#imuo

also I cannot believe kingsolver managed to turn Uriah’s relationship with his mother into something pathetic when in Copperfield it’s a “us against the world” kind of situation to the point that David himself (who’d rather eat his own foot than compliment Uriah) often notes how deeply and genuinely they love each other

ngl the incest in david copperfield caught me off-guard

seriously debating whether i should read demon copperhead because i feel like im missing some crucial part of authorial intent here but im met with the insurmountable obstacle that it seems the exact kind of usamerican literature i despise. most average young man who is both brilliant and an underdog that goes through shit because of society. how original. never read that one before.

btw the relationships in david copperfield are absolutely neurotic. david is named after his dead father and his aunt initially rejects him because by being a boy she cannot name him after herself (when she adopts him she changes his FIRST name into her LAST name. so now he has two surnames and no first name). agnes (of whom david thinks for the first half of the book as a sister) is the mirror image of her mother and her father treats her as half his daughter and half his wife (she holds the keys of the house even when she's 9. she isn't allowed to go to school). mr. peggotty says he loves emily (adopted daughter) more than a man loves his wife. steerforth (homoerotic friend of david's. somewhat stavrogin-coded) ends up seducing and ruining the life of david's first love. david's first wife is precisely his mother. wtf is going on

one of the reasons im. particular abt uriah as a character is that he’s the classic example of character where absolutely neutral behavior is linked to negative moral connotations. and while i agree that this was the way writing went in victorian literature (and it’d be anachronistic and rather stupid of be to hold dickens to higher standards than his times, so it really doesn’t bother me in the context of the classic itself), i cannot see them translated into modern settings with the same grace. and in general the correlation between bad hygiene (something uriah wasn’t even at fault of in the og) and some kind of “deviance” has to end

last take is that if a character in a victorian novel is written with a vocabulary that implies sexual deviance to set him apart from the cast and to immediately define him as a villain, writing him in the position of a pedophile in your retelling might not be the hashtag progressive choice you might think