>Secondly, while Fanny is one of the great characters of
>english literature, Aunt Norris looms over the whole --
>she is to MP what the commodity is to capitalism.
I take your point, but there's no use value in Aunt Norris - she's so consistently appalling, she's only convincing if there's madness in her or the prevailing social arrangement.
>In comparison with her potential for destructiveness Iago
>is a boy scout who peed in the soup pot.
And that's all she can do. Coleridge apparently once cast Iago as 'motiveless malignancy', but there was almost something of the socially transcending Nietzchian genius-idiote about Iago. I'm going back many years, and I do remember Aunt Norris as spectacular, but she's not above her station in any way, is she? She is her class, writ horribly large, and expressing itself at its lonely, narrow, unseeing, vicious worst.
Would that be a fair thing to say?
Cheers, Rob.