| Summary: | 碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 97 === Abstract
William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) deals not only with 19th-century British lifestyles, culture, and the social class hierarchy, but also with human existence, freedom, choice and responsibility. While Darwin emphasizes the biology-based struggle for survival, and Marx looks at the economic basis of society and culture in his critique of the inequality that is built into capitalism, Sartre describes the nature of the human self as both pure consciousness and “thing” or “object.” In seeing ourselves as the social roles we play, and also under the gaze of others, we become objects; as consciousnesses we are radically free to choose, and we define ourselves (as things) through our choices or actions, for which we must thus be responsible.
In my thesis I will present a reading of Vanity Fair primarily in the light of Sartre’s existentialist theory of human freedom in an immanent world (a world without God or transcendent values), his theory of constitution of self and of values through independent choice, and his theory of relation-to-the-other. I will place the main emphasis on the protagonist Becky Sharp’s own freedom and resultant responsibility, that is, on her own self-defining choices. In the first chapter I will explore “Becky’s Self as Desire or Life-Force” in the light of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” and Sartre’s theory of self-creation. In the second chapter I will investigate “Sartre and Becky on Desire, Substance and Substantiality.” In the third chapter I will examine “Sartre’s and Becky’s Need for Self-Definition or Self-Creation.” In the conclusion I will suggest two Sartrean readings of Becky’s sense of “vanity” after she has achieved success: she may be feeling the weight of responsibility for the freedom she has enjoyed in climbing the social ladder, or realizing that she has herself never really escaped from being objectified by her own socially-defined role.
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