Thackeray named his novel after the framing device he uses throughout—the "Vanity Fair," in which his characters are helpless puppets in a puppet show. Thackeray's fair, an allegorical carnival in which human vice and vanity are on display, is an allusion to the Vanity Fair found in the 1678 novel The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come, by the English preacher John Bunyan. Pilgrim's Progress is a work of theological fiction in the form of a Christian allegory: Bunyan's narrator follows a Christian pilgrim, fittingly named Christian, along a pilgrimage during which he encounters various characters that are either biblical figures or anthropomorphized versions of ideas and lessons from the Bible.
In the first part of the novel, Christian finds himself in Vanity Fair, the site of a never-ending fair run by Beelzebub—either a powerful demon or an incarnation of the devil himself, according to Christian theology, who is often associated with the sins of pride and gluttony. Sure enough, in this fair, every indulgence that a human could hope to consume or experience is for sale.
This is the context in which Thackeray situates his novel, and throughout the book he periodically reminds the reader that his characters are going through their respective motions within the confines of this Vanity Fair. By invoking Bunyan's allegory, Thackeray channels Bunyan's thematic exploration of greed and vanity into his own moralizing work—and emphasizes the extent to which he finds such sins on display within English society.
In Chapter 23, Mr. Osborne disinherits his son George for agreeing to marry Amelia Sedley despite her family's financial ruin. At the very moment of disinheritance, Thackeray uses allusion to amplify the grandiosity of Osborne's rejection:
There was a frontispiece to the volume, representing Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Here, according to custom, Osborne had recorded on the fly-leaf, and in his large clerk-like hand, the dates of his marriage and his wife’s death, and the births and Christian names of his children. Jane came first, then George Sedley Osborne, then Maria Frances, and the days of the christening of each. Taking a pen, he carefully obliterated George’s name from the page; and when the leaf was quite dry, restored the volume to the place from which he had moved it.
Thackeray symbolizes the disinheritance in Osborne's act of striking out George's name from the family tree in his family Bible. Osborne's Bible is an old, beautiful book, and Thackeray makes special mention of its frontispiece: an allusion to the biblical story about the binding of Isaac, which comes from the Book of Genesis, in which God tests the patriarch Abraham's loyalty by asking him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham agrees to go through with the horrific task, and it is only in the final moments before killing Isaac that God determines Abraham has passed the test—thereby allowing Abraham to spare his son.
Thackeray has already introduced Osborne as a character of considerable vanity, and there is no doubt that he identifies himself with this biblical patriarch. Osborne's treatment of George is a spiteful version of the binding of Isaac—he is prepared to sacrifice his son (or at least his son's inheritance) not out of loyalty to any god but out of a perverted sense of loyalty to his own family legacy. It is an ultimate testament to Osborne's greed that he would cast his conceited preservation of his family's social status in such biblical proportions.
In Chapter 34, Miss Crawley invites her nephew, James Crawley, to dinner with Lady Jane and Pitt Crowley. James is a young Oxford student, awkward and a bit brash, and Thackeray stuffs his dialogue with a combination of dialect and allusion in order to satirize his behavior:
“Come, come,” said James, putting his hand to his nose and winking at his cousin with a pair of vinous eyes, “no jokes, old boy; no trying it out on me. You want to trot me out, but it’s a no go. In vino veritas, old boy. Mars, Bacchus, Apollo virorum, hay? I wish my aunt would send down some of this to the governor; it’s a precious good tap.”
As James struggles to make a favorable impression at the party, his character emerges as a brutal satire of a posh Oxford man posturing sophistication and masculinity: James inflects his speech with the mannerisms of a cocky upper-class dialect, referring to his cousin repeatedly as "old boy" and stringing together a series of nonsensical classical allusions that underscores his elite education even as it affirms his state of intoxication. "In vino veritas" is Latin for "In wine, there is truth," and Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo are all Greco-Roman gods, but there isn't much to be said about these remarks—they simply underscore that, in wine, James has revealed his lack of personality.
