Thackeray’s Vanity Fair of Hats

In Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero , William Makepeace Thackeray uses hats to illustrate his mock-heroic characters and to reinforce the novel’s theme of “ Vanitas Vanitatum! ” Of these hats—including cocked hats, top hats, shovel-hats, shakos, and bonnets—the narrator’s fool’s cap is the most symbolically important. Adopting a dual perspective of “Satire and Sentiment,” the narrator shows that “All is vanity.” If the vanity of life is inescapable, he implies, then the only consolation is laughter.