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Despite the harsh consequences Becky Sharp suffers, she ultimately prevails by reinventing herself as a governess, a wife, an actress, and a widow. Though “somebody [comes] and [sweeps] it down rudely” each time she makes “a little circle for herself with incredible toils and labour,” she begins anew (690). Becky’s reputation inevitably catches up to her in each new setting and circle of aristocratic friends, yet her sense of humor and carefree attitude allow her to proceed with new plans. Becky, in fact, is the only high-spirited character in Vanity Fair, creating her own rules and showing that culture’s harsh moral invectives can be frivolous and ineffective when rumors about her character fail to discourage Becky from hatching new schemes to marry gullible men for economic security and respectability.
In discussing the underlying social and political climate that so frequently reflects the economic conflicts experienced by the femme fatale, I must argue here that her physical appearance works to construct an acceptable image of the mid-Victorian woman, easy to mistake as the domestic ideal, a woman suitable to bourgeois standards. Sophisticated beauties, like Dickens’ Lady Dedlock in Bleak House or plain-featured women such as Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, use their assets to cross the boundaries of respectable homes, but certainly not as the role of seductress or dangerous woman. The waiflike physique of Becky Sharp seemingly poses no threat, while Lady Dedlock appears too noble a figure to have made any moral transgressions. Though Braddon’s Lady Audley is beautiful, she disguises her beauty behind a façade of childlike innocence, while her delicate features conceal her rapacious nature. Overall, Braddon’s popular Victorian femme fatale seems too harmless to be taken for a Fatal Woman. Yet such camouflage is necessary if dangerous women are to invade aristocratic homes, to break from poverty, and to enchant elderly gentlemen with their innocence, helplessness, or fragility.