Vanity Fair

In “The Vagabond Chapter”, William Thackeray uses language to discuss language, as a way of illuminating the character of Becky and the society in which she lives. Thackeray describes how the existing social order requires that those actions considered bad by that social order go unspoken. To judge people and their actions properly, one must do it silently, so goes the common wisdom. In the same way, Becky’s “crimes” cannot be described, and one must assume that the absence of praise for her character is revealing of defaults in her character.
This silence accomplishes a few things in society and in the novel. If a person’s flaws are enumerated and described, there is more pressure on the speaker to act upon their knowledge of these crimes. If one knows that Becky is stealing from Briggs, for example, that is one thing, but if one were to speak of it, they would become complicit unless they did something to intervene. Silence on the subject of other people’s cruelties is a means of escaping condemnation. Further, on occasion the words will implicate the listener. If one speaks against a particular cruelty, it may be the case that the listener has sinned in a similar way, and it is more damaging to the social order to disapprove of friends’ behaviors than it is continue on with hateful behavior.
Thackeray is literally performing the acts that he is decrying in the opening of “The Vagabond Chapter”. At the same time, he is satirizing his own writing and Becky’s behavior by pointing out that the silence is not a result of neglect or accident, but a carefully created silence. It is an open space cultivated to allow the reader to imagine their own “worst” and “unthinkable” deeds in the place that Thackeray has left open. By not describing her actions, he insures that Becky’s behavior is precisely as appalling as each reader needs it to be for the course of the novel to be satisfactory.
However, even as the novel criticizes society for needing to be obscure in its terms, it defers to the convention at which it is sneering. In this way, the novel meets the needs and expectations of the society it seeks to criticize, enabling its contemporaneous reader to carry on unabashed. There is an apparent hypocrisy here but at what level it operates is unclear. Did Thackeray intend to bate and sneer at his reader, or did he hope to evoke some transformative thought is difficult to say, however the former seems more likely. Nonetheless, the novel parallels Becky and the tale of the sirens, wherein the worst of it is kept underneath and in the imagination of the reader.
The aversion to naming is an interesting approach in writing but one that readers of nineteenth and early twentieth century canonical English literature should be familiar with. It not only a way of obscuring ugliness as Thackeray implies, it is a means of excluding a certain kind of reader; that certain kind would be anyone not of the writer’s class or educational background. Things do not need to be said because between the writer and the reader enough is shared that much can go unspoken. Becky, like Thackeray, knows this and uses it to her advantage, but is also hurt by it. For example, at various points, her bad doings are encouraged by those who share in their profits, but when Becky is found out that person joins others in punishing her. They disapprove of the same things, are spared the horror of reading anything “naughty”, while their social bonds are further secured by shared disapproval, much as affection for the novel is secured by hinting at more while giving readers exactly what they expect.