ABSTRACT

The film Young Adult provides a stunning depiction of vanity and how it is entwined with other moral vices. Mavis Garry is prompted to return to her hometown to woo a married, former beau (Buddy) out of vanity: an overweening desire to be admired for her appearance and authorship. Vanity involves wishing to be seen possessing something valuable that others lack and bestowing excessive attention on that possession, as in Mavis’s repeated physical preening and buffing. Because comparison is central to vanity, it contributes to envy. When the vain person perceives another to have more of whatever else she prizes, she will be prone to envy. Mavis is hostile toward Buddy’s wife, envying her domestic joy and friendships. Vanity also encourages arrogance which, combined with her vanity, distorts Mavis’s perception of reality and disposes her to be insensitive and cruel. At the film’s climax, Mavis’s defects are publicly witnessed, producing in her the salutary moral experience of shame. However, Mavis’s incipient self-awareness and shame are dissipated by a few words from a fawning fan, as the undertow of vanity pulls Mavis beneath the clarity of the moral sensibility evoked by shame.