How Does 'Demon Copperhead' Compare To 'David Copperfield'?

Question

Fans who've read both novels: do the modern struggles in 'Demon Copperhead' really mirror the emotional arcs of Dickens' 'David Copperfield'? Still debating their thematic parallels.

AN LA · Answer

Contemporary retellings such as Demon Copperhead of Dickens’s novels continue to captivate readers and adhere to the core of the stories while relocating them within different eras and geographical locales, with the cited work transferring the author’s portrayal of societal woes to a story set within the context of the opioid crisis unfolding in the Appalachian region and viewed through the eyes of a resilient child. In like manner, other novels are reinterpreting classic conflicts and rendering them within the rich fantasias that they create. For example, in The Devil’s Possession, the exterior conflicts of the classic narrative are supplanted by a deep-seated, contractual, magical problem slowly wreaking havoc upon the psyche and legacy of a family of individuals, with the excruciating, personal struggle of the protagonist to achieve and retain his autonomy providing the emotional epicenter of the novel.

Joanna · Answer

I’m struck by the way Kingsolver updates Dickens in this novel. Dickens laid out a great story in David Copperfield, but it reads as a somewhat dusty and safe novel today. This novel makes you feel the dirt of the trailer parks that its characters inhabit, and the strain of not knowing where your next meal is coming from. The first-person narrative in both novels is wonderful, but the voice of the modern-day Copperhead is much more brilliant, employing slang and dark humor that would be out of place in the proper, English-speaking mouth of the boy David Copperfield. The female characters in this novel are very different from one another—Agnes gets a backbone, Dora is a druggie casualty, and Emily is a tough, hard, survivors-only-type woman.

What is brilliant about Kingsolver is she has shown that the cycles of poverty have not changed in many ways. David had been able to escape his fate because of his inherited wealth, and in Demon’s search for redemption through his art, he is unable to fully escape the clutches of the system of poverty. The two settings of the two novels are coastal England in the 19th century and rural Virginia today, but instead of cobblestone streets there are Dollar Generals and pawn shops. Reading both novels is a great way to see how great literature refracts through the different eras of history.

Oliver · Answer

This is so rich – Kingsolver has reimagined ‘David Copperfield’ for 21st-century America. Her depictions of meth-lab workhouses and the impossible situations that orphans face in today’s society, without even the thin charity of Victorian-era workhouses or schools for the poor, are devastating. Both novels follow the orphans as they search for families and stability in the face of decaying social systems, but unlike Dickens’ firmly-linear exploration of workhouse life in 19th century Britain, Demon’s world is messy and up for grabs – no safety-nets here. Kingsolver’s prose, spare as it is, is vastly different from Dickens’ famously complex, ironic writing in long, ornate paragraphs – rather, Kingsolver relies heavily on the dialect of her rural Appalachian characters to bring home the gut-wrenching specifics of their poverty and hardship.

Where Kingsolver’s_indicator_of_corporate_greed_in_the_opioid_crisis echoes Dickens’s_indictment_of_industrial_exploitation, however, her solutions are not as easily mapped. Unlike the Victorian novels of exploitation_and_redeemption_in_which_personal virtue_takes_the_form_of_a_triumphant_narrative_structure, Kingsolver’s work lingers like a bruise because the systemic_injustices_it_exposes are still unfolding. In contrast to David’s personal victories, Demon’s_wins_are-miniaturized_and_bittersweet.

Levi · Answer

I just finished reading both ‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver and the classic ‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens. Kingsolver has written a fantastic modern retelling of the classic set in the poverty-stricken Appalachian region of the US. Both young protagonists experience neglect from systems that are meant to protect them, but for me, Demon’s experience of growing up in an area with an opioid crisis, within the faltering foster care system, is so much harder to read than David’s misadventures in Victorian England. Additionally, David’s story is somewhat episodic with coincidences occurring to aid his journey upwards, whereas Demon’s story is so achingly painful. There is humor in both stories and Demon’s is far wittier and thus bites deeper. Dickens wrote these tales to expose failures in society in the hope of effecting change. Kingsolver has written her story to make you angry.

Giffygifty · Answer

David’s search for a home is a physical and emotional one – the Blunderstone cottage, the Peggotty boat-house and in the end the house he shares with Agnes are all ‘home’ for him. It is a place of safety, of domestic order. For Demon home is a complex concept – his mother’s trailer, the dreadful foster homes, the football field, Peggot’s trailer, the mountains of his childhood. Each place is bound up with love and loss and identity, and it is a feeling that he has to build from his memories of these places and the people in them, through his work.

Instead, Demon has to create a sense of home from the memory and the people and the art he creates. Thus home is something internal, something that he can take with him wherever he goes. That’s to say, home is not a single house or room that he can go back to. Rather, it is how most people live these days. And particularly the dispossessed. You can’t go home again. And home for many of them was traumatic. The site of much pain. Thus they have to make a new home, and that home is within themselves.

Ayme Denisse Nieto · Answer

These two novels are two sides of the same coin, made centuries apart. Both novels use a young boy as a lens to critique his society, and in both novels, the child is 'left alone' by his parents at some point in his life. In the case of Dickens' David Copperfield, the child is left in the workhouses of London to toil at a very early age as a child laborer, while in the case of Kingsolver's Demon Run, the young boy is passed from foster home to foster home due to the lack of social safety nets in rural America, to be manipulated by the healthcare-industrial complex.

One big difference is the two authors’ relationship to their setting. Dickens wrote about the very poor as an outsider. He was a reformer, so he wanted to expose the social hypocrisy of his time and that’s why he created the character of David Copperfield to tell that story and to expose the child labor, the debtors’ prisons, and the social hypocrisy of his time. Kingsolver, on the other hand, writes about her beloved Appalachian region and writes about its beauty and about its problems with deep, complicated love and with anger and that’s why this book is such a brilliant report, but also such blood-deep testimony.

Karen Rife · Answer

The number of allusions in this piece is impressive without being showy. A reader who has not read David Copperfield can still understand the story of Demon. But a reader who knows the novel will find layer upon layer of meaning in Demon’s story, each echo of the original work adding another layer of tragic irony to the reader’s understanding of the tale. The allusions are like a melody played on different instruments, always the same tune but with a different emotional slant because played in a minor key.

Moreover, the sense of fate created by these allusions is quite striking. Although we know from Dickens’ David Copperfield how the story of a young man who is abandoned by his father develops, we can see Demon leading himself into all sorts of terrible situations. In these moments, we are filled with a sense of dread, and we want to shout at the young man to stop trusting the people he trusts. But he can’t hear us. And in this way, our experience of reading the story is similar to that of the characters in the novel who watch Demon make mistakes but can’t do anything to prevent them. This is a sophisticated literary device that connects the reader’s prior knowledge of literature with the character’s ignorance in order to increase the emotional impact of the story.

Oliver · Answer

Trigger warning for this thread please! The scenes in 'Demon Copperhead' of the worst of the foster homes he went between to are terribly distressing to read. It's a brilliant book but a very hard read in parts. Some of the scenes have been so horrific that I've had to put the book down and walk away for a while. It makes David Copperfield's often difficult but usually pretty sheltered hardships seem from a different century with different levels of graphic realism.

How Does 'Demon Copperhead' Compare To 'David Copperfield'?

8 Answers

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