SARA DECORTE

Vanity Fair - W. M. THACKERAY

Chapter XXX

◊ Rebecca isn't worry about his husband and their condition of money, but she is worry just about the loss of Rawdon's presents, the inability to buy new clothes and jewelry and the loss of social privileges. Rebecca's behavior shows an egoist woman, unfeeling, pointing only to climbing the social ladder and is ready to do anything to achieve his goals.

◊ My impression of Rebecca's character is confirmed. She is a calculating woman, who thinks only of herself. For example at line 52: "Every calculation made of these valuables Mrs. Rebecca found, not without a pungent feeling of triumph and self-satisfaction, that should circumstances occur, she might reckon on six or seven hundred pounds at very least, to begin the world with".

◊ Thackeray uses the method of the indirect characterization; he doesn't describe the personality of the characters in his own words, but leaves it to the facts and behavior of the characters itself to speak.

The reader is more free to form his own opinion on Rawdon's character than on Rebecca's; the judgment of Rebecca's character is explicit and directs the reader to a negative view of woman, but this doesn't happen in Rawdon's character.

The narrator is not critical of middle-class in general, but he critic people like Rebecca: opportunistic, selfish, devoid of feelings and attached to money, who doesn't approach the progress of the Victorian Age.