Review: "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
Apr. 16th, 2023 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losThis novella is simultaneously:
- a tense, gothic story centred on a human 'monster', and
- a possible attempt to represent what we'd now call severe autism.
I rarely go in for Diagnosis: Literature, which fell out of fashion decades ago in academic contexts for good reasons. Yet even given my strong bias against imposing taxonomy, in this case I can't in good conscience fail to admit this retrospective understanding into analysis because the reading is simply too immediately legible. You sometimes hear people ask what happened to severely autistic individuals in the past. Judging by this, they were either accommodated or they Were Not (which, as Isaac observed, must have played out along highly classed lines).
It's interesting that this was published so soon after Dickens' “David Copperfield” circulated in America. Evidently these were peak 'Othered gothic clerks exerting psychological, moral and social pressures on a liberal protagonist' years.
- a tense, gothic story centred on a human 'monster', and
- a possible attempt to represent what we'd now call severe autism.
I rarely go in for Diagnosis: Literature, which fell out of fashion decades ago in academic contexts for good reasons. Yet even given my strong bias against imposing taxonomy, in this case I can't in good conscience fail to admit this retrospective understanding into analysis because the reading is simply too immediately legible. You sometimes hear people ask what happened to severely autistic individuals in the past. Judging by this, they were either accommodated or they Were Not (which, as Isaac observed, must have played out along highly classed lines).
It's interesting that this was published so soon after Dickens' “David Copperfield” circulated in America. Evidently these were peak 'Othered gothic clerks exerting psychological, moral and social pressures on a liberal protagonist' years.
