In Chapter 1, Thackeray introduces the reader to the two main characters of his novel: Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. When introducing Amelia, he uses a combination of hyperbole and satire to describe her and establish her as a foil to Becky:
But as we are to see a great deal of Amelia, there is no harm in saying at the outset of our acquaintance, that she was one of the best and dearest creatures that ever lived; and a great mercy it is, both in life and in novels, which (and the latter especially) abound in villains of the most sombre sort, that we are to have for a constant companion, so guileless and good-natured a person.
These first few lines of description are an exercise in overstatement, as Thackeray carefully sets his reader up for Becky and Amelia's dueling narratives. From the start, Amelia seems to be a paragon of virtue—by describing her as utterly "guileless" and "one of the dearest creatures that ever lived," Thackeray uses hyperbole to distinguish Amelia from the other residents of the Vanity Fair. He even primes the reader for the drama to come, pointedly contrasting Amelia with the countless "villains of the most sombre sort" that abound in novels just like this one. Though he doesn't say it outright, Thackeray is plainly alluding to Becky in this remark. As the reader will soon discover, Amelia is a foil to Becky—and vice versa: where Amelia is good-natured and kind, Becky is a deceitful "young misanthropist," not the least bit "kind or placable." Where Amelia's life collapses at the financial ruin of her father, Becky manipulates her way into the upper stratospheres of London society.
Later in the same sequence of exposition, Thackeray offers the reader a satirical vision of his protagonist, in the negative, when he describes everything that Amelia is not:
As she is not a heroine, there is no need to describe her person; indeed I am afraid that her nose was rather short than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a heroine; but her face blushed with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a good pair of eyes, which sparkled with the brightest and honestest good-humour, except indeed when they filled with tears, and that was a great deal too often;
The pointed observation that Amelia is "not a heroine," even as Thackeray constructs Amelia to be an embodiment of all that is good in the world, betrays his narrator's distaste for literary convention and Thackeray's vision for a novel with no hero. Thackeray's reliance on Amelia's humble physical description, in order to distinguish Amelia from "heroine"-types, is a careful work of satire—even as he assures the reader that Amelia will be a major subject of the novel, he insists that she does not look the part. In this playful way, Thackeray prepares his reader for a novel that eschews tired archetypes and instead presents a set of deeply flawed and human characters in all their complexity and contradiction.
In Chapter 7, Thackeray paints a portrait of Sir Pitt Crawley and his crumbling neighborhood of Queen's Crawley, London. In a novel full of characters of various degrees of social refinement, Sir Pitt stands out for his utter lack of artifice—and Thackeray wastes no time satirizing the elderly aristocrats rough edges:
Whatever Sir Pitt Crawley’s qualities might be, good or bad, he did not make the least disguise of them. He talked of himself incessantly, sometimes in the coarsest and vulgarest Hampshire accent; sometimes adopting the tone of a man of the world. And so, with injunctions to Miss Sharp to be ready at five in the morning, he bade her good night. “You’ll sleep with Tinker tonight,” he said; “It’s a big bed, and there’s room for two. Lady Crawley died in it. Good night.”
If Becky is a shape-shifting master of disguise, Sir Pitt must be her polar opposite. In this interaction with her, Sir Pitt is a caricature of a crass man of the country—and yet he is, by this point, the highest ranking gentleman the reader has had the pleasure of meeting.
Sir Pitt exists in the novel as proof that being a high-class person is not necessarily the same as having poise or delicate manners; to this extent he serves as a foil to Becky's machinations—if Sir Pitt is the real aristocracy, then Becky's performance of aristocracy comes across as doubly inauthentic.
In Chapter 18, Amelia's world threatens to collapse around her when her family is ruined at the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars. Amelia's husband, George, driven by his own greed, refuses to empathize with her predicament—a twist that Thackeray takes as an opportunity to satirize the uneven power dynamics of 19th-century marriage through verbal irony and hyperbole:
To whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily struggles and tortures? Her hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare to own that the man she loved was her inferior; or to feel that she had given her heart away too soon. Given once, the pure bashful maiden was too modest, too tender, too trustful, too weak, too much woman to recall it.
The narrator sees Amelia as a paragon of virtue and tends to convey this in hyperbole, as above—Amelia seems to be too perfect ("too modest [...] too much woman") to fall out of love with George, and despite his awful treatment of her, Amelia maintains that he is her hero. Amelia may be earnest in her convictions, but the narrator drenches his own observation of Amelia's behavior in verbal irony. George is no hero, and Thackeray takes up the entire situation as a bitter satire of the ways that marriages fall into dysfunction without accountability.
