A few years ago I was listening to an interview with a couple of people who play Christmas characters for kids. An interviewer asked “Scrooge” why he was grouchy again since he was visited by the spirits. He was having a hard time answering, so the other guy, who I think was playing Santa, did a great save. He said that every year Scrooge went back to his old ways and so every year the spirits had to keep revisiting him.
Thanks for this, Miller and cheerfully agreed with. I felt when I was writing my original response I wasn’t quite getting the full point across. Deconstruction of an archetype is definitely more accurate.
Going back to the OP, I read an interview with Alan Moore in which he said he was inspired to write about Wells’ character of the Invisible Man for his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because he felt that the character’s psychotic roots had been obscured by time and fond memories of Claude Rains’ more sympathetic portrayal. He also included Captain Nemo to remind people that Nemo was a proud and intense Indian prince and therefore did not look like or act much like James Mason portrayed him doing in the Disney film.
Huh. You learn something new every day. To be fair, in my intense research (skimming Wikipedia), it looks like absolutely nothing about his origins are mentioned in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is how I remember it. Guess most of the directors and such would’ve had to read The Mysterious Island to figure out that tidbit.
Jules Verne didn’t worry about continuity. Nemo appeared in two books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (published in 1869) and The Mysterious Island (published in 1874).
The problem is that Verne specifically states that the events in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea occurred between 1866 and 1868.
The characters in The Mysterious Island are Union POW’s who escaped from a Confederate POW camp, so the opening of that book can’t be any later than 1865. It’s supposedly set from 1865 to 1869. But when they meet Nemo during the course of the book, they supposedly recognize him from having read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. And Nemo described the events in that book as having happened sixteen years earlier. And Nemo also says he was involved in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 before building his submarine.
The Mysterious Island also has another recycled Verne character, Tom Ayrton, who had appeared in In Search of the Castaways (published in 1867) which was set in 1864 to 1865. Ayrton was left on an island in the former book and the characters in the latter book rescue him after what is supposed to have been several years of living alone.
It is actually possible to read what you wrote and disagree with it. Twice, even.
You’re arguing with yourself here, as you introduced the term “great king” into the discussion. The closest thing I said was “ideal ruler, wise and self-sacrificing, defending the weak.” No, wait, that’s not close at all, is it? Because while it might be possible for a great king to drown a shipload of babies, I think most people would grant that it’s not ideal.
That’s not a contradiction, because characters frequently change in retelling. But again you’re arguing against a point no one made, as I never said anything about how he was presented in those works. I did say that they were largely based on Le Mort as an explanation of why I was citing it as an original while explicitly acknowledging that it wasn’t the first telling.
Thank you for at least acknowledging that. I picked the baby incident because it was the most memorable and most appalling, but there’s quite a bit in Mallory and earlier sources that would be repugnant to those who have tried to make Arthur into a Christ figure into or Camelot into some sort of Utopia. In any case, if you want to post more essays about Arthur I’d be interested in reading them, but why don’t you start a thread for that rather than using this one to rebut things I never wrote?
I’ve never read The Mysterious Island, but I did read*** 20,000 Leagues*** Under the Sea. And I recall a passage in which Nemo rescues an Indian fisherman who was drowning while diving for pearls. And afterwards, when Professor Arronax expresses surprise at Nemo’s rare show of compassion, Nemo says something like, “That man is part of an oppressed race, and I am one of them.”
So, while Nemo’s origins are never spelled out in that book, his dark complexion and that passage strongly implied that he was from India.
You’d have saved us both some time if you’d bothered to post this disagreement the first time instead of focusing on a defense of Malory’s importance.
*Uh, yes, I think “great king” is pretty close to “ideal ruler”. It’s also a more accurate description for the popular conception of King Arthur, because I don’t think anyone has the idea he’s supposed to be totally perfect. He may be regarded as generally wise and chivalrous, but that was the case in the medieval romances as well so it isn’t a modern twist on the character.
*Modern depictions of King Arthur don’t normally portray him as being flawless or incapable of wrongdoing. The specific incident with the babies doesn’t often appear in modern Arthurian fiction, but it wasn’t present in most medieval tales of Arthur either. Even Malory doesn’t accuse Arthur of actually drowning the babies himself. He deliberately places them in a situation where they are very likely to die, but the drowning is attributed to “fortune”. The whole incident takes up only a few lines in Le Morte d’Arthur, and it’s not totally clear what Malory intends for us to think about it. Is Arthur just trying to avoid being a baby-killer on a technicality, or is he trying to get rid of the babies while still giving them some chance at survival?
*What is your point, then? The topic of this thread isn’t characters who have been depicted in different ways as their stories are retold, it’s characters who came to be seen as the opposite of how they were originally written. Even if we treat Le Mort d’Arthur as the “original”, the works you identified as the most influential modern retellings of the story of King Arthur don’t depict the character as being the opposite of how he was in Malory. You haven’t named any that do. Some modern works depict Arthur as being more romantic or heroic than did Malory, but that’s not the opposite of Malory’s depiction.
