Taking Vanity Fair's popular success in the United States as one of many signals that an enclosed body of American 'domestic fiction' is untenable, LeFavour takes Thackeray's mockery of the genre as a signal to reconsider the naivite of American readers and the American fiction they read. This essay appears in _Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.