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Race in W.M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and
The Virginians
Maurice A. Geracht
Abstract
Thackeray’s designs, his frontispieces, chapter capitals, textual illustrations, and fly leaf end pieces, always comment on, or augment his verbal texts, and often address issues not verbally directly confronted. Thackeray’s images thus have an independent narrative function that enlarge and complicate the text immediately at hand, as well as Thackeray’s œuvre. The Virginians set in the era of the America Revolutionary War, overtly and covertly, addresses late 1850s issues, among them, slavery and race relations. Thackeray’s views, alas racist, are most overtly articulated in his illustration.
Résumé
Les dessins de Thackeray, les frontispices, les enluminures, les illustrations textuelles et les motifs de pages de garde, offrent toujours un commentaire sur ses écrits, ou bien les enrichissent, en abordant souvent des sujets auxquels le texte ne touche pas directement de manière explicite. Les dessins de Thackeray ont donc une fonction narrative indépendante qui amplifie et complique immédiatement le texte qu'ils illustrent, ainsi que l'œuvre entière de Thackeray. Les Virginiens, qui se déroule à l'époque de la guerre d'Indépendance américaine, touche, ouvertement ou non, à des questions cruciales à la fin des années 1850, parmi lesquelles l'esclavage et les relations inter-raciales. Les opinions de Thackeray, hélas racistes, se retrouvent plus ouvertement articulées dans ses illustrations.
Key words
The Virginians – W.M. Thackeray – H.B. Stowe – abolitionists – slavery in U.S. – African Americans – Racism in Vanity Fair.
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While the subtitle of The Virginians is “A Tale of the Last Century” and the narrative is an historical novel set in the era of the America Revolutionary War wherein “children of the Old Dominion, found themselves engaged on different sides of the quarrel” (V 1), Thackeray often, overtly and covertly, addresses late 1850s issues, also a time when children of the New Republic “found themselves engaged on different sides of the [unresolved] quarrel.” Thackeray’s Virginians claim to belong to the old English Aristocracy and are, staunchly conservative in their values, privileged in their landed wealth, and socially entitled. Thackeray’s own sympathies favored those southern gentry, and especially the very society Mark Twain would, a generation later, mock as the “First Families of Virginia.” Particularly noticeable in The Virginians are the many verbal and graphic passages which are an apologia for slavery and a racist representation of Africans—which even when masked by the narrator’s irony, or articulated by an unsympathetic character, sad to say clearly still echo Thackeray's own views.
Ten years after Dickens’ lecture tour, Thackeray arrived in the US in May 1852 for his first series of vlectures. His tour took him both to the Northeast and to the South where he witnessed slavery first hand. H. B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in late March of 1852 had had enormous impact on readers world wide, including on Thackeray’s mother, Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth. She held a strong abolitionist position founded on her own Anglican evangelical beliefs; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work had re-energized abolitionists worldwide. Thackeray writes to his mother to reassure her that the slaves “are not suffering as you are impassioning yourself for their wrongs as you read in Mrs. Stowe [; really] they are grinning and joking in the sun” (LLP, III, 199). The letter was illustrated with a drawing of a family enjoying leisure on a cabin porch and children playing around its grounds. Thackeray had made a similar graphic and verbal point in his sketchbook and revisits it in the opening of “A Mississippi Bubble,” the seventeenth section of The
Roundabout Papers (1863), which is headed by an illustration showing happy slaves. Thackeray recalls his trip to the United States, refers to his notebooks. The intervening events notwithstanding, he has not in 1863 changed his views. Indeed, as the following graphic and verbal accompaniment show, he reiterates them in almost identical terms (Fig. 1). The slaves “sang,” “laughed,” and “grinned” (RP 175). The African woman who is caring for the white baby on her lap is surrounded by her own thriving children playing around her. She is well dressed, appears well fed, and has found a place in the shade in which to comfortably nurse her charge. While Thackeray denies that he is “an advocate for ‘the institution’ [of slavery] [...] For domestic purposes [he writes further] it seems to me about the dearest institution that can be devised” (RP 176, my emphasis). The satirist and moralist saw no irony and intended none in the above disjunction, nor do such graphics as in figures 1 and 2 convey a point of view different from that of the verbal texts to create a satiric, and/or ironic
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commentary. Such illustrations as figures 1 and 2 are not redundant reiterations of the verbal text, rather, in their material specificity, they extend and make concrete Thackeray’s contention that the slaves are well off and happy.
