Meanwhile Dracula is oft seen as a calculating suave European aristocrat who charms the ladies. In the book, he’s a hypnotic manipulator (he gets to Lucy through her sleep) and a rapist (Mina). Renfield meanwhile has been used as comedy relief and/or shown as a mindless lackey, whereas he was in the book a devoted-disciple turned repentant-martyr.
And then there is Job. Today someone who behaves in a Job-like manner accepts what fate gives him or her without complaining. In the bible, of course, Job takes it for a while and then curses God and spends the rest of the book railing against God.
Sounds pretty tragic, until you remember what he did to Elizabeth and Safie. I’m gonna stick with “calculating killer.”
The OP’s first example was what I immediately thought of when I read the thread title. Uncle Tom went through hell in the book, showing great spirit and resistance. To portray him as a sycophantic, scraping, apologizing servant is downright insulting. The transformation apparently took place mainly through stage adaptations of the work (which were popular from the start), and show the changes in race relations from pre-Civil War to Reconstruction to the early 20th century, which is where Tom looked the poorest and least backboned. After that point, I don’t think anyone took the character seriously, and he was mainly known by the pitiful image he had become.
Interestingly, the Classics Illustrated comic book adaptation always showed Tom in a good light, exactly as Harriet Beecher Stowe originally wrote him.
Safie? She was fine having fled with the rest of the DeLancey family. And it could be argued that killing Elizabeth was, while unjustified, at least provoked by Victor’s reneging on his promise to provide a mate for the monster.
Now, if you mean what he did to little William and Justine Moritz, I’m with you there!
Well, that’s how he started life, as a cartoon by David Low and he really is like how you originally imagined him to be in those cartoons. The film version came later and though inspired by the cartoons, is still a deliberate reinterpretation of the character in a more sympathetic light.
I had read the book as a child, and was greatly surprised the first time I heard someone use “Uncle Tom” to mean “bootlicker”.
Don Quijote and Sancho Panza are very complex characters; the archetypes based on them are much more linear. While not exactly opposite, Don Quijote does a lot more than tilt against windmills and Sancho is shown to be a capable governor, not merely a neverending source of sayings. More than once their friends are left wondering whether it’s Alonso Quijano or them who is insane.
Well, thats the tragedy. He becomes a monster because he’s treated like one.
Is using Nimrod as an insult really from people misunderstanding its use in Bugs Bunny? I’d never heard that, but it makes sense.
Near-obligatory Tropes link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdaptationDecay
movie adaptations frequently change plot and character out of all recognition. Herman Wouk, in a foreword to his book City Boy, noted that his 11 year old Jewish boy became a non-Jewish teenage girl when it became a movie under the title her First Romance. the Wikipedia entry says that the plot elements are largely the same, but I don’t know about the characters:p
I might add that Hamlet hesitates because he does not entirely trust the Ghost. He knows that it is a supernatural apparition, not that it is truely the spirit of his father; it might well be a demon assaying to tempt him into sin. He has to verify its claims.
This seems a misreading of the play, though I haven’t read it in a long time. For one thing, 13-year-old Juliet and 15-year-old Romeo were both of marriageable age; for another, the feud between their families predates them. The Friar is willing to assist them largely because he hopes their union will lead to a cessation of hostilities, and the escalation of same is occasioned by the murder of Mercutio and Romeo’s avenging of it.
I will have to look it up when I get home, but I can think of at least one Biblical historian–maybe Jack Miles, in God: A Biography–who opines that Job actually wins the argument with Yahweh, and both of them know it. Yahweh, in making such extensive reference to his greater power, is conceding that He cannot win the debate except by violence; i.e., that He is in the wrong.
Don’t worry. Freudian Slit has the book wrong. Of course Lolita is a victim, but the point of the book is that Humbert is supposed to know better, even though Lolita is in fact a temptress, a junior version of her mother.
Check out Chapter 29.
and then he takes her virginity. Oh, no, he doesn’t. Sweet 11-year-old Dolores Haze is no virgin, having lost it to a boy named Charlie before Humbert came along.
