Vicious

Vicious gives significant attention to the way that wealth and class differences influence interpersonal relationships. Emilia and Vicious, the novel’s two protagonists, have radically different understandings of the value of money. For Emilia, money is desirable as a source of stability and freedom, but its presence or absence has no effect on her sense of who she is. For Vicious, by contrast, money is the foundation of his identity. Prior to the character transformation he undergoes with Emilia’s help, he understands himself primarily as a person with money and doesn’t know who he would be without it.

Emilia’s perspective on money is based in pragmatism, not class identity. When she takes the lucrative job with Vicious’s company, she does so out of an immediate need for funds to pay for the things she needs, such as rent for the upcoming month and Rosie’s medication. Her goal is to escape the hardships that come with financial precarity, not to elevate her social status. Even once she has a high-paying job, Emilia sees money as something that can vanish as easily as it has appeared, especially given her fraught emotional history with Vicious. Money, to Emilia, is a tool, one that may not always be at hand. She measures the value of money in its effect on her life, not as something that designates a person’s worth. Indeed, she is highly suspicious of what she sees as the corrupting effect of wealth, a result of the bullying she faced as a lower-income student in the ultra-wealthy All Saints High School.

Vicious’s family history means that wealth and money are ingrained parts of his identity. As a teenager, he readily thinks of Emilia as beneath him because her parents work as domestic staff for his. Even as an adult, his ability to use money to manipulate others—including Emilia—gives him a sense of superiority. Though he instinctively craves the power and social status that come with wealth, he feels an intense need to distance himself from the negative example of his father, who values money at the expense of people and relationships. He is capable of seeing money as a tool at some points and recognizes that his financial privilege has helped him acquire his lucrative career far more quickly than he might have done if he hadn’t had this advantage. Yet the novel suggests that when Vicious trades shares of his company to Dean in exchange for more time in New York to reconcile with Emilia, this sacrifice matters not because of the actual dollar value of those shares (though this value is calculated in the millions) but because of the symbolic resonance of this money to Vicious. Ultimately, giving up the money and choosing not to fight for his late father’s estate helps Vicious see that money need not be the foundation of his identity. Instead, the chance to reconcile with Emilia adds much greater value to his life than did any of the money he lost to get that chance. The novel therefore suggests that money is best viewed as a useful tool in service of a life built on relational values, rather than as an end in itself.