Vanity Fair: a New Kind of Hero in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to discuss the differences and the changes that the characters, and especially the heroes, underwent during the Victorian period with the creation of the grey characters that can be found in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Another focus of the dissertation is to understand how Thackeray has influenced the modern genre of the novel and the current image of the hero. For this reason, a small introduction on the Victorian novel is made, followed by a brief description of the main historical events and the quest for realism that has characterised the 19th century. Due to its centrality for this dissertation, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is presented, with its style, characters and the hidden meaning of its subtitle. Then the opinions of many different critics of various periods such as Antony Trollope, Arthur Pollard or Catherine Peters are offered. Their opinions are used to analyse and better the main characters of Vanity Fair. After which, the point of view is changed, and the main characters are analysed one by one to understand who among them can be considered the real hero or heroine of the story and in what they differ from the “ancient hero”. To conclude, I use various description of the narrator of the book, sentences said by characters and personal letters of the author to obtain an idea of what Thackeray himself thought about his own characters.