Fetishizing the flunkey: Thackeray and the uses of deviance

Nunokawa contends that because the domestic angel is inevitably "discharged from her situation as safe estate and subject to the restless fate of capital," Victorian novels habitually refigure her within the realm of the ideal, far from the marketplace: "What can't be held to the heart for long can be held in it forever: property that can't be kept up in the external world is sustained instead in the figure of a woman whose dimensions are defined less by the material shapes of house or body than by a lover's fond thoughts or sorrowful memory" (13). In other words, the Victorian novel counters the commodification of women with its own strategies of dematerialization. Nunokawa's theory applies neatly to the work of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, but Thackeray's fiction refuses this solution. Instead, his novels constitute an ongoing struggle to dematerialize not the angel but the gentleman as a disembodied moral signifier, thereby rescuing him from the "restless fate of capital" while delivering her up to it. The angel finds herself utterly objectified within sexual relations governed by a strictly economic logic: "We young ladies in the world," Ethel Newcome says bitterly, "when we are exhibiting, ought to have little green tickets pinned on our backs, with 'Sold' written on them; it would prevent trouble and any future haggling, you know" (Newcomes 289). The gentleman, on the other hand, liberates himself from the material world by publicly disavowing sexual desire, thereby avoiding the humiliation by servants and the betrayal by women that, taken together, call his cultural authority into question. No wonder that the aptly named Mr. Batchelor of hovel the Widower prefers his "comfortable, cool bachelor's bed" to the honeymoon suite (254): rejecting the pleasures of sex, the gentleman reclaims the privileges of class. The fact that women desire him underscores his gentlemanliness; the fact that he does not desire women keeps that gentlemanliness detached from the sexual and economic fields in which it would quickly deconstruct.

In renouncing sexual relations with women, however, the gentleman consolidates his social power only to jeopardize his masculinity in other ways. Ina Ferris notes that the gentleman's asceticism "tends to position him also outside energy, sexuality, and action" (421) and therefore feminizes him, prompting the gentleman to recuperate his masculinity by socializing with other men in taverns and clubs. However, she does not pursue the possibility that the gentleman's detached position might make him sexually suspect or, worse, that his preference for male company might heighten rather than deflect suspicion. There is a fine line between asceticism and impotence or, still worse, between asceticism and perversion; publicly disavowing desire may camouflage either private shortcomings or deviant preferences-thus making asceticism a virtue of necessity. Sedgwick argues that the nervous Thackerayan bachelor who sexually anaesthetizes himself from homosexual panic nonetheless feels "no urgency about proving that he actually could" fall in love with women; the "comfortably frigid campiness of Thackeray's bachelors gives way to something that sounds more inescapably like panic" only later in the century (194). As Litvak demonstrates, however, Thackeray even at mid-century does worry enough about identifying the gentleman's social sophistication with sexual deviance to fatten up and sacrifice Jos Sedley-who yokes effeminacy to appetite rather than asceticism-as a proto-homosexual scapegoat.