Fetishizing the flunkey: Thackeray and the uses of deviance

II.

The inside joke, of course, is on the snob outside. Without an invitation to the very best dinners, the lower-middle-class snob sees little of high society apart from the liveried footmen who not only stand for the upper-class privilege he desires but also stand between him and those dinners. The narrator of Vanity Fair (1847-48) fancies that the "august portals" of fashionable London houses are ,guarded by grooms of the chamber with flaming silver forks with which they prong all those who have not the right of the entre" (583). Standing in the street, with nothing to look at but liveries, the snob suffers the pangs of a social ambition so intense that he cannot help but fetishize the flunkey who is (in Freudian terms) both a surrogate for the object of desire and a reminder of his alienation from it. The snob, in the throes of his frustrated commodity fetishism, fixates on each detail of the liveried footman and transforms boots, silk, cane, hair, and calves into sexualized objects that he can consume as a voyeur-a displaced and diminished version of the other, more satisfying forms of consumption denied to him. Thackeray's inside joke is that, at best, the snob is impotent; at worst, perverted. Employing Apter's terms, we might then describe Thackeray's representation of the flunkey as a form of "critical fetishism"; that is, "an aesthetic of fetishization that reflexively exposes the commodity as an impostor value" (12). The snob's material lust becomes so excessive, so grotesque, that we renounce his grubby values and take the higher ground already staked out by Thackeray, who critiques commodity culture from the socially elevated and ethically superior position of a gentleman, the insider who remains above it all.

The problem for Thackeray is that his joke backfires, causing repercussions that begin to erode that higher ground and to expose the gentleman himself as an "impostor value." To start with, the flunkey is as much a fetish object for his employers as he is for the snob. His livery both signifies and substitutes for wealth that in many cases does not actually exist; or rather, as those householders who live well on nothing a year in Vanity Fair can attest, it exists mainly as an effect of the servant's plush and powder. The flunkey finds himself fetishized by anxious employers who invest each part of his body and article of his livery with social significance, an attention to detail whose equivalence with sexual obsession underscores the fact that all aspects of the employer's identity-sexual as well as social-hinge upon the flunkey's display. We should note that Thackeray's descriptions do not much exaggerate this attention to detail; Victorian household manuals advised employers, for example, to hire footmen of "equal height to avoid the incongruity of appearance that men-servants of unequal height would present" (Servants' Practical Guide 160). The flunkey's appearance must be congruous in every detail with the wealth and status of his employers: the more ornamented and objectified their servants, the more manifest their possession of wealth, and the more secure their class position.