Why the 19th C. Makes Me Sad

People keep disappearing in Copperfield.   First DC the elder dies, then DC is sent away from home, which he's young enough to experience as everyone he loves disappearing from his life.  When he comes home again, he sees his mother and baby brother briefly, but then they die, and he only sees them again lying in state in the parlor.  (By dying, they finally stop disappearing—they come to rest in the graveyard next to the church next to DC's father.  He always knows where to find them after that.)  

DC goes to school and sees Mr. Mell fired.  He leaves school, and doesn't see anyone from there for a long time.  He works, and seems to disappear from his own life; eventually, he runs away and really does disappear from it.  He finds his Aunt, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone come find him, but finally they leave again and he's glad, for the first time in the novel, to see anyone who leaves gone.  Later he sees Mr. Wickfield slowly losing his mind.  

The worst kinds of leaving for DC, though, seems to be committed by women.  When Emily Peggotty runs away from home with Steerforth, it's a HUGE problem.  Everyone is worried that Em'ly will become a whore in London, but no one will say this directly.  (Earlier, a woman--her friend Martha--ran away from home and seems to have become a whore in London, but she's also a very crazy and apparently unattractive whore, so it's hard to tell.) Pages and pages and pages are spent mourning Em'ly and worrying about her and wondering if she'll ever come back.   (Meanwhile, Mr. Spenlow and Mr. Barkis have both died, but their disappearances weren't nearly so hard.  DC seems more worried that Agnes is going to marry Uriah Heep and so disappear from his life, even though Agnes swears she'll never marry Uriah.)  Likewise, Dora is now about to die, too, which DC has to keep worrying over, hinting at it and alluding to it and anticipating it--then he takes a couple chapters to talk about other people, so that the narrative is left dreading her death.  

All the women are going away.  Men like Mr. Peggotty have to follow women around, to make sure they don't disappear, because leaving home, in any way, means becoming a whore.  (Whores are TERRIBLE, although the novel won't talk about this clearly enough for me to tell why.)   Death is probably whores too.  

Copperfield: Or Only Seventy-Eight More to Go...

Still reading Copperfield, which I'm still enjoying but now have started resenting, too. (It's Long. LONG.) Listening to it streamed from Libri Vox, read by people with good voices. The chapter in which David/Trotwood goes with Steerforth to the theater is wonderful. D/T is drunk, having had Steerforth and his college friends to dinner in his new apartment. He buys too much wine, and then drinks a lot of it, hoping that Steerforth's friends will like him and stop thinking he's very young (which he is). Steerforth's friends are themselves insecure about their youth, though, because one of them keeps referring to himself as "a man." That is, he doesn't use the first-person, just speaks of himself in third. For (a non-Dickensian) example: "A man has got to speak about himself in the third person when he isn't quite comfortable with who he is, and means to display his insecurity in the most affected way possible."

But David/Trotwood is drunk, and at the theater, and doesn't know who or where he is after a while. Before getting there, he (the narrator) had been describing the dinner and the drunkenness and the state of the wine bottles in the usual first-person past-tense, but after a while these pronouns shift into a hazy "someone" (like "someone was vomiting in a corner"), and then finally says, "someone was me." But he goes on describing himself like this, from the outside, like Steerforth's vaguely unpleasant friend "a man." All of which works incredibly well when they're at the theater, and D/T is behaving very drunk in the box during the intermission (and after the intermission, although he doesn't seem to realize it and doesn't understand why everyone keeps shushing him), and the "someone" becomes frighteningly distant—especially frightening because his foster-sister Agnes is there in the box, too, and seems embarrassed to recognize him, as though he really IS someone else.

Later D/T has a melodramatic and very self-pitying hangover, and is ashamed about this transgression of personality. The "someone" has already accomplished the othering before D/T realizes it, though—we were getting it from the first "someone" (it is almost too obvious when the narrator identifies D/T as the someone), and so we're wrapped up in the little moebius-strip of D/T's/the narrator's understanding of himself, and when this understanding takes place.

David Copperfield

Spent today in Richmond and then at home on the sofa, reading David Copperfield. Very sleepy now, but a few notes:

1. The way vision and visual perception get tied up with memory. (Did they use the word "perspective" as a narrative word in the mid-19th century?)

2. DC's phantom imaginary sister—both Steerforth and Miss Betsy wish he had a sister, but instead he just has a dead, "girlish" mother.

3. Narrator keeps wanting to track what he knew—was aware of—at each point in the narrative. Likes to admit that he may be making things up; uses "I remember" as a kind of refrain. A kind of unreliability that, I think, may actually bring the reader in closer to the novel's world.

Also, it's fun. I like fun.