Essay about Portrayal of Jane Osborne in Vanity Fair

The Redundant Woman Thackeray’s portrayal of Jane Osborne in Vanity Fair is very troubling to the reader of the twentieth century. Grown to be a woman who is stuck under her tyrannical father’s roof, her life appears to be very confining and menial. Her sister snubs her, her nephew mocks her behind her back, her father mocks her to her face, and her main role in life seems to be as her father’s housekeeper. However, Thackeray’s portrayal would have had a very different effect on the Victorian reader. While all of these things which affronted us would have been equally awful to them, Thackeray uses another key phrase which has lost its effect on our modern minds: that unfortunate and now middle-aged young lady (448). Jane Osborne’s†¦show more content†¦Michael Anderson has estimated from a sample of the 1851 census that some 1.8 million adult women, 8.9 per cent of the adult female population were surviving without a husband in the mid-nineteenth century. Furth ermore, this estimate does not include unsupported women below the age of 25 (Parkinson). When this destiny was denied, the fate of a redundant woman was very grim. Fate An unmarried woman was generally left in an untenable situation. Especially for the middle class, a redundant woman was often a disastrous curse, where just a few years before she had been a dubious commodity. Unmarried women, as we have seen in Thackeray, were often governesses. A governess, however, was the subject of much social controversy, even spawning a whole literary trend, the governess novel, which although nice to read was not nice as a character reference. Miss Firkins was the archetypal redundant woman of Vanity Fair; her lot in life was that of a parasitic lady-in-waiting, and temporary, after which she was to be shuffled between country relatives. Beyond these there were few options. For the talented, writing was becoming a viable living, though certainly not at all the easy life for which Victorian women were raised. The many barriers restricting