The above illustration from The Virginians makes the same point: there is no suffering. The well-dressed slave chairmen are proud and pleased to carry their aristocratic mistress to her social round. An open mouth bare foot black maid, and equally awed black children rejoice at the spectacle. The Africans show more enthusiasm for their participation in this procedure, or appreciation for merely witnessing it, than does the young boy gaping at the woman in the chair, or the walking traveler left out by the circumstance. These slaves, the illustration is assuring the viewer, “are not suffering”; they are, as Thackeray was assuring his mother, “grinning and joking in the sun."
Though Thackeray had qualms about the principle of slavery (“he denied any white man’s right to hold this fellow creature in bondage & make goods & chattels of him & his issue” [LLP, II, 199]), he saw no particular viciousness in the practice he observed, “saw no need for immediate emancipation,” and he repeated the point, often made by the defenders of slavery, that the English poor were worse off than Virginia's slaves. While the conditions of the English poor were indeed abominable, Thackeray can identify with the “cruelty of starving the English laborer, or driving an English child to a mine, [because, he exclaims] Brother, Brother we are kin!” (LLP, III, 229). He felt no such kinship with American slaves, he feels utterly alien towards Africans. Clearly countering the abolitionist’s motto “Am I not a Man and Brother?” he further writes and elaborates to his mother: “Sambo is not my man & my brother; the very aspect of his face is grotesque and inferior.” He also writes in the same letter, “They are not my men & brethren, these strange people with retreating foreheads,
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with great protruding lips and jaws: with capacity for thought, pleasure, endurance quite different to mine” (LLP, III, 199). Before his marriage, Thackeray’s father, Richmond Thackeray, a tax Collector of a district near Calcutta, fathered a daughter by his Indian mistress. William Makepeace never acknowledged his biracial sister. This briefly, but not, I believe unfairly, encapsulates Thackeray’s views on racial issues, on Indians, on Africans, and slavery, as is made evident in the verbal text, and is even much more explicit and forceful in his graphic representations of “the other” throughout his life and writing career. A small selection of graphic and verbal texts from Vanity Fair and The Virginians is the focus of this discussion and will illustrate the point.1
From Vanity Fair, his first great success, to The Virginians, the last work he illustrated, Thackeray’s views are consistently racist.2
The reference to “Sambo” in his letter to his mother recalls Thackeray’s readers to the opening chapters of Vanity Fair and its first full page illustration in which Sambo, the black-skinned Indian servant belonging to the Sedley family, appears and reminds us as well to reconsider the racial matter in Vanity Fair which is too rarely noted and hardly discussed. Sambo in Vanity Fair is a very minor risible character, treated superficially, that does not have as large a place in the work as his counterpart Gumbo in The Virginians. His name, commonly used in British India and
England in the 18th century onward,
implies his ‘mixed race’: a black man with a mulatto produce a Sambo. The character also reminds us of England’s racial intercourse abroad and at home.3
For example, not often noted is the fact that Captain Dobbins and Lieutenant Osborn’s Regiment has been recently recalled from the Leeward Islands of the West Indies where they have been protecting sugar planters and plantations from occasional slave revolts to face the more direct possible Napoleonic invasion at home. Those Caribbean Islands were fortified and garrisoned by British regulars; the most spectacular of these, and best billet and posting was Brimstone Hill at St. Kitts.
We note, not coincidently, that both the London traders Sedley and Osborn have made their fortune in the West Indies triangle trade. The Napoleonic War has abruptly broken up Sedley’s merchant ships. French privateers will ruin Sedley. Some very large fortunes do survive, including that of Miss Swartz, and that of Old Osborne whose interest is always to augment it. To that end he would have his son marry Miss Swartz, Amelia and Becky’s mulatto schoolmate (“the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt's … who paid double”) at Miss
1 For a general discussion of Thackeray’s racism see Dickerson 30-34. See also Lockard 137. 2 Thackeray’s views of the Irish and Jews are equally unenlightened.
3 In two capital illustrations, young black boys are dressed in costumes and bejeweled and/or feathered turbans meant to evoke India. Hogarth, in his Harlot’s Progress series [Plate II] presents a similar figure.