At dinner in Chapter 34, James Crawley makes a fool of himself as he guzzles wine and talks about his time at Oxford. As he struggles to secure his masculinity, he betrays his affinity for blood sports—which Thackeray emphasizes through the use of blood and red imagery:
“Blood’s the word,” said James, gulping the ruby fluid down. “Nothing like blood, Sir, in hosses, dawgs, and men. Why only last term, just before I was rusticated, that is, just before I had the measles, ha, ha,—there was me and… Bob Ringwood, Lord Cinqbar’s son, having our beer at the Bell at Blenheim, when the Banbury bargeman offered to fight either of us for a bowl of punch. […] Bob had his coat off at once… he polished him off in four rounds easy. Gad, how he did drop, Sir, and what was it? Blood, Sir, all blood."
Thackeray emphasizes the blood-like, "ruby" quality of the wine as James chaotically discusses the appeal of blood itself—from dueling, from hunting, and more. His case is less than compelling, and James emerges from this passage as a caricature of a young Oxford student who puts entertainment above education ("rustication" really means "suspension," despite James's half-hearted excuse of measles).
Thackeray—who himself attended Cambridge, Oxford's ancient rival—finds evident pleasure in conveying James's intoxication and stream-of-consciousness babbling to a less-than-amused Crawley dinner party.
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 34, Becky and Rawdon Crawley enjoy a lovely winter in Paris: it is 1815, and Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo—and Becky has made a fortune selling her horses to Jos. Always on the lookout for a way to advance her social standing, Becky tells her newfound acquaintances in Paris that Rawdon and she are in line to inherit the fortune of Miss Crawley, Rawdon's aunt. In a satirical sequence that pokes further fun at the conceitedness of European aristocracy, Thackeray recounts Miss Crawley's ferocious attempt to expose Becky:
Too much shaken to compose a letter in the French language in reply to that of her correspondent, she dictated to Briggs a furious answer in her own native tongue, repudiating Mrs. Rawdon Crawley altogether, and warning the public to beware of her as a most artful and dangerous person. But as Madame the Duchess of X—had only been twenty years in England, she did not understand a single word of the language, and contented herself by informing Mrs. Rawdon Crawley at their next meeting, that she had received a charming letter from that chère Mees […]
Miss Crawley's rage never makes it across the English Channel: by writing to the French aristocrat "Madame the Duchess of X," Crawley has assumed the duchess could speak English. She cannot, as Thackeray notes with irony: 20 years would be more than enough time for anyone to pick up the tongue, but the French—who, stereotypically, hold the English language in significant disdain—can make no such effort.
This passage simultaneously plays up the long-standing rivalry between England and France and satirizes the upper class of both countries: the French, just as the English, are beset by vanities, and the Duchess of X makes up the contents of the letter when relating it to Becky—thereby exacerbating the conflict between the young Crawley couple and the elder Crawleys back in England, and continuing the chain of vapid miscommunications that accounts for a great portion of the drama in Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair contains a wide variety of vivid, often hilarious descriptions of satirically vapid upper class conversation. In Chapter 46, that conversation reaches new lows as a Mrs. Frederick Bullock drones on about her family—and then bids adieu with a horrific kiss that Thackeray enhances using simile:
My darling Frederick must positively be an eldest son; and – and do ask papa to bring us back his account in Lombard Street, will you, dear? It doesn’t look well, his going to Stumpy & Rowdy’s.’ After which kind of speeches, in which fashion and the main chance were blended together, and after a kiss, which was like the contact of an oyster – Mrs Frederick Bullock would gather her starched nurselings, and simper back into her carriage.
Although an inconsequential moment to the plot of the novel, this simile that compares Mrs. Bullock's kiss to the slimy touch of an oyster is visceral and revolting—so too is the meaningless, self-involved small talk that precedes it. Satirical details like these, which exaggerate the behavior of the English elite in order to better expose their ridiculousness, are essential bits of scaffolding that enable Thackeray to transform his vision of English society into the vast literary world of Vanity Fair.
Thackeray opens Chapter 48, in which Becky at last gains an audience with the king, with a lengthy simile that describes the significance of such an event in the life of an upper-class woman:
[…] we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum [for virtue], until she has […] been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue. And as dubious goods or letters are passed through an oven at quarantine, sprinkled with aromatic vinegar, and then pronounced clean, many a lady whose reputation would be doubtful otherwise and liable to give infection, passes through the wholesome ordeal of the Royal presence, and issues from it free from all taint.
This simile compares the effects of a royal audience with the effects of laundering dirty linens—or linens that may have been used in the treatment of a diseased patient. Such is the power of the king's attention: even a lady with such a bad reputation as to be practically contagious—here the infectious language spills over into the description of the audience itself—is "cured" of her social malady through this interaction.
There is an unmistakably satirical tone at work in the narrator's description of these effects: it is as though he is mimicking the existential stakes of a royal audience, as perceived by the ladies who seek one, in order to more efficiently mock it—although an audience with the king may be a temporary salve for Becky's toxicity, it is unlikely to cause meaningful change in the content of her character.
