Victorian novels "without heroes/heroines" – Barry Lyndon (1844) and Vanity Fair (1848): (mis)adapting W. M. Thackeray’s picaresque

Abstract

William Thackeray created, in the 1840s, two notorious versions of the British picaresque hero: one masculine and the other feminine – Barry Lyndon and Becky Sharp. Written from two different narrative perspectives, one autobiographical and the other omniscient, the respective stories develop a series of intrigues and adventures in high British society and in grand historical scenarios. Thackeray’s tales of relentless social climbing proved that the modern hero/heroine had indeed a thousand faces, not all of them palatable. Lyndon and Sharp are clearly anti-heroic figures that reveal a very dubious morality, including the practice of fraud/imposture and crime/murder. Yet these brilliant satirical portrayals would be misinterpreted in modern adaptations to the cinema, emerging as beautified and/or regenerated versions. Stanley Kubrick’s classic Barry Lyndon (1975) and Mira Nair’s post-feminist/post-colonial Vanity Fair (2004) may, therefore, be mere projections of the respective directors’ political and philosophical agendas rather than works that problematise acquired ethical structures.