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Pinkerton’s academy, verbally and graphically denigrated by the narrator.4 As the diminished “other” she is the narrator’s satiric
whip with which the greed of the British bourgeoisie is lashed. For the sake of her money, they hold their noses and overcome their sense of genteel propriety. The young woman bears in the pun of her name the double taint of both an African mother and a Jewish father. “S[ch]wartz” of course means “black” in German, but lest there be any ambiguity about the further significance of the pun, in his altercation with his father at the end of Chapter 21, newly promoted Captain Osborn identifies the young woman’s father as a “German Jew—a slave-owner they say—connected with the Cannibal Islands in some way or other.” In the two illustrations in
which Miss Swartz is depicted, most prominent are her big startled eyes and wide grin, and hair that will not conform to the fashion worn by the other women in the drawing room (Fig. 3). The narrator describes “Her bejeweled hands [which] lay sprawling in her amber satin lap”; and George reports to a friend, “She looked like a China doll, which has nothing to do all day but to grin and wag its head” (V.F. 209).
The illustrations reinforce the verbal description which dehumanizes her: she is not made of flesh and bone, but of “China”; her head is mechanically set on her shoulder to continually wag; and she wears a perpetual grin on her face. The two engravings emphasize these characteristics as well as her exaggerated facial features: large eyes, wide flat nose, large mouth and thick lips.
The most vicious racist attack on Miss Swartz also comes from Captain Osborn who, pressed by his father to marry Miss Swartz and her fortune, definitively declares: “Marry that mulatto woman?” George said, pulling up his shirt-collars. “I don’t like the colour, sir. Ask the black that sweeps opposite Fleet Market, sir. I’m not going to marry a Hottentot Venus.” (V.F. 214, emphasis in the original text).
The racist remarks, we note, are not the focus of the satire. The elder Osborn is the butt. The London merchant is willing to “overlook” both Miss Swartz’s “origins” and Bildung (she can sing but three songs, can’t spell, and is uncontrollably sentimental), as he dreams of “the name of Osborne ennobled in the person of his son, and thought that he might be the progenitor of a glorious line of baronets” (V.F., 207). With enough money, peerages can be bought even by the crude merchant caste. The narrator
4 Miss Swartz’s St Kitts wealth and roots also remind us that the sugar crops were in the Westward and Leeward Islands, even until the mid 1830’s, worked by slaves. Such references are also noted, first in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and later in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Fig.4. Vanity Fair, Self Portrait as narrator
Fig. 5. Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, Hottentot Venus. Etienne Sainte-Hilaire and George Cuvier, Illustrations of the Natural History of Mammals, Vol. II. Bibliotèque Nationale de France. pl. [40]: Femme de race Bôchismanne/ Lith. De C. de Last. [Cote: 14655]
Fig. 6. Les Curieux en extase ou les cordons de souliers, British Museum. No.12634.
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and presumably his reader stand with young George, not merely for his, at least momentary loyalty to Amelia, but for upholding ‘the honor of social standards’—“I'm not going to marry a Hottentot Venus." The masks have dropped: Thackeray, the narrator, and George Osborn have here but one face and voice (Fig.4). Thackeray expected his readers to concur: “I wouldn’t either!”
The reference to the Hottentot Venus, which needs no large explication here, is to Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (c. 1790 – 29 December 1815) the more famous of at least twoKhoikhoi women who were exhibited as freak show attractions in early 19th-century London under that rubric (Fig.5). Saartjie
“Sarah” Baartman was exhibited in Paris in the last year of her life and after her death parts of her body were preserved and exhibited in the Musée de L’Homme until 1985!
According to Stephen Jay Gould’s Hottentot Venus (1985), the cartoon entitled “Les Curieux en extase” (Fig. 6) is a “satiric French print of 1812” published in Paris before she was sold for exhibition there. The voyeurs comment, from left to right: “Oh, godam good rosbif”; “Ah que la nature est drôle”; “qu’elle étrange beauté [sic].” The young woman tying her shoe says, “A quelque chose Malheur est bon.” While the cartoon satirizes the English, the French were no less peculiar in their treatment of the woman when she was bought and brought to Paris.
While Vanity Fair (1847-48) and The Virginians (1857-58) are very different works, they are consistent in their racism, which we also find in Thackeray’s other works. But nowhere is racism the object of satire. George Osborn’s racist outburst is even silently applauded as it comes to buttress his loyalty to a now impoverished and abandoned Amelia. Miss Swartz’s poor taste, her language and poor spelling, even her sentimental attachment are subjects of ridicule; but racism itself is never the focus of satire. The inferiority of the African other is in Thackeray’s world normative. What we discover in The Virginians is of a piece with his racial attitudes as represented in Pendennis, (1848-50) as well as The Adventures of Phillips (1862).
As already noted, Thackeray’s sympathies favored Southern gentry, and part of the subtext of The Virginians was certainly to contradict the view of slavery as oppressive and to counter the representation of the conditions under which Africans lived as horrific as presented in H.B. Stowe’s powerful Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A claim for a gentle and gentile treatment of slaves in the Old Dominion is announced in both the frontispiece of Volume I, as well as the flyleaf illustration that faces it (Fig.7).
The frontispiece calls up a Pre-Revolution era when Virginians claimed aristocratic lineage. That is announced by the bust of an ancestral Esmond who was granted lands by Charles I for loyal service, a grant renewed by Charles II and again by Queen Anne to Henry Esmond, grandfather of the present twin Virginian Vdescendants, seen here paying their feudal respect and allegiance to the allegorical goddess Britannia. In the 1750's and 1760’s, the twins have not yet politically separated: a decade later, one will remain loyal to
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the crown; the other will become a partisan of the new Republic. As the volume opens, text and illustrations represent each twin having a personal body slave following them as if these were voluntary retainers rather than the personal property they are. Completing the honorary procession and delegation is an allegorical Native American Princess, elsewhere identified as Pocahontas. She represents at once, Native Americans, the American Colony and the new World. But the function of the frontispiece is greater than a show of filial pedigree and of ‘prelapsarian’ political fidelity to the crown.
The iconography underscores, political, social, as well racial hierarchy, not only as normative and benign, but also as obviously socially and politically beneficial. For author and illustrator, the frontispiece is a paradigm of order; here is informed dignity in the formal progress. Precedence is “naturally” given the white twins, the grandsons of English aristocracy, and, the image affirms, the Africans are given their dignified “due” and “natural secondary place” in the progress and procession. As part of this allegorical human pageant they are recognized and honored; they are well dressed and well fed; and more to the point, the violent cruelty of slavery as represented in H.B. Stowe’s work is here silently rebutted. In this progress the human/social bonds are organic and natural to class and race hierarchy; they are ritually celebrated; in this progress human bondage, and violent oppression do not exist.
This benign view of slavery is supported by the established church in the flyleaf illustration that accompanies the frontispiece on its left. Here the Warringtons are gathered at church for Sunday services and their slaves, though not in their family pew and confined to seats in the balcony (separated as women were and are in some religious communities), are nevertheless represented as part of the worship community and dressed in fineries almost as resplendent as those worshiping below. Slavery is viewed here as a conventional form of social hierarchy, depicted as “normal” and observed as a generally benevolent institution. The flyleaf illustration certainly does not represent any reality either as it existed historically in the 1750s or as Thackeray might have observed in the 1850s.
The narrator’s verbal comments in Chapter III want to support the benign order represented in these illustrations, but they unwittingly reveal their racism and undeniable violence. The narrator comments:
nor, in truth, was the despotism exercised over the negro race generally a savage one. The food was plenty; the poor black people lazy and not unhappy.
You might have preached negro emancipation to Madame Esmond of Castlewood as you might have told her let the horses run loose out of the stables; she had no doubt but that the whip and the corn-bag were good for both. (Vol. I, iii 22, my emphasis)
The classifications of “black people” as “lazy” and “not unhappy” in their enslavement are the narrator’s views and brazenly racist. The simile the narrator attributes to Madame Esmond in which she likens “negro emancipation” to letting “horses run loose out of the stables” is so brutally violent that its notice need no further comment, except to remark that the intended wit of the rhetorical zeugma (“the whip and the corn-bag were good for both”) momentarily delays and then unwittingly prolongs the horror. If the view expressed is that of Madame Esmond, the simile, we note, is the narrator’s intended wit, and the sentiment is certainly shared.
The fact that there was “despotism [and the whip] exercised over the negro” is demonstrated and illustrated even in a very episode meant to show the kindness of George Warrington towards his personal slave, as the Mistress of the house insisted on the savage use of the whip on a boy for having dared to sleep on his master’s bed. Transgressions of racial and space boundaries are not to be tolerated. The capital illustration
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of Chapter III (Fig. 8) refers to a crucial episode that will sever George Warrington’s relationship with his mother.
