Vanity Fair: Satire 8 key examples

These first few lines of description are an exercise in overstatement, as Thackeray carefully sets his reader up for Becky and Amelia's dueling narratives. From the start, Amelia seems to be a paragon of virtue—by describing her as utterly "guileless" and  "one of the dearest creatures that ever lived," Thackeray uses hyperbole to distinguish Amelia from the other residents of the Vanity Fair. He even primes the reader for the drama to come, pointedly contrasting Amelia with the countless "villains of the most sombre sort" that abound in novels just like this one. Though he doesn't say it outright, Thackeray is plainly alluding to Becky in this remark. As the reader will soon discover, Amelia is a foil to Becky—and vice versa: where Amelia is good-natured and kind, Becky is a deceitful "young misanthropist," not the least bit "kind or placable." Where Amelia's life collapses at the financial ruin of her father, Becky manipulates her way into the upper stratospheres of London society. 

Later in the same sequence of exposition, Thackeray offers the reader a satirical vision of his protagonist, in the negative, when he describes everything that Amelia is not: 

As she is not a heroine, there is no need to describe her person; indeed I am afraid that her nose was rather short than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a heroine; but her face blushed with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a good pair of eyes, which sparkled with the brightest and honestest good-humour, except indeed when they filled with tears, and that was a great deal too often;

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The pointed observation that Amelia is "not a heroine," even as Thackeray constructs Amelia to be an embodiment of all that is good in the world, betrays his narrator's distaste for literary convention and Thackeray's vision for a novel with no hero. Thackeray's reliance on Amelia's humble physical description, in order to distinguish Amelia from "heroine"-types, is a careful work of satire—even as he assures the reader that Amelia will be a major subject of the novel, he insists that she does not look the part. In this playful way, Thackeray prepares his reader for a novel that eschews tired archetypes and instead presents a set of deeply flawed and human characters in all their complexity and contradiction. 

If Becky is a shape-shifting master of disguise, Sir Pitt must be her polar opposite. In this interaction with her, Sir Pitt is a caricature of a crass man of the country—and yet he is, by this point, the highest ranking gentleman the reader has had the pleasure of meeting. 

Sir Pitt exists in the novel as proof that being a high-class person is not necessarily the same as having poise or delicate manners; to this extent he serves as a foil to Becky's machinations—if Sir Pitt is the real aristocracy, then Becky's performance of aristocracy comes across as doubly inauthentic.

The narrator sees Amelia as a paragon of virtue and tends to convey this in hyperbole, as above—Amelia seems to be too perfect ("too modest [...] too much woman") to fall out of love with George, and despite his awful treatment of her, Amelia maintains that he is her hero. Amelia may be earnest in her convictions, but the narrator drenches his own observation of Amelia's behavior in verbal irony. George is no hero, and Thackeray takes up the entire situation as a bitter satire of the ways that marriages fall into dysfunction without accountability.

Thackeray emphasizes the blood-like, "ruby" quality of the wine as James chaotically discusses the appeal of blood itself—from dueling, from hunting, and more. His case is less than compelling, and James emerges from this passage as a caricature of a young Oxford student who puts entertainment above education ("rustication" really means "suspension," despite James's half-hearted excuse of measles). 

Thackeray—who himself attended Cambridge, Oxford's ancient rival—finds evident pleasure in conveying James's intoxication and stream-of-consciousness babbling to a less-than-amused Crawley dinner party.

Miss Crawley's rage never makes it across the English Channel: by writing to the French aristocrat "Madame the Duchess of X," Crawley has assumed the duchess could speak English. She cannot, as Thackeray notes with irony: 20 years would be more than enough time for anyone to pick up the tongue, but the French—who, stereotypically, hold the English language in significant disdain—can make no such effort. 

This passage simultaneously plays up the long-standing rivalry between England and France and satirizes the upper class of both countries: the French, just as the English, are beset by vanities, and the Duchess of X makes up the contents of the letter when relating it to Becky—thereby exacerbating the conflict between the young Crawley couple and the elder Crawleys back in England, and continuing the chain of vapid miscommunications that accounts for a great portion of the drama in Vanity Fair.

As James struggles to make a favorable impression at the party, his character emerges as a brutal satire of a posh Oxford man posturing sophistication and masculinity: James inflects his speech with the mannerisms of a cocky upper-class dialect, referring to his cousin repeatedly as "old boy" and stringing together a series of nonsensical classical allusions that underscores his elite education even as it affirms his state of intoxication. "In vino veritas" is Latin for "In wine, there is truth," and Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo are all Greco-Roman gods, but there isn't much to be said about these remarks—they simply underscore that, in wine, James has revealed his lack of personality.

Although an inconsequential moment to the plot of the novel, this simile that compares Mrs. Bullock's kiss to the slimy touch of an oyster is visceral and revolting—so too is the meaningless, self-involved small talk that precedes it. Satirical details like these, which exaggerate the behavior of the English elite in order to better expose their ridiculousness, are essential bits of scaffolding that enable Thackeray to transform his vision of English society into the vast literary world of Vanity Fair.

This simile compares the effects of a royal audience with the effects of laundering dirty linens—or linens that may have been used in the treatment of a diseased patient. Such is the power of the king's attention: even a lady with such a bad reputation as to be practically contagious—here the infectious language spills over into the description of the audience itself—is "cured" of her social malady through this interaction. 

There is an unmistakably satirical tone at work in the narrator's description of these effects: it is as though he is mimicking the existential stakes of a royal audience, as perceived by the ladies who seek one, in order to more efficiently mock it—although an audience with the king may be a temporary salve for Becky's toxicity, it is unlikely to cause meaningful change in the content of her character.