Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero

The narrator insists that Vanity Fair is a “Novel without a Hero” (64) but Becky Sharp plays the role of the protagonist. She is unique among the principal characters in that she comes from poverty rather than wealth. The orphan of a painting teacher and a French opera dancer, she learns from a young age that she is all alone in the world. She grows up alongside the scions of wealthy families, where the daughters of the elite learn how to navigate the complicated systems of etiquette and manners that define upper-class British society. Becky turns these systems into weapons in her own private Class War, determined to push herself into the elite through sheer force of will. As such, her narrative becomes a tragic trajectory of ascent and decline, a rise and fall in which Becky relentlessly campaigns against the unfair structure of a society that has—in her view—denied her everything in order to privilege an undeserving group of disconnected, debauched, and uninteresting elites.

Becky uses the tools of upper-class society to force her way inside. As she observes during her time in the Pinkerton school, many young members of the ruling British elite are married away at an early age.