…George, finding his little wretch of a blackamoor asleep on his master’s bed, sat down beside it and brushed the flies off the child with a feather-fan, to the horror of old Gumbo, the child’s father, who found his young master so engaged, and to the indignation of Madam Esmond, who ordered the young negro off […] for a whipping. […] George implored and entreated [...] [for] a remission of the sentence. His mother was inflexible […]. (Vol. I, iii 25)
We note first that “his little wretch of a blackamoor asleep” is the narrator’s descriptive phrase, not young George Warrington’s thought as he “brushed the flies off the child with a feather-fan.” The focus of the illustration is ostensibly on gentle George Warrington gesticulating to the sleeping boy’s father to neither disturb his son nor report what the old man obviously finds a shocking and impermissible transgression. Though the future heir of Castlewood, George is not, as his imperious mother will insist, yet master; Gumbo Sr. will report. That the father is shocked and reports his son’s “transgression” for
punishment in spite of George Warrington’s plea to ignore it, not only indicates that the old man has internalized and accepted his own and his son’s subjugation, but has him also affirm and advocate the rightfulness of the system which enslaves him. That an adolescent makes the plea for remission of punishment seems at first read to augment the poignancy of the injustice. The adults (Madame Esmond, Gumbo Sr., the Colonel) view George as merely sentimental and obstinately contrarian. However heartfelt his plea, however passionately made, it is viewed as childish and unreasonable, unwise. That George’s plea seems to resonate with, let’s say, Eva’s succor of Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, should not obscure its difference. While George is a gentle master, he insists he is a master. His quarrel with his domineering mother is a control and power struggle, not a moral or ethical difference. He insists “he was master of the boy, and no one,—no, not his mother,—had a right to touch him.” In his adolescent rage, he declares he will “set young Gumbo free” when he comes of age. But this is a declaration made in angry defiance, and not from moral principle. Gumbo is not set free when George comes of age, and he will continue to be George’s slave and body servant, after an interval serving as Henry’s body servant, for all of his adult life.5 George’s momentary temper and outcry are
dismissed by all present; the narrator notes that even “the little negro went off [to be whipped] beseeching his young master not to cry” (Vol. I, iii 25).6 The subtext of this episode is to reduce the importance of
5 See following discussion.
6 While this episode is ripe for full sentimental treatment, Thackeray avoids what Dickens might have done, and what Stowe did Fig. 8. From The Virginians: capital illustration, “George Warrington pleads unsuccessfully for Gumbo Sr. silence re. Gumbo Jr.’s sleeping on George’s bed.”
Fig. 9. “A Venerable Ourang-Outang: A Contribution to Unnatural History.” The Hornet, 22 March, 1871. www.amphilsoc. org/library/lobbyexhibit/darwin/case4
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corporal punishment of slaves and diminish the inherent viciousness of the whipping.
We may wonder whether the narrator is being ironic or directly reveals his own attitude when a new paragraph begins: “The young black martyr was an impudent, lazy, saucy little personage, who would be none the worse for a whipping, as the Colonel no doubt thought”(Vol. I, iii 26). Does the delayed “as the Colonel no doubt thought,” which ends the sentence ascribe what precedes it only to the Colonel, or does the narrator seek support and acquiescence from the Colonel by the means of the additive? The “no doubt” could cast unwitting ironic misgivings about the Colonel’s unstated thoughts—what the Colonel in fact may not share with either his daughter or the narrator but will not speak aloud. Whatever he feels about the whipping remains in “doubt”; the Colonel passively acquiesces to the boy’s whipping because, as he admits to his grandson, “standing [up] fatigues” him. What is less in “doubt” is that the narrator
here aligns himself with Madame Esmond Warrington. The narrator’s characterization of young Gumbo as “his little wretch of a blackamoor, etc.…” is characteristically racist; and as telling, as racist, is the characterization of Gumbo as unreservedly servile and loyal, in this passage and throughout the novel. Further, Gumbo’s valor and generosity of spirit, as in this passage, are never the focus, never intended to refine or enlarge him. For instance, his parting words are presented as manifestations and proof of George’s “virtues”: here evidence of the affection, loyalty and care George has earned from his slave.
