{"id":1766,"date":"2010-10-24T16:51:31","date_gmt":"2010-10-24T14:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=36"},"modified":"2010-10-24T16:51:31","modified_gmt":"2010-10-24T14:51:31","slug":"on-fallen-idols-and-mr-charles-dickens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2010\/10\/24\/on-fallen-idols-and-mr-charles-dickens\/","title":{"rendered":"ON FALLEN IDOLS (AND MR. CHARLES DICKENS)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve started teaching Great Expectations<\/em> and, as our times will have it, I have used a PowerPoint presentation to accompany a brief introduction to the life and works of Mr. Charles Dickens. In the course of searching for pictures that might make this write out of the remote Victorian past more real for them, I came across Claire Tomalin\u2019s acclaimed biography of his supposed live-in mistress for 13 years: The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens<\/em> (2004). \u2018Supposed\u2019 as no documents attest to their actually living together, for this silenced romance was regarded as a scandalous affair in Dickens\u2019s lifetime (1812-1870).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t favour at all biographical approaches to writers\u2019 lives and much less gossip about their romantic privacy, although this is still quite widespread (just read the magazine Qu\u00e9 Leer<\/em> for a contemporary version). I make a point of never reading biographies, feeling that they can hardly bring a satisfactory explanation to the riddle of why\/how some people grow up to become writers. Also, because I feel that many other biographies could be equally enlightening and even more exciting, and I don\u2019t mean those of football players \u2013think here housewives or truck drivers. I am sure Dickens himself would agree that either any life or none at all deserves a biographer (who writes the biographies of biographers, I wonder?).<\/p>\n

Just as Pip imagines that his father\u2019s looks reflect those of the letters on his grave, I wanted to imagine that Dickens\u2019s personality reflects the \u2018letters\u2019 in his novels. I pictured him not just as a genius but also as the kind of warm, committed person I definitely would like to meet and make friends with. Now my idol is fallen, quite possibly for ever. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s changed? My internet search led me to a webpage on his wife, n\u00e9e Catherine Hogarth, which disclosed how nasty Dickens had been to her after they separated and, yes, before. I read gossip I want to forget about his being quite unsympathetic towards Kate during a long breakdown, caused by their baby daughter Dora\u2019s death. It seems he even published a notice in the newspapers when they formally separated in 1858, essentially blaming her for her incapacity to run their large household (there were at least two sisters-in-law helping the wife, maybe the husband had a point?). Someone claimed that Dickens even blamed Kate for their sprawling family of ten children.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have enough elements to judge Dickens and I don\u2019t want to have them \u2013instead of borrowing Peter Ackroyd\u2019s famed biography from the library, I borrowed Dickens\u2019s own American Notes<\/em>. My students will learn about the difficulties of divorce in Victorian times but not about Dickens\u2019 ungentlemanly behaviour, unless they read this post (is this censorship?). Yet, I am disappointed, not just as a daft groupie, which I am, but mainly as a feminist teacher who, once more, must separate the man from the artist. <\/p>\n

Others may find this irrelevant or even androphobic (I hope it\u2019s not), but when I admire a writer, I admire a mind that I suppose untainted with major sins: misogyny, racism, snobbery, homophobia, anti-semitism… If the mind is tainted, so is my pleasure in the text.<\/p>\n

As a woman I am of course particularly sensitive to misogyny. Yet, finding out about Dickens\u2019s private life is teaching me, to my surprise, that I am more willing to accept misogyny in the man\u2019s text than in the man. A radical feminist would tell me I should expose both in class, text and man, as they are inseparable. Being no radical (or not always) and because I still love the text even though I love the man much less, I\u2019ll teach Great Expectations<\/em> with the enthusiasm it deserves, pointing my finger at its weaknesses, and including mine for Dickens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve started teaching Great Expectations and, as our times will have it, I have used a PowerPoint presentation to accompany a brief introduction to the life and works of Mr. Charles Dickens. In the course of searching for pictures that might make this write out of the remote Victorian past more real for them, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[225],"class_list":["post-1766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria","tag-great-expectations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}