Significance of vicious treatment toward Christian faithful in Vanity Fair

Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

A sign of the enduring popularity and influence of The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan is that one of the more memorable episodes of the allegory -- the passage of Christian and Faithful through the town of Vanity, and its market festival of "Vanity Fair" -- continues to be a recognizable allusion long after Bunyan's death. In 2012, Vanity Fair remains the title of a Conde-Nast magazine celebrating wealth and fame. To a certain degree, Bunyan would approve the title of this magazine, for his own conception of Vanity Fair is a place of glossy and meretricious emptiness. This is, after all, the etymological meaning of "Vanity" -- although contemporary usage is more likely to refer to conceitedness (as, for example, with "Vanity Smurf" always gazing in a hand-mirror), the original meaning was of worthless vacuity. This is "Vanity" in the sense of "vain effort" or something done "in vain." Bunyan's allegorical meaning of "Vanity Fair" is to emphasize the worldly aspects of the world in which his readers find themselves: it is worth examining what happens to Christian and Faithful in the episode to read the allegory for its meaning.

Because Bunyan's goal in Pilgrim's Progress is to provide the reader with an allegorical model for righteous conduct, it is worth noting that the vicious treatment that Christian and Faithful receive at Vanity Fair is understood as somehow necessary. Bunyan is careful to note, on more than one occasion, that Jesus had to pass through Vanity Fair, too: it is summarized in one of the interpolated bits of verse Bunyan wrote for the illustrated edition of the book:

Behold VANITY-FAIR; the Pilgrims there?

Are Chain'd and Ston'd beside;

Even so it was, our Lord past here,

And on Mount Calvary dy'd.[footnoteRef:0] [0: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. Edited W.R. Owens. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 89.]

In other words, even Jesus had to "[pass through] here" Vanity Fair thus represents the most worldly aspects of human social life. But more than that, it represents a specific kind of temptation, as Bunyan makes clear in his longer summary of what happened to Jesus in "Vanity Fair":

The Prince of princes himself, when here, went through this Town to his own Countrey, and that upon a Fair-day too; yea, and, as I think, it was Beelzebub, the chief Lord of this Fair, that invited him to buy of his Vanities, yea, would have made him Lord of the Fair, would he but have done him Reverence as he went thorow the Town. [footnoteRef:1] [1: Ibid., 86.]