"Don't be galvanic, sir!" -- more "fun" with David Copperfield

[uvula_fr_b4]

It's amazing how little things like your Internet connection going down for 48 hours (give or take a couple of hours), having a tire blow out on the freeway late at night, and suffering from a particular unwanted and unneeded "healthful" effect of yerba maté because you neglected to take the sleeve containing the leaves out of your cup after they'd steeped for a sufficient length of time because you'd never drank the straight stuff before, only Celestial Seasoning's sadly no-longer-available-in-my-area Morning Thunder blend (which combines maté with black tea), can throw a largish monkey wrench into your best-intentioned, most sincere blogging plans.

And this is the second year in a row that I've not watched The Long Good Friday on Good Friday. Bad Uvula! BAD!

Anyhoo...

I'm grimly picking my way through David Copperfield; I would read it a lot faster, even with my flow having been disrupted by changing residences, if I didn't have this annoying habit of, oh, reading other books or pulling out old comic books and re-reading them instead....

I'm up to p. 548 in the Oxford World's Classics edition (in the midst of Chapter XXXIX: "Wickfield and Heep"), and have only ("only," he says...) 307 pages to go, excluding the appendices. I've got some more thoughts on what I've read since my last DC-related entry, but I'll put them behind the cut -- in the SPOILER ZONE -- both for brevity's sake and for the sake of anyone who hasn't read David Copperfield and wishes to come to it as fresh as possible.

First, a wee riddle:

Q: What's the difference between Dora Spenlow and the Suez Canal?

A: One's a busy ditch.

EDITED at 1220 EDT/Saturday, 15 April 2006: ..'cause I low-balled my Internet down time.

• Seriously, Dora Spenlow is so friggin' infantilized, she makes Marilyn Monroe look like Simone de Beauvoir. Since David Copperfield is regarded as one of the closest avatars to Dickens (if not actually constituting a "Mary Sue" incarnation of himself), I have to wonder if Dickens originally liked utterly incompetent, literally helpless, doll-like twits like Dora. Copperfield's dogged infatuation with Dora (I dare not call it love...) is nothing short of pathological, and makes him look at least as skeevy and disreputable as James Stewart's character in Vertigo -- or Matt Murdock/Daredevil during Frank Miller's first run as the comic book's writer/artist, when Matt/DD systematically destroyed the independence and self-confidence of his girlfriend Heather Glenn prior to proposing marriage (a wedding which was derailed thanks to some artfully forged letters written by Natasha Romanoff/the Black Widow). From my reading of Peter Gay, I'm reasonably certain that Dora is meant to be "too much of a good thing" as far as the Victorian-era Englishmen were concerned (though the events in David Copperfield thus far occur in the first two decades of the 19th century, before Victoria ascended the throne); but maaaaan, she is seriously grating on my nerves, and so long as Davy-boy keeps obsessing over her, he's an utterly unsympathetic character.
  
  
• That said, Agnes Wickfield is presented as an equally absurd archetype: the Victorian madonna, wise beyond her years (she's shown to be essentially raising her widowed father and functioning socially as his wife when she's first introduced at the age of, what, nine or ten), sweet natured, empathetic, moderate in speech and deed (Copperfield describes her thus: "She filled my heart with such good resolutions, strengthened my weakness so, by her example, so directed -- I know not how, she was too modest and gentle to advise me in many words -- the wandering ardor and unsettled purpose within me, that all the little good I have done, and all the harm I have forborne, I solemnly believe I may refer to her;" p. 504). In other words, Agnes is the best possible mommy surrogate: she's not a nag, a scold, a harridan, a shrew. She's also literally incredible, far less believable than faster-than-light spaceships or nigh-immortal vampires.
  
  
• Are any of Dickens' "bad" women (i.e., sexually profligate or unwise in their choice of paramours) not tearfully remorseful drips? Say what you will about Anthony Trollope, but at least he came a hell of a lot closer to writing a character more in the vein of Becky Sharpe (from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, natch) than Dickens did. (I would love to be proved wrong on this point, BTW.)
  
  
• Dickens's earnestness may well kill my desire -- or ability -- to read anything else by him. Again, Trollope is more nuanced, and a hell of a lot closer to "realism" than Dickens ever came.
  
  
• That said, if someone could convince me that Dickens has written at least one book more informed by the cynicism displayed in Mr. Spenlow's lack of a will -- after he dies, his proctors search in vain for his will, and, when David tells them that he's dead certain that Spenlow did have a will because he told him that he did in order to scare David away from his daughter Dora, take Spenlow's earnest assurances that he did have a will as ironclad proof that he didn't, which proves to be absolutely correct (pps. 542-43) -- I'd probably read that book within the next year or so. (Bleak House? Our Mutual Friend?) This sequence contains some of Dickens's most subtle satire, and is a welcome change from his constantly playing to the gallery.
  
  
• More anti-Semitism: describing his revulsion for how Uriah Heep dominates Agnes's father, David says, "If I had seen an Ape taking command of a Man, I should hardly have thought it a more degrading spectacle" (p. 501). This gave me pause for two reasons: first, the departure from the usual animals that anti-Semites liken Jews to (pigs, rats, snakes, spiders, or germs); and second, this is a pretty remarkable piece of foreshadowing given that David Copperfield was published ten years before Darwin's Origins of Species....
  
  
• David's aunt, Betsy Trotwood, is a perplexing -- often annoying -- mixture of traits, and is, thus far, the second most believable character in the book after David himself; what ultimately wins me over are the snappy lines Dickens feeds her. For example, upon viewing Uriah Heep's contortions and twitchings, she snaps, "'Deuce take the man!...what's he about? Don't be galvanic, sir!'" (p. 502). Heh.
  
  
• Commenting on the superciliousness of Jack Maldon, David observes: "A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since" (p. 510). Pretty amazing, given that David Copperfield was published before the Crimean War, which I understood to have been the font of the substrate of "Lost Generation" sentiment among some Britons in the latter half of the 19th century (as seen, for example, in Ouida's novel Under Two Flags, or in Trollope's The Way We Live Now).
  
  
• Thank Perun that hair care products are no longer based on bear grease; it was in Trollope that I first learned that fashionable barbershops in Victorian England actually kept bear cubs on site to be slaughtered for the freshest possible pomade. Eeeeyuck. (David puts himself on "a short allowance of bear's grease" [p. 511] after learning that his aunt has been ruined, apparently as a consequence of her distrust of that "dirty, thieving Jew" Uriah Heep, and so she made a series of ill-considered investments on her own, thus pissing all of her money away. You go, girl!)
  
  
• Mrs. Micawber declaring, "'It may be a sacrifice...to immure one's self in a Cathedral town'" (p. 516) made me wonder what Trollope thought of this, since he would begin his Barsetshire Chronicles a couple of years after David Copperfield was published.
  
  
• No, I don't see any similarities between Wilkins Micawber and myself. None whatsoever. (*Coughs*)