THE STRUCTURE OF VANITY FAIR
Thackeray's original title, Pen and Pencil Sketches of English
Society, indicates his intention to describe a succession
of social situations. As he was writing his novel, the idea of
society as a Vanity Fair came to him, and he changed both his
plan for the novel and the title. Though the name Vanity Fair
comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Thackeray
uses the concept in a very different way from Bunyan. For Bunyan,
Vanity Fair comprises all the worldly activities which distract
the Christian from salvation and lead to damnation; they are vanities
for this reason. At risk is the Christian's immortal soul.
The phrase "vanity fair" came to mean "a place where all is frivolity
and empty show; the world or a section of it as a scene of idle
amusement and unsubstantial display" (the Oxford English Dictionary
or OED ). For Thackeray, everyone lives in Vanity Fair
or society; vanity has become the desire for society's approval
and rewards; the individual seeks, not spiritual salvation, but
the rewards of this world–success, status, and wealth.
The change from sketches
about society to society as a vanity fair raises a major critical question; is the novel rambling
and formless? To paraphrase the subtitle, is it a novel without
a structure? This issue was raised by contemporary reviewers.
Robert Rintoul, who praised Thackeray's realism, saw the novel
as episodic: "if putting Vanity Fair aside as a fiction of high
art, we look at it as a series of bits from life, it is entitled
to the first ranks as a set of sketches lifelike and natural"
(1848). Supporting this view is the time difference in the first
half and the second half of the novel; the first half covers
two years before Waterloo and is compact while the second half sprawls
over the next twenty-five years. Even if the novel lacks form,
is that necessarily a serious flaw? The Victorians did not perceive
structure and unity in a novel the same way as modern readers,
who have been raised on James and Conrad and critical theories
focusing on structure.
But is the perception that the novel lacks unity accurate?
- Do major themes, like selfishness,
give it form?
- Do the parallel lives of Becky and Amelia structure the novel?
They leave school together, to enter the world; their subsequent
careers, which include marriage, motherhood, and financial struggles,
intersect several times; the tender, loving, and passive Amelia
contrasts with the ruthless, ambitious, and active Becky.
- Is his portrayal of society, with its crippling, perverted
values and its lovelessness, the center which holds the novel
together?
- Does the narrator hold the novel
together and structure it?
- Is Vanity Fair a panoramic novel, i.e., a novel which
presents a broad view of a society? Percy Lubbock uses Vanity
Fair as an illustration of the panoramic novel; he says
that Thackeray creates
the impression of a world, a society, a time–certain
manners of life within a few square miles of London, a hundred
years ago. Thackeray flings together a crowd of the people
he knows so well, and it matters not at all if the tie that
holds them to each other is of the slightest... The light
link is enough for the unity of his tale, for that unity does
not depend on an intricately woven intrigue. It depends in
truth upon one fact only, the fact that all his throng of
men and women are strongly, picturesquely typical of the world
from which they are taken–that in all their different ways
can add to the force of its effect. The book is not the story
of any of them, it is a story which they unite to tell, a
chapter in the notorious career of well-to-do London. Exactly
how the various "plots" evolve is not the main matter; behind
them is the presence and the pressure of a greater interest,
the mass of life which Thackeray packs into his novel.
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