ABSTRACT
Vanity Fair's assault upon the identification of worth and happiness with money, power, or prestige is the source of most of its satire. Addressing a society that has been taught by the Protestant ethic to regard economic success as a mark of virtue and failure as a sign of social and spiritual undeservingness, the novel insists that the socio-economic order is not also a moral order. The aggressive elements in Vanity Fair's psychic structure are so strong that they are often more vividly presented than the opposing compliant views. The relationships between aggressive and compliant characters are the backbone of the novel. The novel's conclusions about human nature are drawn exclusively from neurotic characters. In Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth there is a penetrating discussion of the relation between art and neurosis which includes a value theory similar to that governing the foregoing criticism of Vanity Fair.
