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Thackeray describes his early literary efforts as “writing for his life”, and he gains some popularity through his serialized novels, illustrations, travel writing, and satirical contributions to literary magazines. His biggest success is Vanity Fair and he is most famous for this novel. Because of the popularity of the novel and the satire view in the novel Vanity Fair, he is one of the greatest Victorian novelists. Early critical views of Thackeray focuses on the autobiographical aspects of his writing. More recent criticism has highlighted his complex and subversive presentation of women and his troubling conceptions of race.
Vanity Fair is the greatest novel written by William Makepeace Thackeray. In this novel, Thackeray depicts two completely different female characters, Rebecca Sharp and Amelia Sedley. Like all satire novels, Vanity Fair has a mission and a moral. The first published installment has an illustration on the cover of a congregation listening to a preacher; both the writer and the reader are shown by donkey ears. In the pages, Thackeray explains:
My kind reader will please to remember that these histories. have
Vanity Fair for a title and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish
place. And while the moralist who is holding forth on the cover
professes to wear neither gown nor bandsyet, look you, one is bound to
speak the truth as far as one knows it. Losing is vanity, and winning is
vanity.(Thackeray 58)
By the point in its serial publication, Thackeray's long, rambling tale of relentless and corrupt social climbing, told with humor and cynicism, is the talk of London. Readers wait new episodes in the life of Thackeray's deeply immoral and self-serving Becky Sharp. She has been one of the most famous yet the most controversial characters in the field of literature since then. The novel assures Thackeray's place in the literary giants of his time; and the giants of his time, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred Tennyson, have endured as giants till this day. Vanity Fair is considered a classic of English literature and one of the great works of satire in the history.
This essay will focus on Thackeray’s contradictory attitudes towards the two different female characters, Becky and Amelia. Thackeray summarizes that the two female characters are both the representatives and victims of the capitalist society. He thinks the two women both have merits, Becky is smart and beautiful and Sedley is kind-hearted and tender. At the same time, they also have their demerits. For instance, Becky is cunning, greedy and selfish and Sedley likes to rely on other people and inclined to submit to her fate. In this novel, the author also expresses his view of how women should live in that society.