Demon Copperhead by writer Barbara Kingsolver, a tribute to Charles Dickens
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, New York: Harper, 2022, 560 pp.
The adjective “Dickensian” has entered the English language to denote systemic social inequality and brutal poverty and squalor, particularly in regards to the cruel treatment of child victims of circumstance.
The latest novel by American author Barbara Kingsolver Demon Copperheada coming of age story written in homage to Charles Dicken David Copperfieldexplores how this term is applicable to the contemporary US opioid crisis in Appalachia, an area he knows intimately.
The social crisis arose as giant US pharmaceutical companies pumped billions of opioids into populations in some of the poorest and most deindustrialized regions of the country, deliberately campaigning for doctors to prescribe them. Many addicts started with a prescription from a doctor.
Between 2006 and 2012, $76 billion of prescription painkillers were dispensed, fueling an epidemic that companies responded to by pumping more pills into the hardest-hit regions, especially Appalachia. Former coal mining centers in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee have been particularly targeted.
By 2021, US deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses rose to 71,000, up from 58,000 in 2020.
The fact that Kingsolver has chosen to write about the impact of the opioid crisis while also delving into literary history is in line with the interest he has previously shown in social and historical issues. His first novels (1988 and 1993) featured the adoption of an Indigenous child by a non-Indigenous parent. The 1998 publication of The Poisonwood Bibleon the aftermath of an American family’s trip to the then Belgian Congo in 1959 so that their father could be a missionary, it won her a large following. The gap, set in pre-WWII Mexico and post-war United States, it earned her the Orange Prize for Literature.
Kingsolver must be fascinated by Victorian England and the connections it may have to today’s United States. His 2018 novel without shelter, which was partly about the contemporary threat of homelessness to even middle-class people, contained an archival discovery of a real letter from Charles Darwin.
That a prominent novelist like Kingsolver has embarked on a project that pays sincere tribute to Dickens is good, given some of the identity-politics-based hostility directed against him in recent years.
She wrote: “I am grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his passionate critique of institutional poverty and its harmful effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my place and time, working for years with his indignation, inventiveness and empathy by my side, I have come to think of him as my genius friend.
Kingsolver’s imaginative reworking of the novel which Dickens describes as “his favorite son” (for it wove some autobiographical elements) is entirely readable as a work of fiction in its own right, but it faithfully portrayed the plot of David Copperfieldand sometimes conversations transplanted directly from Dickens.
Both Demon and David, born fatherless and soon orphaned and left with heartless stepfathers, had ruined childhoods. Kingsolver parallels David’s experience in a vicious boarding school with Demon’s life in the hands of Social Security, placing him with an adoptive parent who will take in those children rejected by everyone else, only to work them mercilessly as cheap labor .
In England, David’s stepfather has more suffering in store for the boy and sends him at the age of ten work in London in a bottle washing factory. Undoubtedly drawing on his traumatic experience in a polish (shoe polish) factory at an age not much older than David when his (novelist’s) father was jailed for debt, Dickens describes the excruciating loneliness, isolation and alienation in the metropolis.
For Demon, shunted from one foster family to another, the foster system is thoroughly impersonal and depressing, but he finds emotional support in the countryside of Lee County, Virginia.
However, the area is marred by endemic drug use thanks to the campaign by the big pharmaceutical companies to target the area, once the center of working-class militancy, and reduce it to social misery.
Demon, whose mother died of a drug overdose, later becomes addicted himself after being prescribed opioids for a soccer injury, starting with hydrocodone (Vicodin®) and switching to oxycodone (OxyContin®).
Kingsolver successfully followed Dickens in his translation of the somewhat idealized working-class Peggotty family in David’s life. For Demon, the rambling Peggott family has a similar relationship to David’s interactions with Clara and Daniel Peggotty. Mrs Peggott, the matriarch of the Virginia clan and her beloved daughter June, who has become a highly trained nurse, are among the only ones to resist the scourge of OxyContin.
As a positive role model, June Peggott should mirror Dickens’ honest sailor Daniel Peggotty, not only in his battle with the narcotics epidemic, but as him leading a determined and sustained fight to save his adopted daughter from ruin.
June attempts to warn Demon and his football coach, who had become his guardian, about painkillers. “She and Coach left the room, but I heard them in the hallway. Coach using her voice from fifty yards, and she was quite tall too, telling him that she sees two or three narcotic patients a year and now that many every day. She then gave up on him and went back to working on me.
Demon doesn’t listen to her, because he desperately wants to get back on the soccer field. “This was legit, not using. With all the blood flowing in my heart, I believed it and swore to the coach. I followed the doctor’s orders to the T, and he let me play… I went back to get oxys on the watch.
Together with his lover Dori, Demon falls into an addictive lifestyle that plummets to the bottom. The novel contrasts three funerals: two for drug overdose victims and one for the kindly ex-miner Mr Peggott, who “went out with the tide” of old age. For his funeral, not only sprawling members of the Peggott clan gathered, but the entire rest of the once close-knit mining community.
“My mother’s funeral stuck with me that day. It struck me a lot, how different this was… The service was so different than mom’s. The minister He knew Mr Peg. She told all these stories about him, and they were all right there…dead but still here, in other words. This is what killed me the most. At mom’s funeral, her coffin closed on her and she just walked out. Everything good that was still known about her, if any, was all about me, and I was too pissed to do anything about it.
The indignation and genius of Dickens that Kingsolver acclaims is never more evident than in the cast of supporting characters he creates, with Mr and Mrs Micawber, as well as Uriah Heep and his mother, unforgettable masterpieces.
The Micawbers are perpetually battling for respectability as they face constant failure and destitution. Mr M is irrepressible and Mrs M, who married below her rank, swears that she will never leave him. The Heeps are determined to work their way up the social ladder by trading their servility for all their “best”. Uriah’s machinations end in his entirely proper downfall.
Kingsolver refers to these characters as the sleazy Mr and Mrs McCobb and the sneaky U-Haul, but they pale in comparison to the Dickens originals.
Another distinctive couple drawn by Dickens is that of James Steerforth, capable of boundless cruelty towards those who are socially inferior to him, and his mother, who absolutely supports her son’s right to destroy the lives of others if it suits him.
Steerforth’s double in Kingsolver’s novel is Sterling Ford, known as Fast Forward, the former high school football hero, who trades his former fame to further his pursuit of drugs, sex, and anything else for his own amusement.
His is not the upper class arrogance displayed by the Steerforth couple. The class boundaries in the Kingsolver setting have become blurrier, as the middle class has been emptied out and pretty much everyone is struggling.
Given the wild prospects for today’s children and youth, Kingsolver seeks to dramatically address a profound social problem raised by contemporary capitalism. For doing so, while also arousing interest in reading Dickens’ masterpiece, is to be applauded.
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