Vanity Fair

In Chapter 18, the narrator interrupts the story to give his thoughts on the way that men treat women in relationships. He uses metaphor and simile to get his point across: 

We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and yak-maks. But their souls must be seen by only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our slaves—ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.

Cite this Quote

In Chapter 25, the narrator continues to whisk the reader around the interlocking stories of Vanity Fair somewhat out of order, and this ultimately maximizes each story's dramatic effect. The narrator uses a lengthy and somewhat convoluted simile to emphasize his privilege in knowing the bigger picture and delivering it to the reader in the best possible fashion:

As you behold in Her Majesty’s drawing-room, the ambassadors’ and high dignitaries’ carriages whisk off from a private door, while Captain Jones’s ladies are waiting for their fly: as you see in the Secretary of the Treasury’s antechamber, a half-dozen of petitioners waiting patiently for their audience, and called out one by one, when suddenly an Irish member or some eminent personage enters the apartment, and instantly walks in to Mr Under-Secretary over the heads of all the people present: so, in the conduct of a tale, the romancer is obliged to exercise this most partial sort of justice.

Cite this Quote

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.

Cite this Quote

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.

Cite this Quote

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.

Cite this Quote