This is going to take a long while to explain, so bear with me. The upshot of this is that I’m writing a story which is based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist. This version is set in the future but the future looks a lot like 19th century Brooklyn. Oliver Twist in its original form is famous for being cringingly anti-Semitic in its depiction of Fagin.
The question I’m asking is whether or not rewriting Fagin as an Ikey Solomon type fence and the Artful Dodger (the protagonist) as Black in order to comment on institutionalised racism and anti-Semitism is necessarily racist or anti-Semitic in itself.
Here are two paragraphs as examples (not here for input).
BTW the most racist thing I experienced was when I was 13. I was kicked on the butt by a White woman when I was on an escalator who said “Damn Asians!”
The danger you face is that, if you’re not deeply familiar with the culture (including dialect) of your Dodger character, you’re going to rely instead on a lot of stereotypes in order to flesh out the culture, and that’ll be unfortunate at best.
(Another note: again this isn’t a Morwen asks for input thread) Nineteenth century AAVE (often unfortunately caricatured in minstrel shows) is what I’m familiar with.
My general idea with this was that in a 19th century style setting some forms of 19th century language might come back into use.
Sorry for quoting myself but on the 19th century language issue: Unfortunately I don’t know enough about linguistics to know if language usages can come back into use (one example is "gay"to mean happy, lively or bright or even loose or immoral; I once saw something which described a woman as living “the gay life”: the quote was from the 1880s and the implication was that she was living in a way considered “immoral” by “respectable” Victorian society.)
Does anyone know if that’s actually possible? Googling doesn’t really tell me anything.
Jewish. It would so much depend on how it was done.
Oliver Twist’s Fagin comes off as so anti-Semitic because the only clearly Jewish character in the book played to the stereotypes of the time. If that wasn’t the case then the character could just as easily demonstrate some complexity, how people can be religious in ritual and areligious in morality. That requires it being a theme repeated in other characters of other faiths.
@DSeid: Thanks. IIRC though there’s a character called Barney in the Three Cripples, who’s called Jewish and described as no less ugly than Fagin. (And he talks through his nose). He’s a very minor character though.
I actually think that beyond Fagin just being a miser and a child exploiter, he’s also part of a 19th century tradition that all so-called “Oriental” (including Jewish) men were seen as cowardly, weak and effeminate by 19th century standards.
Bit off-topic, but are you American? What state do you live in?
Surely, the point about Fagin’s jewishness, just like Shylock’s, three hundred years earlier, is that, at that time, it was shorthand for all kinds of stereotypical character traits.
Writers write for an audience, and will use those characters and descriptors that are meaningful to them. “Jewish” to me at least, does not conjure up an image of a miserly crook, or even a rapacious moneylender, just as “black” does not personify an inferior species of human.
In the UK today, the adult leader of a gang of thieving children would be expected to come from Eastern Europe, as we see reports of people trafficking, slavery and prostitution, led by this geographical group. An author using this would also avoid any accusations of a racial nature
@bob: Not just in the UK but all over Western Europe. In Eastern Europe itself it tends to be the Roma and Sinti (called Gypsies) who are blamed. And AFAIK in the mid-late 19th century “Eastern European” and “Jewish” were often nearly the same; quite a lot of Jewish people in both the UK and US have Eastern European (Ashkenazi) ancestry. And actually it wouldn’t be racial but ethnic assuming the author was White and writing about Eastern European Whites.
(I’m not White btw)
And yes, Fagin’s religion/ethnicity was shorthand for “exploitative miser/fence.”
The essay and bob++'s comment both make me wonder …
The essay differentiates between two groups.
One that is fanning a stereotype out of, if not hate then at least honestly held dislike.
And another (Dickens in this case) playing into a stereotype that they know is held, even though they might not so much hold it themselves and even though they have no personal issue with the group, but as a “useful” shorthand to create a feeling and understand about the character with the target audience.
Is one more or less reprehensible or harmful than the other?