Vanity Fair 
The title: The novel has a subtitle, A Novel without a Hero.
Vanity Fair comes from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The three possible meanings of the subtitle:
1. hero means a positive character; on the contrary,
no hero means no positive characters in the novel;
2. it indicates that the novel is concerned principally not with individual heroes
but with the society as a whole;
3. it also possibly means there are only heroines in the novel but no heroes.
The main characters :
Becky (or Rebecca) Sharp and Amelia Sedley.
The two heroines are in striking contrast:
Amelia, a woman who submits to her fate,
is a good but really tame and sentimental and useless woman,
while Becky, who rebels and tries to master her own fate,
is tricky but resourceful and practical and capable.
Both of them are victims of the society.
Themes:
In a personal sense,
it is about the struggle of a woman for high status by hook or crook.
In a broader sense,
Thackeray criticizes the whole English society of the early 19th century,
when the predominant feature of that society is the struggle for money,
by everybody against everybody else among the upper classes.
posted on 2006-08-08 01:53
真水无香swing 阅读(1919)
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