1. This is spot on. For centuries novelists -- running from Sterne and Austen to Dickens to Bellow, Roth & Roupenian have had a monopoly power on parodying their family, lovers & friends. Now people have more power to strike back!https://twitter.com/SamAdlerBell/status/1413342298025435145 …
-
Show this thread
-
2. The 19th century version of the Cat Person scandal involved Dickens and a little person, Mrs. Seymour Hill, whose dwarfishness he mocked as "Miss Mowcher" in the serialized version of David Cooperfield (where he also implied she was a pimp).pic.twitter.com/MdGS9O7aAN
2 replies 7 retweets 33 likesShow this thread -
3. Mrs. Seymour Hill read David Cooperfield in serialization & objected to the cruel jokes about her appearance and the suggestion in the novel that she procured young women for aristocrats.
1 reply 3 retweets 29 likesShow this thread -
4. Hill to Dickens, 1849: "you shew up personal deformities with insinuations that by the purest of my sex may be construed to the worst of purposes." Amazingly, Dickens took the criticism to heart & changed the characterization of Miss Mowcher in later chapters.pic.twitter.com/g8cQJGBE3a
1 reply 2 retweets 29 likesShow this thread -
5. Dickens of course was a popular entertainer & unusually responsive to reader complaints (he also, in answer to Jewish readers who complained, toned down the anti-Semitism a little in Oliver Twist & later created, as redress, positive Jewish characters).
1 reply 1 retweet 34 likesShow this thread -
6. The thing is a roman a clef is more like a caricature than it is polemic. You can answer a polemic -- how do you respond to mimicry exaggerated likeness?
1 reply 1 retweet 19 likesShow this thread -
7. A Saul Bellow story is instructive. The critic Hilton Kramer was big Saul Bellow booster until Bellow put him as a character in Humboldt's Gift. The likeness was, in many ways, unfair, but also (if you know what a stuffed shirt Kramer was) hilarious.
3 replies 1 retweet 24 likesShow this thread -
No, just going by his literary persona.
-
-
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.