"First, I got myself born": A Contemporary Take on Dickensian Motherhood in Demon Copperhead (2022)

abstract: From Oliver Twist (1837) to David Copperfield (1850), Charles Dickens's novels explored the loss of the mother as the inauguration of a state of precariousness that both triggers and hinders protagonists' Bildung . This fundamental rupture with motherhood as both an embodied state and a symbolic personification of the sanctity of the domestic sphere triggers plots of individual development with far-ranging social implications. By expanding the focus on an individual protagonist's misfortunes to afflictions faced by entire socio-economic categories, wider social critique in the Dickensian novel often relies on the sympathy engendered by the displacement of its vulnerable children. This article explores how Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead (2022), a contemporary novel that revisits the plot of Dickens's David Copperfield in a modern setting, repurposes the social critique of its informing text while producing a politically charged novel in its engagement with problematic constructions of motherhood.