Vanity Fair

Thackeray's narrator calls himself the Manager of the Performance, working puppets, and that framing is the whole book's argument: everyone in Vanity Fair is on the make, differing only in skill and self-awareness. Becky Sharp is simply the character honest enough, to the reader if to no one else, about the game everyone else pretends isn't one. Her genius is reading a room's vanities and supplying exactly what each person needs to see in her; Amelia's is a different kind of vanity entirely, mistaking her own faithfulness for virtue when it's really just as much of a performance — a devotion to a dead husband's memory that costs her years of a far better man's patient love.

The novel earns its subtitle by declining every chance to let Becky be a straightforward villain or Amelia a straightforward heroine; the narrator interrupts constantly to remind you he's showing a novel without a hero, because heroism, in a world this transactional, is either naive or a performance too. That cynicism is the satire: Vanity Fair isn't a place Becky corrupts, it's the neutral medium she's unusually well adapted to, and the reader's discomfort at half-admiring her for it is the point.

Dobbin's decades of devotion get their reward, and Thackeray makes sure it isn't a triumph. By the time Amelia finally sees George's unworthiness clearly enough to marry the man who's loved her all along, Dobbin is old enough, and clear-eyed enough, to recognize that the woman he idolized was never quite equal to the idolizing — that getting what you wanted for twenty years doesn't erase the twenty years. It's the novel's most understated cruelty: even its one deserving love story arrives too diminished to read as a happy ending. Thackeray published the novel in monthly serial installments through 1847 and 1848, illustrating it himself, and the slow release meant readers spent nearly two years living inside a story that kept refusing to reward anyone's patience on schedule — Dobbin's included.