In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar hold up Vanity Fair's Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp as 19th century examples of the age-old female archetypes of angel and "monster." In the passage Gilbert and Gubar quote, Becky is seen as "writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling around corpses." She is, in short, not only a a proverbial monster, but an actual one as well (though she is "proper, agreeable, and decorous"on the surface.I balked at this denouncement of Becky. Becky is one of the most sparkling and fearless heroines in all of literature; one whom I, personally, would be proud to relate to. She is sharp, like her last name, with beauty and to match her wit and cunning. She is ambitious and resourceful, and fights for everything; her arsenal is full of tools, and she is not afraid to use men's lust against them.
Gilbert and Gubar hold, however, that she is being depicted as "an emblem of filthy materiality, committed only to [her] private ends," and thus "an accident of nature." The very same behavior, assertion and aggressiveness, would be lauded in a man, of course, but not in little Becky Sharp.
The patriarchal hegemony would have her be more like her counterpart, Amelia: eternally calm and quiet and "good," and furthermore, in the words of Abbe d'Ancourt, cognizant of the fact that she "owes her Being to the Comfort and the Profit of man." This is not Becky, however, with her "demoniac" longing to escape into a reality where she sustains herself, free from the anima projections (as Carl Jung called them) of a man.
I am not (nor is Becky) waiting for Prince Charming. We'll rescue ourselves, thank you.
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