What is the theme of Vanity Fair?

Answer 1

Vanity

There is one clear, overarching theme in Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, and Thackeray telegraphs it in his title and subtitle. In the pages of Vanity Fair, all is vanity and all are vain. Some are more vain --- more obsessed with self and with the ephemeral treasures of social position and money --- than others, but none, in the author's estimation, can be called heroic.

The title is borrowed from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, in which Vanity Fair is a town that exists for the purpose of diverting men and women from the road to heaven. The town's residents are all mean and ignorant, and they all make their living by enticing passersby to spend what they have on worldly vanities --- items that offer brief sensual pleasure but have no lasting value. Thackeray transports Vanity Fair to London in the early 1800s and peoples his version with characters, primarily from the middle and upper classes, who live only to obtain higher social status and more money, and who are happy to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and betray in the pursuit of these goals. It is worth noting, as well, that Thackeray's Vanity Fair, like Bunyan's, is explicitly a godless place; both authors believe that the unrestrained vanity they portray is possible only among people who have no concept of a God who sets, upholds, and enforces moral standards. In an often-quoted letter to a personal correspondent, written in July 1847, before Vanity Fair was finished, Thackeray wrote, "What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world greedy, pompous, mean, perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue."

Thackeray succeeded so well in doing this that the novel has been faulted, more often than for anything else, for the unrelenting baseness of its characters. The vainest of all is Becky Sharp. Becky is proud of the physical attractiveness and clever wit that allow her to charm men. Her ultimate effect on them is similar to a spider's effect on a fly, which finds itself trapped and consumed. As her first husband, Rawdon Crawley, goes off to the Bat-tle of Waterloo, Becky muses that she will be free to marry a wealthier man if Rawdon is killed. When he is not killed, Becky makes the best of it, using his aristocratic pedigree to win entrance to the social circles she seeks and to help her avoid paying her bills. Meanwhile, she uses other men, especially Lord Steyne, to get what she cannot get from her husband (money), carrying on public relationships that humiliate him, and ignoring him and their son. After Rawdon has finally left her for a faraway island, where he dies of a tropical disease, Joseph Sedley has the bad luck to encounter Becky a second time, and the drama of the spider and the fly again unfolds. Becky seduces Joseph and soon talks him into taking out a life insurance policy with her as beneficiary. Within months, Joseph is dead of poison; whether by Becky's hand or not is left to the reader to decide. There is scant evidence in the novel that murder would be beyond her.

Most of those around Becky are not better than she is, they are simply less clever and less desperate. Joseph is lazy, gluttonous, dull, and uncaring. When his father goes bankrupt and his whole family is on the verge of starvation, he doesn't get around to sending relief until it is nearly too late. George Osborne, Amelia's husband, is unable to love anyone but himself. George's father is mean, calculating, and unforgiving. Old Sir Pitt is a vulgar skinflint. Reverend Bute Crawley is not at all reverent and lets his overbearing gossip of a wife write his sermons. The list goes on and on.

Among the main characters, only Amelia Sedley and William Dobbin approach virtue. Amelia's fault is not so much that she is vain as that she is too blind and too shallow to recognize either vanity or virtue even at point-blank range. She idolizes George, the self-absorbed cad; she fails to see that Dobbin is a better man by far, even after years of his selfless attention to her. And Amelia is not completely above vanity. She is self-centered enough to accept Dobbin's devotion and his generous gifts without thinking of his feelings and without even expressing much gratitude.

Dobbin alone possesses real integrity and moral maturity, but even he is tinged with vanity. He is selfless, loyal, generous, and kind, ever content to give more than he takes. Dobbin's failure, similar to Amelia's, is his lack of discrimination about the characters of those around him. As a result, he gives people much more and much better than they deserve; in other words, he spends his life casting pearls before swine. And Dobbin's vanity lies in his dogged devotion to Amelia, who is, like the wares hawked at Bunyan's Vanity Fair, glittery but not golden. She is not a heroine, worthy of a hero; she is just a generally decent, conventional, sweet-tempered woman. Though he does finally realize that Amelia has not been worthy of the adoration he has heaped on her, as a character, Dobbin is weakened by the fact that it takes him half a lifetime to develop a realistic view of Amelia.

Answer 2

The theme of "Vanity Fair" by William Makepeace Thackeray revolves around the pursuit of social status, wealth, and success, often at the expense of morality. It satirizes the superficiality and materialism of society while exploring themes of ambition, manipulation, and the consequences of vanity.