Vision and Satire: The Warped Looking Glass in Vanity Fair

AbstractIn Vanity Fair Thackeray moves beyond the inherited traditions of moral and social satire as his vision of society darkens and as he realizes the anarchic potentials of laughter and satire. Examining not the particular ills of a certain society, but the diseased structures inherent in civilization itself, Thackeray creates a world defined by madness and emptiness; in it satire holds little sway. In trying to locate alternatives to or a way out of an apparently inexorable pattern of death and destruction, Thackeray looks, through the image of childhood, toward a pastoral vision, one that assumes various and yet similar configurations for those characters who travel into this visionary landscape. As Charlotte Brontë intuited, Thackeray's novel embodies both the impulses of the moral and social satirist and those of the visionary or prophet. It is the final irreconcilability of these double impulses that accounts for much of the power and haunting quality of Vanity Fair.