Reading Amelia And Rebecca In Vanity Fair From The Perspective Of Critical Realism

Since William Makepeace Thackeray published Vanity Fair in1847, this novel has been attracting the attention of numerous readers and scholars alike, and a great deal of research has been done concerning Thackeray, the novel and the characters in it. Amelia and Rebecca, the two chief female characters in the novel, have aroused a great many Chinese as well as foreign scholars’interest. Both Chinese and foreign scholars focus mainly on four aspects. They are as follows:feminist reading, intertextuality studies, rhetorical analysis, interpretation techniques and comparison between different translation versions. Almost all these research efforts have made remarkable achievements and, as a result, have made it possible to make further study on this novel and its characters. This dissertation is intended to interpret Amelia and Rebecca from the perspective of critical realism. By making a contrastive and critical analysis of the two characters’different viewpoints on love, family, money, career, and religion, this dissertation aims to study and scrutinize the middle class’s corrupt life and decayed social values in the early of19th-century England. It aims to examine, on the one hand, the prevalent values and beliefs of the "snobbish, secular and prejudiced" middle class in the male-dominated, money-oriented society, and on the other hand, the influence on the world view and the fate of the two female characters. Living under such unfavorable circumstances, Amelia and Rebecca are doomed to tragic destinies.The early of19th-century England was still a patriarchal society. The social responsibility bestowed upon a woman was to be "the angel in the house" who lived in a "separate sphere" from men. Women inherently belonged to their families, parents, husbands and children. Repressed for so long, a variety of treacherous females started to come forth in the middle class during that period. It could be seen in the rebellious prototypes with very distinctive characteristics that appeared in the novels written by19th-century female writers. However, these characters eventually made a compromise between the oppressive social realities and their rebellious desires. In contrast, Rebecca, a low-born woman in W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, was thought to be a "fig" except for her beauty, grace and high-education. Although confined to the conservative male-dominated society, her rebellion was evidently far greater than her social compromise, which was one of the substantial differences between male writers and female ones. The deeper the writers’hatred, the more pain they suffered. In those "dissidents" like Rebecca who seemingly did not abide by the law and blatantly fought against males’superior status, a transitional stage and arduous journey of life from "traditional females" to "Neo-females" in the middle class could be detected. Although those females were never acknowledged by the society and were marginalized in an awkward position, such resistance and rebellion was indeed very daring at that time to which Thackeray had shown both his understanding and critical ambivalence. It’s very worthwhile to make an in-depth exploration into this aspect.Critical realism, which originated in the thirties of the19th-century, can help not only to interpret and understand Vanity Fair, but also to scrutinize the characters’ different viewpoints on love, family, money, career and religion and their influence on women in the middle class in the19th-century England. It still has realistic significance for current society. Under the special social environment of the novel, the novelist aimed at returning to the original social situation, revealing the dark sides of the society, criticizing the crimes of the reality, and mass-criticizing the social and personal relationship that was based on the belief that "money is everything" under the capitalist system. The creation of Amelia and Rebecca in Vanity Fair was a good illustration of typical characters in critical realistic literature.This dissertation consists of five parts. The introduction itemizes the existing research that has been made into Vanity Fair and the significance of this paper by combining middle class women’s status in19th-century, the contrast between Amelia and Rebecca and Thackeray’s intention in writing this novel. Chapter One dwells on the overview of critical realism and its value and specification and the relationship with the novel. Thackeray aimed at describing the "reality" and advocating "benevolence". Chapter Two makes a contrastive study of the two characters, Amelia and Rebecca, from their viewpoints on love, family, money, career, and religion. In contrast with Amelia’s passiveness and blindness, Rebecca was not only active but independent:she pursued her husband by herself and was willing to take social responsibilities after their marriage. She had a strong desire for wealth and social status. Inwardly, she had no faith in religion. Chapter Three further analyzes the two characters in the context of middle class’ life and values, the male-dominated society in19th-century England and Thackeray’s intention in writing the novel. Since the abnormal society triggered people with the distorted values and ethics, Amelia and Rebecca had been unavoidably dealt a tragic fate. Based on the previous three chapters, this dissertation reaches the conclusion that traditional women like Amelia were not "angels", but represented the sorrow and tragic fate of middle class women in general. On behalf of the rebellious women, Rebecca was not an "alien", but represented great progress in women’s struggle for liberation and independence. The "reality" Vanity Fair had exposed was the evil and the hypocrisy of the capitalist society in which women ended up in a tragic fate. The conclusion of the thesis summarizes the inevitable destinies of those two typical women in the middle class in19th-century England.