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Vanity Fair

There was a time when a man’s life was defined by his devotion to finding God. Christianity spread like a wildfire throughout a good portion of the world’s population in the past two thousand years, especially in Europe and America, and its almost blinding light can still be seen today in the eyes of its many followers. But this fire, like all others, has exhausted itself at a faster and faster pace as the years have passed. Worldly possessions have come to mean more and more as the search for the divine has been pushed into a secondary status. We are no longer measured by our devotion to a greater being whom we are to be grateful for, but are judged by our worth in a world of commercial trade and an ever-so-important financial status. One cannot help but to question where this change occurred, and what vehicles have propelled this material state of mind to come to the forefront of the collective conscious of the human race.
A most interesting change can be seen in the dichotomy of the ideals between the decades of 1670 and 1710. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical puritan piece meant to be read with the Bible, was the most popular book of its time, only next to the Bible itself. Assuming its popularity to be a measure of its worth to the people of the time, Bunyan’s novel of a simple story of a man in search of God can be viewed as the scripture to which its disciples refer. Throughout his narrative, the reader is swept into a world of religious struggle and strife. Bunyan illustrates those things of the world that are to be considered of virtue. Simply put, a man’s virtue is defined by Bunyan as his desire for peace in God, the ability to shun the evils of the world, and strict abstinence from material possessions, all of which are ideals missing from the fictional town seen by Bunyan in his dream, known as Vanity Fair. Just forty years later, the antithesis of Bunyan’s divine dream is manifested...