involved in looking so closely at servants. Even without the help of a suggestive epigraph, a post-Freudian reader sees immediately that the flunkey has been fetishized, his body fragmented into a collection of parts that are in turn eroticized by the narrator. The footman's hair is "ambrosial," inviting us to smell and even taste it; his legs are not only "beautiful, silk-stockinged" but also "crossed," inviting us to hear the whisper of silk on silk; and, of course, he holds a cane, tipped with gold, inviting us to visualize why else he might deserve the Homeric epithet dolichoskion-for a spear "casting a long shadow." The description in fact serves as a neat inventory of the classic Freudian fetishes; we need only note the narrator's interest just prior to this passage-the shoe buckles which "John and Jeames, the footmen, wear, and which we know are large, and spread elegantly over the foot" (393)to round out the list.
As the adjective "practised" also suggests, this scene is not an isolated instance in Thackeray's writing; he frequently takes the time to ogle male servants and savor fetishistic details. Elsewhere in Pendennis, we notice "the tightest leather breeches" (306) and the "gloves as large as Doolan's" (364) worn by various flunkeys; in Barry Lyndon (1844), we meet the hero's "huge body-servant Fritz lolling behind with curling moustaches and long queue, his green livery barred with silver lace" (208); in The Book of Snobs (1848), we are told that "peach-- coloured liveries laced with silver, and pea-green plush inexpressibles, render the De Mogyns' flunkeys the pride of the ring when they appear in Hyde Park" (42). Censuring lazy and conceited servants, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) warned what would happen "when the lady of fashion chooses her footman without any other consideration than his height, shape, and tournure of his calf" (961). In Thackeray's fiction, however, it is not the lady but the gentleman of fashion who best appreciates "that delightful quivering swagger of the calves, which has always had a frantic fascination for us" (Book of Snobs 15), and who admires "gigantic footmen" with bodies "too big to be contained in Becky's little hall" (Vanity Fair 588).
Thackeray's obsession with the figures and accessories of male servants complicates recent critical discussions of his representation of male sexuality. Both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Joseph Litvak have argued that Thackerayan gentlemen exempt themselves from the experience of sexual desire. Sedgwick suggests that Thackeray's bachelors, in "response to the strangulation of homosexual panic" that underwrites their patriarchal power, exhibit "a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female" (192). Litvak, on the other hand, contends that Thackeray disavows sexual desire in order to claim a superior class sophistication predicated on a surfeit of experience: "Thackeray's desire not to desire is at the same time a desire to be, as well as a desire for, the kind of man whose apparent libidolessness only signifies the more decisively, and the more seductively, that he has had and done it all" (235). Neither of these descriptions, because they assume that homosexual desire must necessarily be masked, can accommodate a publicly fetishized flunkey. Thackeray's frantic (but not panicked) fascination with the servant's virile body and displaced phallus demonstrates both an investment in genital sexuality and an enthusiastic libido-as well as a certain contempt for the closet.
