Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero / by William Makepeace Thackeray

Overshadowed for much of his relatively short writing tenure by others, W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863) was nonetheless a notable scribe, satirist and observer of human nature, particularly well-regarded for his fiction and editorial anecdotes by the reading public as well as the very same members of the British upper-class which he so cleverly caricatured. Born in India, Thackeray was brought to England permanently in 1815 after the death of his father. During the passage, his ship was shortly detained on the island of St. Helena where the then exiled Napoleon Bonaparte was pointed out to him. The emperor's permanent deposition, brought about as a result of the Battle at Waterloo, was an event which indirectly forms the backdrop for his 1848 serially published book Vanity Fair, the author's most celebrated novel and a prized work of Victorian literature.
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"Revenge may be wicked. But it's natural".

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Becky Sharp is a sly, artful woman always scheming towards a better deal in life. Orphaned as a girl after the deaths of her artist father and opera singer mother, Becky was kept at a privately run finishing school until she came of age and inherited a moderate income, though not one guaranteeing her financial independence. With her beauty, wit and devilishly clever charms of which few women can match, eligible bachelors and married men alike routinely fall prey to her wiles, exemplified when her hasty marriage to the easily manipulated Rawdon Crawley, done solely for want of financial security, is brought about without the consent or blessing of any of the man's relations. With Rawdon now her willing pawn, Becky feels no less limited to tampering with those in her immediate circle. She routinely intermingles herself into the company of men in high standing such as General Tufto and Lord Steyne, both fashionable aristocrats, while still finding time to aid Rawdon in cheating at cards and fleecing wealthy members of the ruling class out of their money.
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Though her flirtatious cocquetry is always winning her new male friends, Becky's shrewd, self-promoting lifestyle, enacted without conscience, has essentially eliminated the potential for female companionship. Amelia Sedley is the exception to the rule. A benevolent and compassionate though naievely ignorant and, in her own way, vainly fanciful girl brought down in society by her family's financial ruin, Amelia has remained Becky's loyal ally ever since their days at finishing school together, even spurning rumours that her own beloved husband Capt. George Osborne has been lured in by Becky's arts. But when the captain is killed in the war with Napoleon, Amelia's misfortune seems to only increase as her own father's spendthrift ways and misuse of her meager widow's legacy plunge Amelia and her newborn son into further destitution and misery while Becky's amoral behavior, often executed at Amelia's expense, seems to only elevate her financial status and social standing. Yet, tragically, such is the lot of those in 'Vanity Fair', where "the general impression is forever one more melancholy than mirthful".
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The title Vanity Fair is a direct homage to the term's original inception in John Bunyan's seventeenth century Christian allegorical treatise, The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a town called Vanity holds a year-round fair devoted to worldly novelties, tawdry attractions and all kinds of "licentious, fleshly" activities--"moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, knaves, and rogues, and that of all sorts." (Bunyan, 96)*. Thackeray's novel is in parts full-on parody while at other times soliciting solemnly stern lessons. Yet the narrative is always whimsical, the author's personal running commentary on the "upraised curtain" of life routinely conjecturing, as if a casual member of the audience, about the stage on which the world and its actors tread, their lives driven by pretentious yearnings and carnal desires perpetually leading to greivous, lamentable and often absurdly cruel consequences. The character of Becky Sharp, one of the most popular female literary figures ever since, was one of the first prominently featured anti-heroines to appear within an English novel.
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*Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1972.