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Unreliable Narrator
Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... read full definition
Chapter 18
Explanation and Analysis—Her Hero Himself:
In Chapter 18, Amelia's world threatens to collapse around her when her family is ruined at the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars. Amelia's husband, George, driven by his own greed, refuses to empathize with her predicament—a twist that Thackeray takes as an opportunity to satirize the uneven power dynamics of 19th-century marriage through verbal irony and hyperbole:
To whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily struggles and tortures? Her hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare to own that the man she loved was her inferior; or to feel that she had given her heart away too soon. Given once, the pure bashful maiden was too modest, too tender, too trustful, too weak, too much woman to recall it.
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.
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Chapter 34
Explanation and Analysis—Parlez-vous anglais?:
In Chapter 34, Becky and Rawdon Crawley enjoy a lovely winter in Paris: it is 1815, and Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo—and Becky has made a fortune selling her horses to Jos. Always on the lookout for a way to advance her social standing, Becky tells her newfound acquaintances in Paris that Rawdon and she are in line to inherit the fortune of Miss Crawley, Rawdon's aunt. In a satirical sequence that pokes further fun at the conceitedness of European aristocracy, Thackeray recounts Miss Crawley's ferocious attempt to expose Becky:
Too much shaken to compose a letter in the French language in reply to that of her correspondent, she dictated to Briggs a furious answer in her own native tongue, repudiating Mrs. Rawdon Crawley altogether, and warning the public to beware of her as a most artful and dangerous person. But as Madame the Duchess of X—had only been twenty years in England, she did not understand a single word of the language, and contented herself by informing Mrs. Rawdon Crawley at their next meeting, that she had received a charming letter from that chère Mees […]
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.
Related Themes:
