The Scrooge McDuck Supposition

Hello again,

Lets talk about Scrooge McDuck.

For those of you who are unaware, Scrooge McDuck is the exceptionally wealthy uncle of beloved (if somewhat under medicated) Disney character, Donald Duck.

 He lives in the penthouse suite of his own high rise building and frequently dives head first into a pool full of gold coins and jewels. He treats human life (well in this case animated anthropomorphic animal life) as completely expendable and will do anything to further his business enterprises. This is certainly strange behaviour, but because he is wealthy is not crazy, merely eccentric. Now if an ordinary person were to dive into a pool full of nickles and dimes we might think something was wrong.

                                          Disney's Scrooge McDuck

                                          http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.ca/2012/06/monstous-power.html

When I researched “deviant burials” I came across an article describing the excavation of a slave cemetery in Barbados dating from the 17^th century (Handler 1996). While excavating the team came across an unusually large mound that contained a single body, a woman of roughly 40 years with extremely high levels lead in her bones, lying prone and after some ethnographic research it was decided that the grave belonged to a witch(Handler 1996). But what if the grave was known to have belonged to a wealthy person and not a slave? Would we still look for connections to witchcraft? Would we still assume the person was undesirable? Would we refer to the grave as “deviant? Who knows.

Frustrated by the one sided results from my search I changed to looking for “unusual burials” and came across a fascinating article entitled “Eccentric or enlightened? Unusual burial and commemoration in England, 1689 – 1823” by Clare Gittings (2007). Gittings describes a series of burials that are out of the ordinary and though she remarks that deviant refers to graves that are “statistically uncommon or unique” (Gittings, 2007:323) she never once refers to the burials in question as deviant. One of the graves described belongs to Susanna Carteret Webb, a very wealthy woman. She requested that a cave be built in her garden with a long passage ending in a lamp lit chamber where her coffin would rest alongside her two young children (Gittings, 2007). If we were to uncover this tomb without knowing the social status of its occupant we might well think of it as deviant. After all she was not buried in consecrated ground and the ceremony was not conducted by a priest as was the custom of the time.

What if Scrooge McDuck were to be buried in a dollar sign shaped tomb in the middle of a private cemetery, or in the middle of a parking lot for that matter? Would we call his tomb deviant? Of course not. Strange perhaps, eccentric certainly but almost certainly not deviant, there are just too many negative connotations with that word.

                          http://www.wolfgnards.com/index.php/2009/08/27/how-rich-is-scrooge-mcduck

So perhaps we should abandon “deviant” and find a better word that can encompass individuality and creativity without casting a negative light on the subject in question.

Sources:

Gittings, C. 2007. "Eccentric or enlightened? Unusual burial and commemoration in England, 1689 – 1823." Mortality 12: 321-349.

Handler, J.S. 1996. "A Prone Burial from a Plantation Slave Cemetery in Barbados, West Indies:    Possible Evidence for an African-Type Witch or Other Negatively Viewed Person." Historical Archaeology 30:76-86.