The Politics Of Irony In Thackerays Mature Fiction

Author : Juliet Sutton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (143 download)

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Download or read book Thackeray's Novels written by Juliet Sutton and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irony in Thackeray's novels is not only a rhetorical device by which the writer conveys more than the precise signification of his words, but also a view of life which interprets experience in terms of conflicting responses. Thackeray's novels are highly complex structures in which irony informs the narration, characterization, and thematic organization. The artistic complexity which he achieves through his ironic vision is a major reason for his considerable stature as a novelist. A consideration of the role of the narrator in his novels shows Thackeray as bringing into operation the conflicts between illusion and reality that are implied in the creative process. He mocks the conventions of fiction while he conforms to them, subjecting himself to his own satire; and he is prepared, with ironic detachment, to examine his characters both as actual and as illusory beings, and to illuminate the contrast between external reality and the world he creates in his novel. The various personae he adopts allow him juxtapose different responses to experience. So his favourite pose as the old fogey with the nostalgic backward view sets in ironic tension the attitudes of youth and age, romantic enthusiasm and cynical disillusion. The varying and sometimes contradictory attitudes of the narrator complement each other to form an intricate and sophisticated total vision. Thackeray's irony is most obvious in his social satire. Here verbal irony is his weapon, and he appropriately conveys inverted values with inverted statement, and exposes hypocritical self-aggrandizement with veiled mockery. He writes of snobs, those who 'meanly admire mean things,' and he writes as 'one of themselves.' As moral antitheses to the self-seeking citizens of Vanity Fair, Thackeray creates the saintly characters for whom worldly success is insignificant and love is all in all. Where contemporary criticism took him to task for his sympathetic depictions of "bad" characters like Becky, modern criticism has been more inclined to find fault with his exaltations of "good" characters like Amelia; for Thackeray shows through his irony how good intentions can act as a blight, and how selfish action can be ultimately beneficial. The subtlety of his moral vision depends on his depiction of this intricate relation between good and evil. Thackeray has always been considered primarily as a novelist of manners. But his greatness also lies in his realistic depiction of intimate human relationships. In his presentation of his characters as psychological beings, he emphasizes the ironic contrast between the apparent and the latent motive, and explores love as both a constructive and a destructive force. He suggests, where he does not analyse, the co-existence of contrary impulses in the human psyche; so through his novels we find evidence of his awareness of psychological patterns which have since been explicitly formulated by twentieth century psychoanalysts. A close study of Henry Esmond shows this novel to be permeated with dramatic irony, for to grasp the full significance of the story the reader must re-examine every statement of the narrator, and form an independent judgement on him and the relationships in which he is involved. In The Newcomes , where the theme is the hypocrisy and pretension of society, and the confusion of worth, and wealth that has produced the concept of "respectability," Thackeray uses a stylistic pattern of allusions to fairy-tale, romance and fable that are in ironic counterpoint with the grossly materialistic middle-class world which he depicts. Again he explores the incongruous, and achieves with his irony an effect of the complexity of life.