In our second extract from 'Faulks on Fiction', Sebastian Faulks argues that Becky Sharp in 'Vanity Fair' is a hero, not a heroine.                                   By Sebastian Faulks

Jane Eyre is a heroine; Becky Sharp, the main character of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-48), is a hero. No one seems to question the distinction: it’s obvious. Rather harder is to say quite why. In the end, I think, it’s a question of independence.

Jane Eyre is a resilient woman, of higher moral calibre than Becky Sharp, but her happiness, and her psychological “completion”, seem to depend on her securing the love and companionship of another, Mr Rochester. All her battles from the orphanage onwards, with whatever doughty and feminist intelligence they are fought, are presented as leading to this one end.

Becky can’t be a heroine because she is not a “good” enough person; while Jane Eyre’s fine qualities see her through against the world, Becky is too much of that world. Her resourcefulness and skill at dealing with it, however, qualify her first for our interest, then for our backing and finally for something like heroic status.

A hero may well have a lover; the chase and the affair give opportunities for displaying qualities of romance and constancy. Ultimately, though, a hero can be disappointed or defeated in love and it will not matter, because pairing off is not the goal or completion of the heroic trajectory. The hero imprints his or her qualities on society and by doing so overcomes false or smothering social restrictions.

While she has an undoubted fascination for men, Becky Sharp is magnificently indifferent to them. The thought of “settling down” or “finding the right man” would be risible to her, though from childhood she enjoys male company. She marries Rawdon Crawley because he is an affable, though temporary, associate in the business of her life: getting on in high society without working. He is no more, Thackeray says bluntly, than her “upper servant and maître d’hôtel”.

Men, sex and marriage constitute an important, but by no means dominant, element of the lifelong survival game that Becky plays. Thackeray never suggests that Becky’s emotional life is such that it would influence her worldly actions.

Most women in fiction cling at some stage to their feelings for a man as a fixed point or priority; it is at least one known star by which to steer. Becky never reaches such a stage of surrender.

This is a radical conception of female character in the mid-Victorian period and it is what gives Becky her enduring interest. Like Tom Jones, she has disreputable beginnings: she is the daughter of a French chorus girl and an alcoholic drawing master who abuses his wife and daughter. But from the first moment we see her, she is on the make, not inclined to “rehabilitate” the memory of her parents and to prove that society’s disdain for them is snobbish or unkind, but to make a path for herself despite her disadvantages.

Becky’s world is all about her; and her challenge is to keep the faith in her own egotistical drive in a social world that is more venal, corrupt and smothering than anything portrayed in Henry Fielding’s London. Thackeray’s London is literally pre-Victorian, belonging to the Regency period in which the story is set, but also, through the biblical reference of the title and the generic names such as Lady Bareacres, purporting to be timeless.

Becky’s real problem lies not in her intelligence, education, beauty or cunning – on all of which she scores highly – but in the lack of liquidity in capital markets. It was simply very difficult for a clever middle-class girl with no money to acquire enough of it to live well. Had Becky and Rawdon lived at some time in the last 30 years, Rawdon could conceivably have found himself a position in an investment bank. He is an unflappable and not entirely straight gambler; he would seem to have the qualifications to work on the proprietary desk of an investment bank.

As it is Becky is debarred by convention from working and has enough scruple, we think, not to sell her body for cash. Whether she actually sleeps with Lord Steyne in order to keep his flow of expensive presents coming her way, we do not know – because Thackeray tells us he does not know either. Acquiring straight cash by marriage into the Crawley family is made difficult, as so often in Victorian law and fiction, by a disputed will. Becky’s access to money is therefore sporadic, and securing it is the main occupation of her life.

The sticking point with Becky – the point at which many readers have parted company with her – is her dislike of her son, little Rawdon. She has no maternal feeling. She ignores him or bullies him, and is scornful of his father’s fondness. She makes him eat in the kitchen or with the servants and dispatches him to boarding school as soon as possible. Once, on “seeing that tenderness was the fashion”, she kisses the boy in public, only for him to point out, loudly, that she never does so at home.

When her husband finds himself detained by a creditor, under a sort of civilian arrest, Becky makes no hurry to bail him out. Freed eventually by his sister-in-law, Rawdon returns home to find Becky canoodling with Lord Steyne. She pleads her innocence, but Rawdon finds a banknote for £1,000 in Becky’s purse and in the view of the world, she is now “a wicked woman, a heartless mother and a false wife”.

Our interest in Becky Sharp lies in the fact that she is a hero with no morally good qualities. She fulfils all the narrative requirements of the hero, but Thackeray has jettisoned the idea that such a person must be “good”. The strange thing is that it seems to work. Function trumps goodness. The novel is a user-friendly machine.