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Vanity Fair through Plate Glass

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Andrew Miller
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Abstract

Material goods in William Thackeray's work constantly circulate and incessantly dispirit, eliciting and frustrating the desires of characters. While these commodities present themselves as metonyms of enduring fulfillment and utopian pleasure, the images of contentment they provide are repeatedly undermined. This pattern, derived from Thackeray's own economic experience of loss, represents not a private obsession but the effects of the Victorian economy working through Thackeray's biography and his literary products. Vanity Fair, which represents this pattern most fully, derives its narrative energy from its characters' desires, and it suffers, as a result, an analogous disenchantment: the narrative itself, this essay argues, takes the form of the commodities Thackeray describes, and writer and reader experience the text in the way that the characters experience commodities.

Type
Victorian Cluster
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 5 , October 1990 , pp. 1042 - 1054
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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