Unlike the Esmond/Warringtons who claim roots for their names in Norman knights and Saxon Queen Boadicea, Gumbo Sr. and Jr. are given their name for their presumed fondness for the soup of that name.7 Their
name is not derived from an occupation, or place, or ability; the name of a soup denies their humanity, and this is explicitly drawn in the elder man’s stance. His body is bent and curved, almost like an “S”; it is not the ogée line of beauty, nor is the bent back merely the effect of hard fieldwork. Gumbo is a houseman. It is a graphic version
of the verbal description of the African Thackeray had written to his mother in the letter cited above: “with retreating foreheads, with great protruding lips and jaws, etc.….” His features are exaggerated. His arms are elongated, his hands oversized; his head too is large and parallel to his shoulders, his brow protrudes heavily, as do his upper lips and under jaw. The whole effect is to make him appear simian: a fore-vision of the cartoons that would greet Darwin a generation later:
The graphic makes concrete and public what Thackeray had written privately to his mother: “Sambo is not my man & my brother; the very aspect of his face is grotesque and inferior” (L.P.P., III, 199). The graphic
with parallel situations.
7 Certainly an anachronism as gambo is a New Orleans and Louisiana dish in origin, the earliest recorded there was at the turn of the 19th Century and not likely known as such in pre-revolutionary Virginia, but certainly known there by the 1850s.
Fig.10. The Virginians, Gumbo Astonishes the Servants’ Hall.
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reveals a social and psychological violence not silent but less explicit in the text. It also indicates Gumbo Sr.’s internalization of his position as an “Untermensch”; this is reflected in his body language; he has come to present himself as Madame Esmond and others see him. The graphic confirms and authorizes that image.
Thackeray’s verbal and graphic representations of Gumbo Jr. grown up and now young Harry’s slave and body servant in England (George has presumably died under Washington's command and care in the French and Indian Wars of the late 1750’s), display a whole range of stereotypical racist attitudes, underlying race anxieties and fears, and expiatory excuses for supporting slavery. For instance, when Gumbo enumerates the astonishing number of gardeners, grooms, and women servants who attended Madam Esmond’s property, the narrator affirms:
The truth is, that as four or five blacks are required to do the work of one white man, the domestics in American establishments are much more numerous than in ours; and, like the houses of most other Virginian landed proprietors, Madam Esmond’s mansion and her stables swarmed with negroes. (I, XVIII, 125)
If Gumbo had elaborated the “truth” to burnish his master’s wealth,
honor and, by extension, his own status, the “truth” of Thackeray’s narrator diminishes the efficiency and value Africans as domestics “as four or five blacks are required to do the work of one white man.” It is also notable that the focus of the commentary is on the comparative requirement of numbers of domestics in English and Virginian “establishments.” There is no distinction made regarding the condition of their service.
The full page illustration that accompanies the passage depicting Gumbo “Astonishing the Servant’s Hall” (Fig. 10) at the English Castlewood, shows him elaborately dressed in an outfit not originally meant as livery; he is wearing a powdered wig; the costume is old fashioned, in the style of Queen Anne. He is acting a part; he is playing the role and function of the English majordomo to his present master Henry. But everything about him is imitation. Above all, even in slave free England, he is not authentically free.
Part of the text on the left of the illustration does seem to grant Gambo some talents and virtues: he had “a hundred accomplishments”; “he could dress hair beautifully”; “was great at cooking many of his Virginia dishes, and learned [...] culinary secrets from my Lord’s French man”; “he played the fiddle [and] set all the girls dancing in Castlewood Hall.” But a greater focus is on Gumbo as a “poseur” and impostor: “it was not difficult for the servants’-hall folks to perceive that Mr. Gumbo was a liar [...] he pretended to read [...], he pretended to read music.” Gumbo’s Queen Anne clothing is an anachronism and a fake livery,
Fig. 12. From The Virginians: “Sir George, My Lady, & Their Master.”
Fig. 11. From The Virginians: capital illustration, “ The gentleman servant.”
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but like his “reading of sheet music,” is, while he is in England, a performance prop, and allows him, from his point of view, to pretend to momentarily escape his slavery. More significantly, it sanctions the narrator/ historian of the novel to represent Gumbo’s bondage as a mild and benevolent servitude, and to re-present slavery out of context and not as it existed even in the American South he visited.
At the same time, the narrator/historian of the novel insists on representing Gumbo as an imitation human, though one who can be threatening; after all, Gumbo’s music “set all the girls dancing”; he was “a favorite with some of [the ladies] in the drawing room, and all the ladies of the servant’s hall” (vol., I, XVIII, 124). Note that in Fig. 10 the three women are giving Gumbo all their admiring attention, while the two men are not amused; one of the men looks downright angry. Logically inconsistent (Gumbo can’t at once be less than, and more than “a man”), the narrator’s characterization of Gumbo in word and image conforms to stereotypical racist views. He is an exotic curiosity attractive to the white women and threatening to their men. Are these qualities mirroring those of the Hottentot Venus?
