CHARACTERIZATION
Society
Like Austen in Emma, Thackeray in Vanity
Fair identifies the
place or status characters have in society and the nature of their
relationship to society. Unlike Austen, who
portrays the limited world of Highbury, Thackeray fills his novel with
people, places, and travel. Almost all his characters are
individualized, no matter how briefly they appear. We know their
attitudes, their values, their hypocrisies and pettiness, their class,
their desires and feelings. Taken together they make up the society
that Thackeray calls Vanity Fair.
His characters also satirize the institutions they serve
or represent: Lord Steyne and Sir Pitt Crawley (both the father and the
son) show up Parliament, the rotten election system, and the
aristocracy; religion is satirized with the Rev. Bute Crawley (the
Church of England) and with Mr. Pitt Crawley and Lady Southdown
(Dissent);
the army leadership is satirized with General Tufto; the Colonial and
foreign service, with Joseph Sedley, Rawdon Crawley, Mr. Pitt Crawley,
and Tapeworm; the financial system, with Osborne senior. Excluded,
however, are the working class, the poor, the homeless and the
destitute.
In view of his characters' vitality and their
representing major institutions, is it tenable to suggest that society
is the real protagonist of
Vanity Fair?
The Hero
Even though Thackeray subtitles his novel A Novel
Without a Hero, readers in Thackeray's day and in ours want a hero,
and many assign the role to Dobbin. Does Thackeray in fact regard him
as the hero of the novel or even as a hero? If you see
Dobbin as the hero, then the subtitle and the narrator's references to
the novel's having no hero are part of Thackeray's satire of novelistic
conventions and manipulation of the unthinking or careless reader. Is
there any doubt that George Osborne is used to satirize the
conventional hero?
Amelia
The question of whether the novel has a heroine is more complex. Amelia
seems to be the conventional heroine–sweet, passive, self-sacrificing,
gentle, tender, and loving. And Thackeray calls her a heroine–at times,
but he contradicts himself at other times and says she is not a heroine
(he also refers to Becky as a heroine and not a heroine). In addition,
he repeatedly calls Amelia "weak" and "selfish." Of Dobbin's faithful
love and decades-long submission to her, Thackeray wrote to a friend
that finally "he will find her not worth having." Thackeray wrote his
mother that
"My object is not to make a perfect character
or anything like it. Don't you see how odious all the people are in the
book (with the exception of Dobbin)–behind whom all there lies a dark
moral I hope. What I want is to make a set of people living without God
in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompous mean perfectly
self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior
virtue."
Does this judgment apply to Amelia? Does Thackeray
admire her wholeheartedly or admire some of her traits and behavior but
not others? If she is not the heroine, is Thackeray using her to expose
the selfishness of the conventional heroine?
Becky
Becky has much more appeal than Amelia for most
readers, as Thackeray acknowledged:
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...
(x, "Before the Curtain")
Born with no advantages, in a society that values rank and wealth,
Becky makes her way to the highest levels of society through her own
resources, with determination, intelligence, hard work, and talent. She
is resourceful and bounces back from every reversal. At the same time,
her behavior and character are morally indefensible; she constantly
manipulates others, she lies, she cheats, she steals, she betrays
Amelia, and perhaps she even commits a murder. As the novel progresses,
some readers feel that she becomes more dangerous and villainous. If
so, was Thackeray upset that so many readers found her attractive? Does
a change in her portrayal reflect ambivalence toward Becky? was he
both attracted to her energy and courage and repelled by some of her
actions, for instance? Or is the perception that her characterization
changes false?
Dyson explains Becky's appeal in terms of the corrupt
nature of society and her role in that society:
..surely we do admire Becky, and legitimately,
however glad we are to be outside the range of her wiles? The fact is
that she belongs to Vanity Fair, both as its true reflection, and as
its victim; for both of which reasons, she very resoundingly serves it
right. Like Jonson's Volpone, she is a fitting scourge for the world
which created her–fitting aesthetically, in the way of poetic justice,
and fitting morally, in that much of her evil is effective only against
those who share her taint. Dobbins is largely immune to her, since he
is neither a trifler, a hypocrite nor a snob. The other characters are
all vulnerable in one or other of these ways, and we notice that those
who judge her most harshly are frequently the ones who have least
earned such a right.
A question arises about Becky's innocence in the last
portion of the novel. Specifically, is she innocent of adultery? and/or
of murder? Thackeray offers a variety of opinions from self-interested
and self-righteous observers, who range from the servants to the
highest levels of fashionable society; the narrator's opinion remains
ambiguous. It is important to keep in mind that though what characters
say about one another is significant, their judgments may reveal more
about the speaker or about society's values than about the person being
discussed; thus, the opinion offered may not be trustworthy. The
question of
Becky's personal innocence raises a larger question; how important or
meaningful is the question of her innocence, in view of how universally
corrupt society is and how selfish the people judging her are? Who in
this society is innocent?
Character Development
Do the characters change or develop in any significant
way? or do we merely come to know them better as Thackeray reveals more
details about them? Edwin Muir describes Thackeray's presentation of
his characters as a gradual "unfolding in a continuously widening
present"; the characters have the same weaknesses, vanities and foibles
throughout, the only change being "our knowledge of them." The
character who seems to change most is Rawdon Crawley, but how great is
his change actually? If he does change significantly, are his love for
Becky and his love for his son a sufficient, convincing reason for his
change?
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