Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

Throughout Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1848), the narrator toys with the reader.  He inserts himself at the end and beginning of the narrative, at the beginning of chapters, in the middle of the action.  He announces that he knows everything about what is going to happen, yet he declines at points to reveal information that is private or boring or just not information he cares to provide.  His satirical voice, sometimes dripping in sarcasm, makes one well aware of what he thinks of his characters, yet he may often seem to urge the reader to admire a character whose behavior is contemptible.  In this narrative that traces the lives of  two young women from school hood to maturity, he shows impatience with them in various ways.  When a group of characters travels to tour German republics, he informs us that he observed them all together at dinner and in other locations.  This is a throwback to Fielding, and it can seem an old-fashioned device—but Thackeray makes it so on purpose, I think.  Towards the end, after he has slowly, torturously developed a potential linkage between two characters who have known each other from the beginning of the novel, who are separated at one point for years, one of whom loves the other, who in  turn seems indifferent to him, just as things seem to be headed towards the great moment, the narrator interrupts with long, tedious descriptions of German nobility and places and habits.  Finally, the relationship between the two seems permanently severed, only to be rescued in the final pages of this long novel.

As a fictional record of early 19^th-century life in England, of the daily goings-on of the British upper class and of their servants and of the middle class, this brilliant and acerbic satire of the aristocracy is superb.  Only a few of the aristocratic families and individuals we encounter actually have money.  Most struggle frantically to maintain the habits and lifestyle of people with money—they scramble for money or to make the most of what they have or to live on credit and unpaid bills.  Their need for money seems to be one of Thackeray’s main interests. He pays much attention to the position of women, who rely on their fathers and then their husbands for social status and economic survival.  Fathers have complete authority over whom their daughters marry. Thackeray comments often on the precarious positions of women, though he is not so forward as to suggest they ought to be allowed to live their own lives.  But he’s aware of their precarious positions.  He lampoons the vanity of many of his characters, both men and women.  One man in particular, Joseph Sedley, spends much time gazing in the mirror and thinking about his clothing and appearance, even though he is overweight and shy around women.

The relationship of the pure, virtuous, and somewhat dim Amelia Sedley and of the conniving, amoral, self-interested Becky Sharp suggest the relationship of Melanie Wilkes and Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.  Surely Mitchell read Vanity Fair.

In Bleak House, Dickens seemed wholly engaged with his characters.  In Vanity Fair Thackeray’s narrator keeps a distance: passing judgment, criticizing, analyzing.

Vanity Fair is clearly aware of the outer British empire.  Most of Thackeray’s portrayals of people from India and other locations are at least mildly satirical.  He portrays a one-fourth African woman as lacking in intelligence.  A clear sense of national and racial privilege marks the novel.

As a novel that gives the reader pleasure, that brings to life a particular time and place, and that makes one interested in and concerned for its characters, I place Vanity Fair with War and Peace and Bleak House as among the best I’ve read.