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Vision and Satire: The Warped Looking Glass in Vanity Fair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert E. Lougy
Robert E. Lougy*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
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Abstract

In Vanity Fair Thackeray moves beyond the inherited traditions of moral and social satire as his vision of society darkens and as he realizes the anarchic potentials of laughter and satire. Examining not the particular ills of a certain society, but the diseased structures inherent in civilization itself, Thackeray creates a world defined by madness and emptiness; in it satire holds little sway. In trying to locate alternatives to or a way out of an apparently inexorable pattern of death and destruction, Thackeray looks, through the image of childhood, toward a pastoral vision, one that assumes various and yet similar configurations for those characters who travel into this visionary landscape. As Charlotte Brontë intuited, Thackeray's novel embodies both the impulses of the moral and social satirist and those of the visionary or prophet. It is the final irreconcilability of these double impulses that accounts for much of the power and haunting quality of Vanity Fair.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 2 , March 1975 , pp. 256 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

1 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston: Houghton, 1963). All subsequent citations will be from this edition. In order to facilitate the use of other editions, I have cited both chapter and page number.

2 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1946), ii, 423–24. Hereafter referred to as Letters.

3 Some studies of Vanity Fair that examine possible differences between the authorial and narrative voices include Sister M. Corona Sharp's “Sympathetic Mockery : A Study of the Narrator's Character in Vanity Fair,” ELH, 29 (1962), 324–36; Andrew Von Hendy's “Misunderstanding about Becky's Characterization in Vanity Fair,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 18 (1963), 279–83; Ann Y. Wilkinson's “The Tomevsian Way of Knowing the World : Technique and Meaning in Vanity Fair” ELH, 32 (1965), 370–87; Harriet Blodgett's “Necessary Presence: The Rhetoric of the Narrator in Vanity Fair,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 22 (1967), 211–23; Juliet McMaster's chapter on Vanity Fair in her Thackeray: The Major Novels (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 1–49; and Roger M. Swanson's “Vanity Fair: The Double Standard” in The English Novel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. George Goodin (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 126–44. My own position in this controversy will, I trust, be evident in my essay. While I certainly regard the narrative voice as being a vital part of Vanity Fair, I also see its various tones and stances as reflecting those larger dilemmas and strategies that Thackeray variously confronted and employed as the novel evolved.

4 An extensive discussion of the metaphor of war in Vanity Fair is found in Edgar F. Harden's “The Fields of Mars in Vanity Fair,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 10 (1965), 123–32.

5 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965), p. 16.

6 Contributions to the MORNING CHRONICLE, ed. Gordon N. Ray (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), p. 71. Hereafter referred to as Morning Chronicle.

7 The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (New York: Harper, 1904), xiv, 686.

8 The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 141.

9 “The real relevance of untrue propositions for each actual occasion is disclosed by art, romance, and by criticism in reference to ideals. . . . The truth that some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital truth as to the aesthetic achievement. It expresses the ‘great refusal’ which is its primary characteristic.” Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 158.

10 The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 109.

11 This scene is the only instance in which Becky may be said to realize her potential as artist; and it is significant, I think, that she does so in return for the kindness Lady Steyne has shown to her in a room otherwise filled with hostility toward Becky.

12 See, e.g., G. Armour Craig's “The Unpoetic Compromise: On the Relation between Private Vision and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction” in Self and Society in the Novel, ed. Mark Schorer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1956).

13 These comments were made by Charlotte Brontë in the Preface to the 2nd edition of Jane Eyre. The Norton Critical Ed. of Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn, contains the entire Preface (pp. 1–2).