Vanity Fair (1847)

I wonder if anyone who works for the magazine Vanity Fair has ever read the book. I would think that if they had, they wouldn't call it Vanity Fair because Thackeray was (very effectively in my opinion) making fun of the kind of people who live that type of life style.

(Maybe someday I'll write more of a review but wanted to get that idea down.) ( )

I wonder if anyone who works for the magazine Vanity Fair has ever read the book. I would think that if they had, they wouldn't call it Vanity Fair because Thackeray was (very effectively in my opinion) making fun of the kind of people who live that type of life style.

(Maybe someday I'll write more of a review but wanted to get that idea down.) ( )

I enjoyed this immensely! Although it is long, it never bogged down. My only regret is that I didn't read this years ago!! ( )

Vanity Fair is sometimes called the best British novel ever written, but it's totally not. Middlemarch is way better. Honestly, VF's not even in the top ten. So why do people love it so much? Because of Becky Sharp. Which is funny, because she's not what it was supposed to be about.

Becky Sharp is to Thackeray as Satan is to Milton. The argument has been made in both cases that the author secretly intended us to love their most memorable characters, but that's not true - or at least it's not that easy. While both dominate their stories, both authors are clearly uncomfortable with the fact that that's happened.

Vanity Fair didn't really take shape until Thackeray turned it into an autobiography: the Amelia / Dobbins story, which he thought of after he'd submitted the first few chapters and which caused an eight-month delay while he reconfigured the story, mirrors his own one-sided love affair with his friend's wife. Dobbins is based on himself. And certainly their story turns out to be an important counterweight to Becky's; without it, the novel would be a slighter work about a femme fatale, arguably more fun but less important. With them it turns into a sprawling landmark in realist literature, one that unarguably influenced War & Peace.

But Amelia and Dobbins are such milquetoasts that Becky insists on running away with the book. They're nice people, and you root for them, but during their chapters...you wish it would get back to Amelia's frenemy.

And Thackeray attacks Becky, again and again, viciously. His most telling attack is in her constantly reiterated failure to love her son, which is a mortal sin in Victorian novels as it is in the rest of them. A father can occasionally be forgiven for not loving his children; never a mother. But there's also this deadly passage toward the end of the novel, in which he defensively compares her to the old-school, evil mermaid:"Has [the author] once forgotten the rules of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling around corpses, but above the waterline, I ask, has not everything been proper?"It frankly feels like Thackeray is punishing Becky for taking over the book that he'd tried to take over himself. He sounds confused: like he wishes the whole novel was a moral one, and realizes only now that it's failed to be that. (Remember, this book couldn't be retooled; it was released in installments, and everyone had already read the rest of them.)

Consider also the ending. Becky has a moment of magnanimity and reconciles Dobbins and Amelia. Then she turns around and murders Jos. (Don't try to argue that she didn't murder him. Thackeray may not say it, but he leaves little doubt.) Which feels more honest to you? Which feels like something Becky would do? She's a calculating, immoral woman who may have been (but probably wasn't) involved in countless affairs by this time, but did you get the sense that she's a murderess? Thackeray's book has gotten away from him, and he's betraying her in an attempt to snatch it back.

Compare this with Middlemarch, also a landmark realist novel, and also one released in installments, but one in which it's perfectly clear that Eliot had the entire plot, thread by thread, perfectly planned from the beginning. Eliot never lets her book get away from her. And when I say that, and when you consider the fact that Middlemarch includes no character as compelling as Becky Sharp - she would have despised Dorothea - it sounds like Vanity Fair might be more fun than Middlemarch, but it's not. Thackeray's sense of human nature isn't as strong as Eliot's (or as Tolstoy's), and the novel isn't as satisfying.

It's good, because Becky Sharp escaped from somewhere in Thackeray's brain and took it from him. What doesn't belong to her is just okay. ( )

I enjoyed this immensely! Although it is long, it never bogged down. My only regret is that I didn't read this years ago!! ( )