Billy Wang – Grade 11
Instructor: Ms. Petula
English Literature
20 March 2020
Wordcounts: 1070
The Uniqueness of Ghosts in A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is literature created during the 19th century. Its author, Charles Dickens, first implemented the traditional idea of Christmas in his works that include contemporary social conventions and circumstances somehow related to reality. People accepted this literature genre delightfully because the Christmas spirit went through the whole text, conveying people’s extraordinary emotion to the readers as well as echoing with their wonderful expectations. A Christmas Carol is so significant that it pioneered a path for Christmas books in which producing meanings for readers at a very depth.
In A Christmas Carol, the protagonist is undoubtfully Scrooge. But several nonnegligible figures are pushing the development of the plot. They helped Scrooge came to redemption, which highly affected Scrooge’s disintegration. Dickens was good at writing something with them, that is, ghosts. In Dickens’s literature works, readers can find some figures of ghosts without any effort. It seems that Dickens also tends to contain ghosts in his various writings. As for A Christmas Carol, ghosts are created under his pen. In the literature field, scholars claim that the element with supernatural force is a typical revelation of the Gothic literature style.
Gothic, it is a literary style that prevailed in the 18th and 19th century, which is defined as ‘writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread’ (Kennedy). For instance, Dracula is just a typical Gothic novel. Indeed, Gothic literature always focuses on the depressing and dark atmosphere that given to the readers. In this case, readers can easily sink into the trick designed by the author, experiencing the fear and fright within the stories, usually be enveloped in the shadow of supernatural elements.
However, except for causing fright, Dickens did not just create panic or depressing environment for his story exclusively. In fact, in A Christmas Carol, ghosts, as the supernatural elements created by Dickens intentionally, are symbolized with another secret veil. And this is how Dickens’s ghosts are different from other phantom figures. More importantly, the uniqueness of Dickens’s ghosts is also a part of romantic literature. As someone has commented, ‘not romance novels with breathless lovers with wind-swept hair on their paperback covers—and much fiction today stems from it’ (Kennedy).
It is helpful to know the representations of Dickens’s ghosts while finding the uniqueness of them. There are four ghosts in A Christmas Carol. They are Marley’s ghost, Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future.
Marley’s ghost represented Fear. Dickens wrote ‘For though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven’ (47). From this sentence, an unearthly figure of Marley’s ghost is coming out of the story. By depicting words, Dickens even makes the figure more real. ‘The phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear in-doors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast’ (47). At that time, especially the Victorian period, people would tie a piece of fabric around the dead person’s jaw to prevent him or her from gaping. Scrooge knew this social convention and he was convinced by seeing the appearance of Marley’s ghost. This caused the fear inside Scrooge’s heart. What’s more, Marley’s ghost was chained by a lot of heavy burdens that were acquired by himself when he was alive because of exploiting people and being stingy to others. These elements compelled Scrooge to show his fright between the lines inevitably and started to think about his afterlife.
Although it seems that fear is the only representation in Marley’s ghost, it does have something insightful for us. That is the criticism of capitalism and the tragic circumstance the people were experiencing. Dickens used a tragic but pitiful figure as Marley’s ghost to reveal that it was the ugliness of capitalism that both harmed the capitalists and the people. If Scrooge’s stingy behaviors are the direct criticism of capitalism, Marley’s ghost is an implied or indirect criticism of it.
As for other ghosts in the book, they respectively represented Memory, Generosity, and Dread. Christmas Past brought Scrooge back to his childhood. Scrooge confronted with his grey past fragilely. And he began to know the striking juxtaposition of his past and present. By reminding his lonely childhood, he could see what his early life influenced the decisions he made temporarily. Christmas Present led Scrooge to see the happiness of sharing, which leads to a core concept of generosity. ‘Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice’ (74). The facial descriptions, especially adjectives, undoubtfully reinforce the concept of generosity. By Scrooge’s eyes, although some families suffered a lot and maybe Christmas was the only time they felt really happy, they still share what they had generously. This helped Scrooge saw another side of Christmas. Last but not least, Christmas Future conveyed dread to Scrooge. ‘In the vary air through which this spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery’ (95). This time, Scrooge saw his afterlife finally. However, that was not what he expected. The character of Christmas Future’s figure correspondingly reflected Scrooge’s emotion at that time. And this is the climax of the contradictions. After that, Scrooge was looking for a change.
Generally speaking, the uniqueness of Dickens’s ghosts is now clear to know. Not as the ghosts only produce fear, Dickens’s ghosts are revelatory. They not only criticized the ugliness of capitalism and bad living environment at that time but also use humanitarianism to redeem people including what people think is a kind of stingy and selfish capitalist by nature, which is also the embodiment of dickens’ Gothic literature, a subgenre of romanticism.
Someone also argues that ‘A Christmas Carol implies that Christian morals are the only correct morals, and that Scrooge is Jewish and it’s a subtle conversion story’ (Ballini). However, the essence of this book is not talking about the religion itself though Dickens used some religious method to show his idea. He mainly focused on the morality that advocated by the religion, which is inspired by Dickens’s ghosts.
To sum up, Dickens’s ghosts are revelatory, which is the uniqueness of them compared to other ghosts in Gothic literature. Dickens set the precedent or improve this subgenre under the romanticism. And this kind of special character has been used nowadays.
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol (Webster’s Thesaurus Edition). ICON Group International, 2005.
Kennedy, Patrick. “What Is Gothic Literature?” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 23 Jan. 2020, www.thoughtco.com/gothic-literature-2207825.
Ballini, Cassandra, et al. Nineteenth-Century Studies, 8 Oct. 2014, c19.sunygeneseoenglish.org/2014/10/08/negative-reviews-and-criticism-or-lack-thereof-on-dickens-and-a-christmas-carol/.
“’The Ghosts’ in A Christmas Carol (Key Quotes & Analysis).” YouTube, uploaded by Dr Aidan, 10 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HiKFCMEyk&feature=youtu.be.
