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Edith Wharton, born in Edith Newbold Jones, was a Pulitzer Prize-winner for American novelist, short-story writer and designer. She was an American female novelist of the 20th century. As one of the major figures in American literary history, more than 40 volumes--novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, Wharton had a long and remarkable life. Her complex characters and subtle point-of-view cause the reading of Wharton’s fiction both challenging and rewarding, and her novels and short fictionare notable for their vividness, satire, irony, and wit. It is the novel that established Wharton’ career as a writer, and in many ways it is the first well-defined attitude for her rebellion against the pressure of her class. Edith Wharton kept right on climbing, claiming extraordinary achievements both as an inpidual and as a writer. During the World War I, she established the American Hostels for Refugees and the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee. For these humanitarian efforts in Europe, she received high honor from the governments of France and Belgium.
In the paper, the similar and different reasons of the tragedies of the heroines in Vanity Fair and The House of Mirth are analyzed. The similar reasons involve social reasons, family reasons and personal reasons, and the different reasons include their different attitudes towards love and marriage. Through the analysis of heroines’ similarities and differences in Vanity Fair and The House of Mirth, the readers can deeply understand the novels and the authors’ thoughts. It makes us know more about the women of low class in the 19th or 20thcentury and their lives in the patriarchal society. They will be described in detail In the following parts.
II. The Similar Reasons of the Heroines’ Tragedies
2.1 Social Reasons
Vanity Fair and The House of Mirth have similar social background. Vanity Fair is a picture of life in the upper class of the society in the 19th century in the UK. On one hand, by means of hegemony and colonial war, wealth rolled in from different foreign countries and the aristocratic bourgeois became wealthy overnight. On the other hand, the industrial was completed. So it has a profound influence on the writer. The title of Vanity Fair suggests the theme: vanity fair. The treasures of vanity fair are money and position, which are desirable and transient. Then Thackeray’s idea is that although one may live in vanity fair, one needs not be a slave to its values, which eventually turn into emptiness, especially the females. The novel of Vanity Fair is a novel without a hero, which intends to portray the bourgeois and aristocratic society as a whole. In fact, none of the characters are wholly evil. Even Becky, who is amoral and cunning, is thrown on her own resources by poverty and its stigma. Vanity Fair is work of social criticism, and is noted for the author’s realistic depiction, the ironic and sarcastic tone and constant comment and criticism. This kind of realism is based on author’s own life experience. The character of Becky Sharp is based in part on Thackeray’s maternal grandmother Harriet Becher. She abandoned her husband and children when she eloped with Captain Charles Christie. In 1806 shortly after the death of Christie and her husband, she married Edward Butler, another army officer. Thackeray lived with his grandmother in Paris in the 1830s and again in the 1840s. It reveals the truth of the politics and society of the capitalist world, that is, the ugliness of the society. Thackeray felt that the society was full of those faithless, hopeless and merciless men who were either swindlers or fools with much popularity. Novelists should make people laugh by exposing and making fun of them. Therefore, the novel Vanity Fair aims to reveal all the evils without mercy. With his precise and thorough observation, rich knowledge of social life and the human heart, the circumstances in his novels are accurate and true to life.