Copperfield!

[bagheera_san]

Wow, writing in everyone's fandom du jour really pays off! That X-Men fic has just reached its second page of comments. That has rarely (if ever?) happened to me.

Also, finished David Copperfield today. Had tears in my eyes for the last fifteen pages just, because, you know. It was over and stuff. And everyone got a ridiculously happy ending. Although going back to the first sentence, I don't think Davy is actually the hero of this story. It's pretty much everyone else (chiefly Betsy Trotwood, nineteenth century BAMF, Mr Pegotty and Micawber) whereas Davy is just sort of there. And occasionally makes a stupid choice like marrying Dora. Of course, when Dora was almost dead, I finally realized that the reason she annoyed me SO MUCH is that the way she talks to her dog is exactly like the way my mum treats our dog. (Although my mum is otherwise nothing like Dora, for the record.) And then I was sad, and everyone went to Australia and Davy went off to go be a Romantic Poet (I laughed hard at the obligatory OMG THE ALPS ARE SUBLIME passage.) Also, Freud must have fucking loved this book, if he read it. The incestual subtext alone... But also, I think quite highly of Dickens for his positive portrayal of Mr Dick, and to a lesser extent, Miss Mowcher. But mostly my conclusion is: Betsy Trotwood Forever.

Comments

[daystarsearcher.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I know, right? Betsy Trotwood was one fierce and fabulous BAMF.

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

I don't know why or how, but it seems my ideas of nineteenth century women were so far mostly shaped by writers like Jane Austen or Bram Stoker or the Brontes and then suddenly there's this. Quite refreshing.

[aralias.livejournal.com]

i am also going to say it - betsy trotwood rules! tom baker claims that bessie the car is named after her. is he just confused? it's difficult to say.

maggie smith is v good as her in the daniel radcliffe adaptation.

also, hurrah for 2 pages of comments! surely, like, living things must have hit 2 pages. i don't know. but anyway - v good, whatever. still only half way through the movie...

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

Hm, I think I may have to watch that adaptation eventually, though not immediately (I prefer to keep the characters as they are in my imagination for a while).

[aralias.livejournal.com]

yes, this seems fair. the book is most excellent. i should stop plugging the 'can't read a long book' version.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

My take on Dora changed completely due to finding out about real life circumstances of the author, one of the very few times that happened. At first, I found her annoying as well. Then (still not knowing rl circumstances) I thought she was a valid critique of how Victorian society deliberately cultivating the childwife thing and a woman behaving like a child makes the girl and later woman incapable of dealing, plus there were the obvious similarities to David's mother which made it so very Freudian, as you say. And THEN I found out about Dickens' marriage. Which makes it impossible to read Dora dying young and giving David her blessing re: Agnes as blatant wish fulfillment. (DC isn't regarded as the most autobiographical of Dickens' novels for nothing - just reverse the initials...)
What happens if Dora doesn't conveniently die: her husband starts treating her like Mr. Murdstone does David's mother. He utterly destroys her self confidence and makes her stupid for even existing. But through all her numerous pregnancies and the resulting children, she still doesn't die, and A Good Man does not leave his wife or get a divorce, especially not for having fallen for another woman. No, the only acceptable reason is: declaring she's a bad mother, banishing her from the house and making all her children choose between him and her because of course if her children would side with her this would destroy his alibi. Once the oldest daughter who is alrady married disobeys. And the woman still doesn't die conveniently; in fact, she survives her husband, and after his death, but only after his death, her other children dare to see her again. But of course, in the first biographies she has to read that she was too stupid for the great genius, unworthy, and A Bad Mother because surely, surely he would not lie and kick a woman who through eleven births, seven of which survive, lost her youthful looks (how dare she?), and of course has no job skills to support herself because she was not raised that way, and no friends who weren't her husbands out for any other reason.
It's not until the eldest daughter, on the advice of George Bernard Shaw whom she's friends with, publishes her own memoirs that perception changes.
And I can't block that out when going back to David Copperfield, so now I think: poor Dora. ( More here)

The Micawbers are another fascinating case of reality transported into fiction to make it more bearable, but in a gentler way. They're portrayals of Dickens' parents with a happy ending. As opposed to, you know, still sponging on even after their son became famous, and of course David is never angry at them the way Dickens was angry at his mother for making ihm work at a bottle factory at age 10 when his father was in debtor's prison. There is a fragment of an attempt at an autobiography which just seethes with resentment, and which he abandoned, prefering instead to transport them into fiction, where David can just love them precisely because he's not their son and they sort of adopt him anyway, and Mr. Micawber can turn over a new leaf and save the day at the end instead of ever incuring new debts.

Betsy Trotwood has no rl model and is just sheer wish fulfillment, the aunt we all wish we had, and one of the most glorious female characters in Victorian literature.

Miss Mowcher: rl story to Dickens' credit: like all his novels, David Copperfield was originally published via a bi-monthly magazine, and Miss Mowcher was modelled on a real person. When the issue where the character first appears was published, she was hurt and wrote to Dickens, and he hadn't want to hurt her, so he changed the concept of the character, rewrote the passages (Miss Mowcher was originally meant to be a villain) and made her into a heroine the next time the character shows up.

Mr. Dick: good point. Dickens was a rl crusader for better treatment for the mentally handicapped as well.

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is like a free lit class. I knew that DC was autobiographical, but sort of assumed (since I didn't bother until now to look up Dickens biography) that his first wife died young, too, or something like that. Reality is pretty sad. Probably now I won't be able to read the Dora passages without some rage, so I'm glad I didn't know that while reading the novel for the first time.

I completely understand why, when writing a fictional autobiography, you'd want to turn your not-so-great parents into the Micawbers.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Here are some passages of what George Orwell, who wrote the best Dickens essay ever (really, check it out, it's so what literary essays should be) - says about David Copperfield, which he both praises and critisizes:

One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child
labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books,
but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in factories. The
one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in
DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's
warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age
of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much
as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly
because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents,
and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married.
Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:

"It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so
easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and
with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt
bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made
any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old,
a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby."

Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens
himself. He uses almost the same words in the autobiography that he began
and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying
that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on
bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to be condemned
to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.
David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and
the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles
Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness that the
STRUCTURE of society can be changed. (...) However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class animosities may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences between class and class were enormously greater. The ‘gentleman’ and the ‘common man’ must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens is quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him not to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma.

And another passage, starting with a DC quote again:

"There was one boy--a certain J. Steerforth--who cut his name very deep
and very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice,
and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles,
who I dreaded would make game of it, and pretend to be dreadfully
frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I fancied would
sing it."
When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were
exactly the pictures that those particular names would call up. The
reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words (Demple--
'temple'; Traddles--probably 'skedaddle'). But how many people, before
Dickens, had ever noticed such things?