Vanity Fair in Reading the Classics

May 28, 2011 Everyman added it · review of another edition

In his day, Thackeray was as widely read as any other Victorian author, but he has lost much of his popularity. He wrote only two books that are much read today, Vanity Fair and The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

Following a somewhat strange opening passage, discussed below, Vanity Fair opens with the departure from Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies of its female protagonist, Becky Sharp, and her friend Amelia. The basic story follows these two women and their friends, families, and lovers for th In his day, Thackeray was as widely read as any other Victorian author, but he has lost much of his popularity. He wrote only two books that are much read today, Vanity Fair and The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

Following a somewhat strange opening passage, discussed below, Vanity Fair opens with the departure from Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies of its female protagonist, Becky Sharp, and her friend Amelia. The basic story follows these two women and their friends, families, and lovers for the next twenty or so years as their lives in England and on the Continent unfold. I won't say more about the plot other than to say that for me it has some times of interest and enjoyment and some others where it drags almost interminably.

Vanity Fair opens with an rather strange introductory passage, "Before the Curtain," in which the Manager of the Performance of a puppet show sits before the curtain reflecting proudly on his puppets: "the famous little Becky Puppet has been pronounced to be uncommonly flexible in the joints and lively on the wire: the Amelia Doll, though it has had a smaller circle of admirers, has yet been carved and dressed with the greatest care by the artist...."

While from this point the novel opens much as any regular novel would, and indeed the book is subtitled "A Novel Without a Hero," Thackeray does occasionally interject reminders that we are watching a puppet show, and closes the book with "Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

Although it would be easy to dismiss this seemingly whimsical sort-of-casual frame story, I think that's a mistake. Puppet shows were a staple of recreation in Victorian fairs, so Thackeray’s readers would have been very familiar with them, their form and function. As in puppet shows, Thackeray’s characters are stereotypical caricatures of familiar figures – the scheming woman using her wits (and her wiles) to rise from nothing to enter the highest levels of society; the unassuming “finished” young woman with no talent for anything but being subservient to a man; the loyal lover keeping his private faith for decades; the wealthy fat fool gourmand; the stuck-up faux-superior private schoolmistress; and so on. Thackeray is perfectly accurate in calling Becky “uncommonly flexible”; it is not just in the joints that she is flexible, but in her ability to adapt to any position in which she is placed by the puppet master. And Amelia has indeed been primped and prepared for a role in society with great care, but with little more to recommend her.

Like puppets, the characters in Vanity Fair show almost no character development; no ability to learn from the circumstances they are placed in. (In the third chapter of the book Becky is unsuccessfully making up to Jos; in the last, the 67th chapter, Becky is once again making up to Jos, once again unsuccessfully. At the end here they are back at the beginning.)

Because this book, like a puppet show, isn’t about the characters; it’s about the humor of social commentary and of the absurdity of life in Vanity Fair. That’s what makes it both at times a quite good and at times a quite mediocre book. ...more

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Jan 25, 2014 Nanci Svensson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A fascinatingly thorough pre-DSM-V case study of a female sociopath. Thackeray would have made a fine diagnostician.
However, though Rebecka's character in deed is ghastly realistically portrayed, and consistent with the behavior of someone whose life is a constant project of hustling, I found the predictability of the other inhabitants of Vanity Fair a little tiresome. Though I am sure that is just the moral of the story, a couple of hundred pages less of whining about the behavior of the genti ...more

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