In Chapter 36, the narrator treats the reader to an engaging description of how, exactly, the Crawleys have been able to sustain a lavish lifestyle with no discernible source of income (the chapter is called "How to live well on Nothing a Year"). While Becky has her own duplicitous means of securing cash, Rawdon is quite the gambler. He finds quite a lucrative business in card games, and Thackeray describes his bewildering success in that department in a simile that alludes to the famous reputation that the Duke of Wellington held amongst the French:
And as the French say of the Duke of Wellington, who never suffered a defeat, that only an astonishing series of lucky accidents enabled him to be an invariable winner; yet even they allow that he cheated at Waterloo, and was enabled to win the last great trick: so it was hinted at headquarters in England, that some foul play must have taken place in order to account for the continued success of Colonel Crawley.
As the man who defeated Napoleon, the French have good reason to dismiss the Duke of Wellington as a lucky, rather than a brilliant, general—for the sake of French morale, at the very least. In much the same way, Crawley's opponents can't quite understand how he has such success at the card table.
Thackeray attempts to connect his narrative with the historical context of the Napoleonic wars throughout the novel, but, as is the case here, that connection can be heavy-handed to the point of silliness. On the one hand, this simile gives Rawdon a slice of Wellington's own historical grandeur, but on the other, it serves to make Rawdon's attempts to stay financially afloat feel all the more pathetic.
In Chapter 44, the Becky and Rawdon Crawley struggle to maintain their lavish lifestyle with what little wealth they have left. As tensions mount, Becky's treatment of her son, Rawdy, worsens, and the Crawleys' servants begin to mutter amongst themselves about Becky's erratic behavior—and her possible affair with Lord Steyne, who shows up frequently at the Crawley residence. Thackeray emphasizes the subversive power of gossiping servants in a series of metaphorical allusions:
If you are guilty, tremble. That fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a bow-string in his plush breeches pocket. If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances: which are as ruinous as guilt.
‘Was Rebecca guilty or not?’ The Vehmgericht of the servants’ hall had pronounced against her.
This double allusion affirms the considerable power that servants hold over their masters: a Janissary was a legendary soldier in the Ottoman sultan's infantry, said to carry strings to strangle enemies of the sultan, while the Vehmgericht was a semi-secret court in medieval Germany that dealt out death sentences to convicted criminals. By comparing a butler waiting "behind your chair" to a Janissary and the institution of the servants' hall to the Vehmgericht, Thackeray emphasizes the devastating role that servants can play in destroying the reputation of even the most prominent families. There is considerable situational irony in Becky's predicament: her household staff is at once a sign of the social class she has worked so hard to attain and a possible source of her downfall.
In Chapter 49, Thackeray relates the fading grandeur of the Bareacres family to the reader. He uses a series of allusions to the family's beautiful portraits and sculptures—which contrast with their present appearance—to emphasize how far they have fallen:
Bareacres Castle was theirs, too, with all its costly pictures, furniture, and articles of vertu – the magnificent Vandykes; the noble Reynolds pictures; the Lawrence portraits, tawdry and beautiful, and, thirty years ago, deemed as precious as works of real genius; the matchless Dancing Nymph of Canova, for which Lady Bareacres had sate in her youth – Lady Bareacres splendid then, and radiant in wealth, rank, and beauty – a toothless, bald, old woman now – a mere rag of a former robe of state.
This passage contains a string of allusions to various famous artists—Anthony van Dyke, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Lawrence were famous painters in the 17th and 18th centuries—and one Italian neoclassical sculptor, Antonio Canova, for whom Lady Bareacres had apparently modeled. These trappings of great wealth, the narrator is quick to share with the reader, has now been entirely lost by the Bareacres in their age and misfortune, and Lady Bareacres no longer bears any resemblance to her marble counterpart.
This passage reflects the narrator's fascination with tracing the shift and disintegration of England's great fortunes. He appears to take great delight in recounting how people fall out of money—and out of society—based on the whims of their family and the cruelties of inheritance law. One of the primary sources of humor in Vanity Fair is the narrator's playful eagerness to get caught up in his own vain preoccupations even in the midst of skewering the vanity of his subjects.
At the beginning of Chapter 50, the narrator shifts his attention away from Lord Steyne and the entertainment of the upper class in order to bring the reader up to date on the Sedley family, who is living in poverty. To make this shift, the narrator makes an allusion to the narrative practices of classical poetry:
The Muse, whoever she be, who presides over this Comic History, must now descend from the genteel heights in which she has been soaring, and have the goodness to drop down upon the lowly roof of John Sedley at Brompton, and describe what events are taking place there. Here, too, in this humble tenement, live care, and distrust, and dismay.
