Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero

Vanity Fair employs a framing device in which the narrator acts out the events of the play using a puppet show. Each character is a puppet, being controlled by the narrator as a way to entertain and educate the audience. This framing device has an important metaphorical meaning, conveying to the audience the role of performance in the British society depicted in the novel. The characters are rarely themselves in public. Instead, they are performing the role which is expected of them by the society. Becky charms and seduces many people, all while keeping her true resentment and bitterness hidden. Amelia denies her love for Dobbin for many years, continuing to perform the role of the grieving widow which she believes society expects of her. The entire society is an elaborate performance of manners, in which the characters are mere puppets controlled by the social expectations thrust upon them. They are taught a system of manners and etiquette at a young age and this system governs their lives, as the strings of the puppet dictate the puppet’s movement. Rather than expressing their true desires or motivations, the characters are compelled by social expectation to perform the role expected of them. Their lives are, as the framing device suggests, an elaborate puppet show in which their agency is surrendered to social expectation.

The metaphor of the puppet show also hints at the amount of agency which is given to the characters. Someone like Becky might seem to be radical and disruptive, but she is beholden to the broader powers that govern her society. Becky defies expectations and rises above the lifestyle expected of her. She achieves these lofty ambitions by bending the rules of Vanity Fair to her will. She charms, seduces, and manipulates people. She borrows money and throws extravagant parties at other people’s expense. For all her individualism and refusal to adhere to social expectations, however, Becky is ultimately as much of a puppet as everyone else. She is bound to the rules of society, just like everyone else. When her relationship with Lord Steyne threatens to undermine his status, for example, these same systems of etiquette are used to discipline Becky. She is threatened through intermediaries and banished from various European social enclaves. Her admittance to the Fair is denied, as she still lacks the agency over her life which would distinguish her from a puppet. The “famous little Becky Puppet” (6) may attract the audience’s attention with her uncommon flexibility but she remains, ultimately, as much a puppet as everyone else.

The metaphor of the puppet show is also used by the narrator to implicate the audience in his social criticism. At the end of the novel, as the performance of the puppets draws to a close, the narrator separates himself from the narrator. The framing device returns, as the narrator calls on the audience to “shut up the box and the puppets” (809). The performance is over, he hints, but he asks which members of the audience can consider themselves truly happy. The audience, like the characters and the narrator himself, is bound by the same social expectations which turn Becky, Amelia, Dobbin, and the others into mere puppets. The narrator uses the performance of the puppet play to elucidate the audience’s complicity in the decadence and hedonism of the society. They have watched the puppet show, they have been thrilled by the travails of the characters, and—as a result—the audience must reflect on their own happiness and their own performance. Social expectations govern everything and this governance extends beyond the closed box which now contains the puppets. The performance is over for the puppets, the narrator says, but the performance shown by the audience continues in earnest.