*Forgive me for assuming that your posts here were meant to have something to do with the OP. Maybe you should have started a new thread.
Has Madame Bovary become a role model yet?
Jezebel has come to be used for any type of scheming hot-to-trot woman. The biblical basis is not this: she was depicted as a villain because she was an idol worshiper and persecuted the prophets, but she was a devoted wife to her husband Ahab and seen from the perspective of a woman who grew up in a Baal worshiping land she’s not that unreasonable; Esther married an idolatrous king and used her influence to promote Jews and is regarded as a hero. As for sexual connotations of Jezebel, she’s never accused of infidelity, and as her husband had 70 sons by other women it’s doubtful she could have influenced him that much with feminine wiles alone.
Quixote himself is an excellent on-topic example: the author intended him as a parody of medieval chivalry & courtly love and such, but instead he ended up as a sort of idealistic hero, attempting to fulfill his quests in the face of a cynical world. I personally favor the latter interpretation, myself, even if Cervantes would disagree with me (such is art).
Although I haven’t read the book, I can’t help imagining Madame Bovary as a great cow-like woman (probably because “Bovary” = “bovine” + “ovary”).
I’m surprised. And not just because we teased kids about their names even when they were fairly normal.
I thought Bugs Bunny was brilliant for using the name Nimrod because it worked on three levels: Hunter, Idiot, and Inherently Funny-Sounding Word.
Other examples of Inherently Funny-Sounding Words that you should never name a kid: Kumquat, Peoria, Squeegee.
And, y’know, Anonymous Possibly-Apocryphal Jewish Parents: Just because a name’s in the Bible does NOT make it a good name for your poor kid who’s going to have to carry it around.
I hope misguidedly religious Judeo-Christian whacks aren’t naming their kids Zaphnathpaaneah, or Uz, or (perfect for twins) Diklah and Dorcas… or Onan.
I’ve known literally dozens of Nimrods (promounced Neem-ROAD) - it’s a very common name in my age group. All of them would be surprised to hear that Americans think their name sounds funny.
I’ve also known several Diklas.
Nah…we’d only think it was funny if it was pronounced “Nim-rod”.
“Dorcas” was a not-that-uncommon girl’s name* into the early 20th century. One of the main characters in Lark Rise to Candleford (both the novels and the TV series) is named Dorcas, and I’ve encountered the name in other older fiction like Agatha Christie novels. It dropped off in popularity pretty sharply after the 1920s-30s, although I guess it might have come back into fashion if not for the appearance of the slang term “dork” in the 1960s. But as far as Biblical names go one could do worse. If I encountered someone with this name I’d be more likely to assume they were named after a grandmother or the Lark Rise to Candleford character than that their parents were religious fanatics.
*ETA: In the English-speaking world.
Or named after a character from the Book of the New Sun (1980-3).
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she was the only one giving head.
It’s not like I’m not already going to hell for other reasons.
Maybe not exactly on point with the OP, but:
(1) Tom Brown, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays – was intended as a model of moral rectitude and muscular Christianity, but is now almost certainly better known for his cameo appearances as a priggish sycophantic Puritan through G.M. Fraser’s decision to turn Arnold’s hortatory work on its head and make the brutish Flashman his anti-heroic protagonist. If you have read TBS, you’d honestly have a hard time (and maybe this is just our modern cynicism) not thinking – “What a little pansy!”
(2) Horatio Alger. Now thought of as the paradigm of the rags-to-riches inspirational story. Lots of people have a problem with this (liberals like the Horatio Alger paradigm and its manifestations in conservative politics about as well as they like Jesus’s “the poor you shall always have with you.”). I think Michael Moore, among others, singled out the modern understanding of Alger as a classic piece of capitalist propaganda, as it sort of implies that people who remain poor do so through their own fault. Also factually, when you read some of the stories, you might be surprised to find that: (1) not all the protaganists become rich – some of the “success” stories consist of, say, going from being a street peddler to being a clerk; and (2) there is a fair degree of luck (the second half of “luck and pluck”) in many of the characters’ success (vague memories but, oh, some wealthy industrialist meets the peddler boy and adopts him, or the like). Both of those features would also tend to enrage critics of capitalism, as “rags to lower middle class” isn’t quite as supportive of free market economics, and as the “anyone can escape poverty with hard work [and a deus ex machina]” model is hardly, as we’d say today, scalable for all poor people.
Heathcliff–particularly as influenced by depictions like Olivier’s in the movie version of Wuthering Heights, which covers only part of the story–is often thought of as a romantic hero, one who overcomes a trying past to find his fulfillment in his intensely felt love for Catherine. In the book, he is a cruel, vindictive, resentful, hate-filled monster.
Re. Nimrod, there was also a tradition that he was the one who ordered the Tower of Babel to be built and/or he was one of the biblical “giants” of Genesis. So in that tradition he’s the archtype of the ruler powerful and arrogant enough to challenge God.