The muses are a time-honored device of Greek literature. Ancient Greek poetry, particularly epic poems, traditionally begin with an invocation to the muses not dissimilar from the narrator's playful invocation in this passage: according to Greek mythology, the muses are the goddesses of creative inspiration for everything from music to astronomy. By praying to the muses at the beginning of a work of literature, authors could ensure their work's quality would reflect such divine inspiration.
Throughout Vanity Fair, the degree to which the narrator has control over the story remains unclear. At some moments, the narrator whisks the reader from vignette to vignette according to his whims, but in other moments, like the one above, he defers to the powers that be—the forces of literary convention. In this case, Thackeray is having a bit of fun with the constraints of this convention and the unreliable narrator as a literary device. The reader is already familiar with how wealth and vanity fascinate the narrator: while he would prefer to continue soaring amongst the heights of English society, the Muse (which is to say, Thackeray) drags him—and the reader—back down to earth.
In Chapter 51, Becky hosts a game of charades at Lord Steyne's residence with an ancient Greek theme, complete with abridged versions of Greek drama that the participants put on between charade guesses. In one such interlude, Thackeray uses an allusion to Aeschylus's tragic play Oresteia as a source of sinister foreshadowing:
A tremor ran through the room. ‘Good God!’ somebody said, ‘it’s Mrs Rawdon Crawley.’ Scornfully she snatches the dagger out of Ægisthus’s hand, and advantances to the bed. You see it shining over her head in the glimmer of the lamp, and – and the lamp goes out with a groan, and all is dark.
In this truncated version of Oresteia, Becky plays the part of Clytemnestra—a figure from Greek mythology who falls in love with Aegisthus while her husband, the legendary Greek king Agamemnon, is away to fight the Trojan War. To be with Aegisthus, and to avenge her daughter, Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrifices in the war effort, Clytemnestra ultimately kills her husband.
By casting Becky as Clytemnestra in this sequence, Thackeray not-so-subtly hints at the disastrous events of the next few chapters. Like Clytemnestra, Becky will cause the death of her husband as a result of an illicit affair: through her seductive manipulation of Lord Steyne, Becky secures Rawdon, her husband, a government post in a far-off colony—where he promptly dies of disease.
As could be expected, given this context, Becky plays the part of Clytemnestra with aplomb:
Rebecca performed her part so well, and with such ghastly truth, that the spectators were all dumb, until, with a burst, all the lamps of the hall blazed out again, when everybody began to shout applause. ‘Brava! brava!’ old Steyne’s strident voice was heard roaring over all the rest. ‘By —, she’d do it too,’ he said between his teeth. The performers were called by the whole house, which sounded with cries of ‘Manager! Clytemnestra!’
The "ghastly truth" of Becky's performance is more real than the audience can suspect: Becky barely has to act to play her role, and merely taps into her sinister nature that she has, thus far, managed to hide from English society. She cannot keep up appearances indefinitely, however—while Steyne's effusive praise for Becky makes sense in the context of her performance, he won't be able to mask his impropriety for much longer.
Clytemnestra's is an archetypal example of female power in Greek literature—in the face of an impossibly cruel world, she takes her life into her own hands and escapes the restrictions of her identity as Agamemnon's wife. Likewise, although Becky's manipulation causes no shortage of harm over the course of Vanity Fair, it is also the source of her agency—her ability to rise above the restrictions of her gender role in 19th-century England.
In Chapter 64, Thackeray—or the narrator—compliments himself on his careful portrayal of Becky's behavior and further establishes the unreliability of Vanity Fair's narration. The narrator also makes an allusion to the mythical siren in order to better characterize Becky's deadly charisma:
I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner. In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses;
In Greek myth, the siren is a monster with the appearance of a beautiful woman who lures sailors into the water to kill them. By describing Becky as a siren, the narrator is also congratulating himself for disguising her worst qualities so effectively. It is only now that he reveals her true monstrosity.
In addition to confirming the narrator's untrustworthiness—has he been toying with the reader?—this passage produces another powerful, gendered image of Becky's character. The trope of feminine beauty disguising monstrosity is present throughout literature, from Ancient Greece through to today, and connects to a longstanding stereotype of female characters as inherently, or inevitably, deceitful.