Yes, the book is often misunderstood, and yes, Humbert is a monster, though I always found the section where he blackmails her for blow jobs every morning to get her milk money the true horror. But Lolita is not an innocent victim either. That as much as anything was what got the book its notoriety.
I don’t think so, Expapno. We had a thread on it a while ago and pretty much everyone else agreed with me. I’ll try to find it.
Just because she’s not a virgin when she had sex with Humbert doesn’t mean she’s not an innocent victim. (I’m not even sure what innocent victim really means.) Are only virgins capable of being defiled? I think that’s a disturbing idea. Lots of kids play doctor or whatnot at that age–do we really have to call little kids playing or experimenting “temptresses”? That feels really wrong to me.
And again, from what I know, it’s very normal for young girls to experiment with their sexuality. To even play with the idea of tempting older men. I think every young girl kind of likes the idea of that power. But I don’t know that that makes her a temptress. Lolita definitely did crush on Hum, but the fact that he saw her naive, adolescent sexuality as proof of her leading him astray is what makes him so perverse.
You see Lolita through Humbert’s eyes, and he certainly wants her to be a willing participant.
And in many ways, I think she was. I’d slice the difference between the “she seduced him” (Frankly Humbert’s such a letch that he’d think that) and she’s innocent - she isn’t innocent, but she also has no idea what she is playing with. She’s full aware that her sexuality can be used to get things, including attention, she is too young to recognize that isn’t a good thing (although age don’t always fix that, it at least provides the opportunity to fix it - its the rare young girl who isn’t fascinated by her own sexuality - but has ANY CLUE about the ethics of sex).
Yeah. But I do have to wonder, are there any innocent victims? You know, the age old idea that you discredit the rape victim by saying that, gasp, she likes sex or she’s had sex. I don’t think any of us really qualify as “real” victims. I’m just so uncomfortable with the idea that she’s not innocent, so is she a victim? You can be “un-innocent” and be really vulnerable. Or even more vulnerable. I’m reminded of someone here on this board who said that prostitutes suffer less from rape and thus we should punish it less. I think I’m probably more sympathetic to someone who doesn’t fit the innocent victim profile because it’s so much harder for someone like that.
The whole “innocent victim” notion is a red herring. Nabokov was commenting on American notions of sex and sexuality in the book. By using a pre-pubescent girl (something the movies always fail on, since they must use post-pubescent girls) to demonstrate his thesis, he strips away all the baggage that normally hides adult sexuality. It’s very similar to the way science fiction writers set their stories in alien worlds or times, to rid the reader of the crutch of familiar context.
Lolita cannot be simply a victim. That would rob the novel of all of its complexity. She is and must be complicit in his outrages. She is a victim, and a survivor, and a seducer, and a bland average American woman blinded by our culture. Your uncomfortableness with all this is exactly what Nabokov wanted.
Scarlett O’Hara is seen as an airhead of a Southern Belle, but she is actually a pragmatist, willing to do whatever she must to survive.
That’s always been my take on Romeo and Juliet. Of course the title characters are hotheaded and impetuous, they’re a couple of kids. (Yeah, I know 14 then does not equal 14 now, but their incompletely developed brains would still have been bombarded with teenage hormones.) Their “wise” elders absolutely let them down.
How about King Arthur? Often he’s held up as an ideal ruler, wise and self-sacrificing, defending the weak, even attempting to introduce elements of democracy into the monarchy. Now there may not be a single definitive source in his case, but many of our modern tellings are based on our influenced by Le Mort d’Arthur, and in that he can be a right bastard.* In one memorable passage he allows (if not orders) a wooden ship to be loaded with infants and set adrift at sea. But its okay, because most of his subjects blamed Merlin.
Actually, many of Arthur’s friends and allies are portrayed in LMd’A in complex, even self-contradictory ways, which is understandable as it drew on diverse sources.
*ETA: No pun intended.