Domestic Orientalism: Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead as a Counter to the Stereotyping of the Appalachians

Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 novel Demon Copperhead deals directly with the impact of the opioid crisis on life in Lee County, in the Appalachian region of Virginia. Demon Copperhead is a coming-of-age story that traces the experiences of its eponymous narrator/protagonist from his birth until adulthood as he grows up in Lee County. In a literary sense, this personal story is complicated by the fact that Kingsolver's novel is also a carefully crafted retelling of Charles Dickens's 1850 novel David Copperfield. Kingsolver's story is deeply rooted in its historical moment, focusing on the opioid crisis that began in the 1990s and continued to worsen through the first decades of the twenty-first century, especially in rural areas such as Lee County. Kingsolver's detailed, sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian culture also deals with broader issues, addressing the common tendency in American culture to depict the people of the Appalachians in stereotypical ways that assume the backwardness and even depravity of the “rednecks” and “hillbillies” who inhabit the area. Indeed, Demon Copperheadclearly undertakes the project of describing and then deconstructing this stereotyping, partly by demonstrating its parallels with the colonialist tradition of Orientalism as famously described by Edward Said.