Charles Dickens rolls in his grave
This is too good. I’m still reading Dickens’s journalism; he wrote an article to criticise a writer who had translated the French version of a fairy tale adding little “moralising” bits about alcohol, tobacco and gambling. As in, the villains are alcoholic and the goodies are teetotallers. Dickens hated it, and he wrote this:
Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum kept in. Imagine a Vegetarian edition, with the goat’s flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that ‘tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society Edition, to deny the cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed. Robinson Crusoe would be “edited” out of his island in a hundred years and the island would be swallowed up in the editorial ocean.
My poor dear Dickens could not imagine that there would be a world in which Coetzee wrote his absolutely wonderful Foe, the story of Crusoe as seen by the woman who was castaway with him in the same island. Nor that The Tempest would stay alive thanks to postcolonial interpretations, that explain how it feels to be seen as Caliban by men who see themselves as Prospero. Nor that cinema would make a feminist out of Jane Austen. Nor that me, a young woman like the ones that get married and have babies in his novels, would analyse to what extent the cases of gender violence in his work resemble what happens in real life.
Well, it is a world in which women vote, an idea he considered the highest pinnacle of nonsense, so maybe it’s just as well he’s not here to see it.
Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum kept in. Imagine a Vegetarian edition, with the goat’s flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that ‘tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society Edition, to deny the cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed. Robinson Crusoe would be “edited” out of his island in a hundred years and the island would be swallowed up in the editorial ocean.
My poor dear Dickens could not imagine that there would be a world in which Coetzee wrote his absolutely wonderful Foe, the story of Crusoe as seen by the woman who was castaway with him in the same island. Nor that The Tempest would stay alive thanks to postcolonial interpretations, that explain how it feels to be seen as Caliban by men who see themselves as Prospero. Nor that cinema would make a feminist out of Jane Austen. Nor that me, a young woman like the ones that get married and have babies in his novels, would analyse to what extent the cases of gender violence in his work resemble what happens in real life.
Well, it is a world in which women vote, an idea he considered the highest pinnacle of nonsense, so maybe it’s just as well he’s not here to see it.