The largest portion of the narrative of The Virginians unfolds in England where first Henry and then George Warrington undergo the necessary trials and tribulations of their conventional Bildung. Gumbo remains a slave to each in turn, even in England, and is released from bondage well past his prime of life as a “reward” for his loyally rescuing George. All friends and family had abandoned George to perish in a sponging house. The significance of this narrative is plain enough and the graphics hammer home the point: Gumbo’s “freedom” will come as a “reward” for extraordinary loyalty and, no narrative irony intended, that prize will be the honor to “freely serve” his master for the rest of his life! On his second US tour in 1855, it was clear to Thackeray that change was inevitable. Thackeray’s position is not to force that change, but to let it evolve and resolve itself. We also note that in that narrative Gumbo’s life and position do not essentially change: technically “free” he may be, but he remains for the rest of his life George’s “body servant.”
Gumbo Jr. in both figures 11 and 12 has perhaps acquired an English refinement and polish reflected in both his clothing and the comportment of his body language, which Thackeray meant to represent his freedom. But figure 11’s gentlemanly salutation seems rather more than obsequious, it is servile. Years pass and George Warrington and Gumbo’s fortunes change. The flyleaf illustration, which closes the last chapter of The Virginians, is entitled “SIR GEORGE, MY LADY & THEIR MASTER.” We note an elderly, portly Gumbo, chin and head held high up by a stiff collar, following closely upon the heels of his Master and Mistress. The title means to refer to the supposed tyranny of household servants over their masters. Gumbo, this last graphic implies, has grown prosperous and domestically powerful. Still, though less formal, this last graphic is yet another “progress” which reminds us of the frontispiece of the first Volume (Fig. 7 above); Gumbo’s freedom has not changed his place in that “progress.” He is still George’s body servant. Lest we miss the connection between this last illustration and the frontispiece, the presence of Henry Esmond and the family’s aristocratic ancestry is represented in the full portrait of the warrior we glimpse in a room beyond, just as in the allegorical frontispiece we have a bust of Henry Esmond. In both graphics the same social hierarchy and social/racial structure is promulgated.
Racial and ethnic stereotyping, racist discourse, were ingrained into Victorian social consciousness at large. That Thackeray shared the racist mindset that prevailed among his generation, and that racism was part of his personal and professional outlook is disappointing, for the keen moralist and satirist that he was. His works also reveal anti-Semitism, and he was also anti-Irish and anti-Indian. To say that he was a man of his
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time will not do. I appreciate Thackeray, and I must say I much love a good deal of his works, but appraisal of him also needs to recognize that he was an equal opportunity bigot. At his best Thackeray ironically questions, subverts, transcends the values of his era, in matters of race he mirrors the culture of his society. That is not comforting to discover in a beloved and iconic writer; but to paraphrase Thackeray, an author’s work “is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face” (VF, II,11).
Bibliography
Dickerson, Vanessa D. Dark Victorians. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Print. Gould, Stephen J. “The Hottentot Venus.” The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton,1985. Print.
Lockard, Joe. Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair: A Novel Without A Hero. 1847-1848. Ed. Peter Shillingsburg. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994. Print.
———. The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848-1850. Print.
———. The Virginians, A Tale of the Last Century. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1858. Print.
———. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray. Ed. Gordon N. Ray. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1944. Print.
———. Roundabout Papers; to which is added The Second Funeral of Napoleon. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 15 Waterloo Place, 1869. Print.
Thomas, Deborah A. “Bondage and Freedom in Thackeray’s Pendennis.” Studies in the Novel 17 (1985): 138-49. Print.
Maurice A. Geracht is Stephen J. Prior Professor of the Humanities at The College of The Holy Cross,
Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. He teaches 18th and 19th Century English and American literature in the
English Department. He co-edited James Fennimore Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe, and is the author of numerous articles on D. Defoe, J. Swift, W.M. Thackeray, H. James, and V. Woolf. He is particularly interested in narrative forms and the relations between the visual and verbal arts. He is presently finishing a monograph on Thackeray’s graphic illustrations of his work.
