Satire on England Middle Class Society in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

ABSTRACT

The word literature often appears in our daily life, but until this time there is no perfect definition that can explain this word exactly. According to Long (1945:3), literature is the expression of life in the words of thruth and beauty; it is the written record of man’s spirit, of his thought, emotions, and aspiration; it is the history, and the only history of the human soul. Literature gives the people love, faith, duty and friendship.

In this thesis the writer tries to analysis about satire aspect which is reflected
in Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. According to Holman, (1970:473) satire is a literary manner that blends a critical attitude with humor and wit to the end that human institution or humanity may be improved. Satire is artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement. The writer of this thesis uses genetic structuralism approach which analyses the novel based on the intrinsic and the extrinsic aspects.

The objectives of this research are to find out kinds of the satiric methods used in Vanity Fair and to find out the way how Thackeray satirizes the middle class society in England through his novel Vanity Fair.

From the analysis which is done it can be concluded that in Vanity Fair, found
Thackeray uses almost all of the satiric methods. The quotation which is finds by
the writer is in the form of dia logue between one character and each others. The writer does not find the other from the expressions, events and discourses.

In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray satirizes the England middle class society through the characters and the society which is appear in the novel. He used some family portrait to illustrate the England middle class society in that time. Thackeray saw how capitalism and imperialism with their emphasis on wealth, material goods, and ostentation had corrupted society.

Based on the conclusion, some suggestions are made. They are: (1) the next researcher can be more creative in analyzing this novel and can collect the supporting data as many as possible (2) the next researchers can continue analyzing this novel in the same object w hich is analyzed by the writer (3) they also can analyze the data from the other side, such as from the author of Vanity Fair, from the relation between the author and his society when he writes the novel or from the other aspects and (4) the next researcher can develop their research by using the methods of literary criticism which now has many kinds, such as, by using sociological analysis, genetic structuralism analysis, and et cetera.