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The Vanity Fair
The background of this novel is England in the first half of
the 19th century. The novel opens with the departure of two fellow girls,
Amelia and Becky, from their school to enter into society. After Becky fails
to entrap Amelia’s brother Joseph into marrying her, she works in the
Crawley family as a governor. There she secretly gets married to Rawdon, the
son of the Old Crawley, because Rawdon would be the inheritor of his rich
aunt’s fortune. However, the marriage irritates Rawdon’s aunt and he loses
the hope for inheritance.
In the meantime, Amelia marries her childhood sweetheart George
Osborne with the help of Dobbin, George’s friend, who also loves Amelia. At
the climax of the war with Napoleon, George is sent to war and killed in the
Battle of Waterloo. Widowed Amelia gives birth to a son and lived with her
father who has gone bankrupt, while her life-long admirer Dobbin remains
devoted to her.
Becky manages to live in grand style on nothing a year. She
enters a liaison with Lord Steyne, a rich, old aristocrat. By chance, her
husband, Rawdon finds this secret and leaves home in rage. He leaves England
for the West Indian and dies of fever there. Becky, after this scandal, is
unable to live in London any longer and roams all over the Europe Continent.
While Becky wanders through the Continent, she met her former
friend Amelia who is traveling with her son and Dobbin. Amelia still
cherishes the memory of her dear husband and refuses Dobbin’s love. However,
Becky shows Amelia the letter in which Amelia’s husband asks Becky to elope
with him on the Eve of the Battle of Waterloo. This shattered Amelia’s idol.
Becky goes on living with Joseph, Amelia’s brother, until he dies, leaving
all his property to her. She returns to England and lives like a grand lady.
Amelia gets married to Dobbin to reward his lifelong affection.
Taking the experience of Becky and Amelia as the clue of this
novel, Thackeray paints a truthful picture of the aristocratic-bourgeois
society in England in the early 19th century. In this society, all member of
the upper class had no sense of shame. They would rather sell everything in
order to grub money. This inevitably led to artificial and hypocritical
human relationships. Thackeray attacks this social relationship by bitterly
satirizing the individuals in the different social strata of the upper
society.
Becky Sharp, the most distinctive character, is a model of this
money-grubbing impulse. Her ultimate desire is to gain wealth and position
to change her humble and obscure status. She excellently masters every means
to get what she wants, such as telling lies, taking unscrupulous and mean
actions. She never stops challenging her fate and running after her preys.
The unprincipled adventuress, under her pretty and pure mask, carries out
her plans with brilliant head as well as accurate judgment. Cringing to the
rich and the noble, shrewd Becky perceives how shallow, vain and worthless
they are. She actually is a high-spirited strategist in the battle of life.
Yet Becky is not an exception among the characters in the Vanity Fair
because every one wishes to gain something and behaves nearly the same as
Becky. The following is an excerpt that describes how Becky smartly
comprises with her husband’s debtors.
Rebecca’s object in her
journey to London was to effect a kind of compromise with her husband’s
numerous creditors, and by offering them a dividend of nine pence or a
shilling in the pound, to secure a return for him into his own country. It
does not become us to trace the steps which she took in the conduct of this
most difficult negotiation; but, having shown them to their satisfaction,
that the sum which she was empowered to offer was all her husband’s
available capital, and having convinced them that Colonel Crawley would
prefer a perpetual retirement on the Continent to a residence in this
country with his debts unsettled; having proved to them that there was no
possibility of money accruing to him from other quarters and no earthly
chance of their getting a larger dividend than that which she was empowered
to offer, she brought the Colonel’s creditors unanimously to accept their
proposals, and purchased with fifteen hundred pounds of ready money, more
than ten times that amount of debts.
…………
Rebecca received their congratulations with perfect modesty;
ordered a bottle of sherry and a bread cake to the little dingy lodgings
where she dwelt while conducting the business, to treat the enemy’s lawyers;
shook hands with them at parting, in excellent good-humor, and returned
straightway to the Continent, to rejoin her husband and son, and acquaint
the former with the glad news of his entire liberation. As for the latter,
he had been considerably neglected during his mother’s absence by
Mademoiselle Genevieve, her French maid: for that young woman, contracting
an attachment for a soldier in the garrison of Calais, forgot her charge in
the society of this militaire, and little Rawdon very narrowly escaped
drowning on Calais sands at this period, where the absent Genevieve had left
and loft him.
Another heroine of this novel is Amelia who is tender,
sentimental but doll-like, just in contrast to Becky who is all trickiness
and resourcefulness. They are representatives of two different types of
women in that age. Amelia stands for women who submit their fate while Becky
represents those who rebel and try to be the mistress. Yet both of them are
victims of the society because they spiritually lose themselves.
The subtitle of this book is A Novel Without a Hero.
The novel not only has no hero, but implies the non-existence of heroism.
Although there is one positive character Dobbin, who is always honest,
general, and helpful to others, he is only a positive character rather than
a hero, because he lives without any valuable aim and never wants to change
or leave the life that he disgusts with.
Above all, Thackeray pictures a real vanity fair in England
which he introduced this name from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The
fascination of the book is indisputable. Besides its exhibition of the
worldly life, the perfect intellectual honesty of the writer, the sad or
satirical sincerity with which he gives in his evidence against human
nature, is the most prominent. This novel makes him one of the greatest
critical realists just like his contemporary Dickens. Apart from using
satire and subtle humor in his works, Thackeray is also a moralist with an
aim to produce a moral impression in all his novels.
“The style, while it has the raciness of individual peculiarity and the
careless case of familiar gossip, is as clear, pure, and flexible as if its
sentences had been subjected to repeated revision, and every pebble which
obstructed its lucid and limpid flow had been laboriously removed.” (Edwin
Percy Whipple, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1865) Thackeray, like Dickens, is a
glorious and unneglectable figure of critical realism in 19th century
England.
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