1. Sergei Eisenstein, ''Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," in Film Form (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 232-33. [BACK]

2. According to Christian Metz, the "regime of perception" perpetuated by cinema is one for which the spectator has been "'prepared' by the older arts of representation (the novel, representational painting, etc.) and by the Aristotelian tradition of Western art in general" ( The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977], 118). Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

3. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red Press, 1983). Dickens's story has long been recognized for its unabashed celebration of excess and consumption. its alleged commercialization of the "Christmas spirit," and the seemingly infinite adaptability and marketability attested to by its annual reappearance as literary text, public reading, theatrical performance, television production, and film. [BACK]

4. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 13. See also note 14 for "circularity." [BACK]

5. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in The Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 1:68. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

6. Paul Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

7. The term interpellation is Louis Althusser's; I discuss below its relevance to my understanding of Dickens's story. [BACK]

8. Despite the importance of feminine subjectivity to Victorian ideologies of feeling, A Christmas Carol links charity to the proper functioning of the economy: to a masculine-identified form of power. Relevant here is Kaja Silverman's discussion of the way in which "our dominant fiction calls upon the male subject to see himself, and the female subject to recognize and desire him, only through the mediation of images of an unimpaired masculinity" ( Male Subjectivity at the Margins [New York: Routledge, 1992], 42). Scrooge's miserliness is by implication a corollary of his rejection of female companionship and the family; the story presents Scrooge with images of his own impaired masculinity and permits him to restore himself, through gift giving, as a symbolic father to the Cratchit family ("to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father" [133-34]). [BACK]

9. I refer to such novels as The Man of Feeling and A Sentimental Journey . The scenes detailing such encounters are themselves "culture-texts," in that they stage confrontations between characters situated in different social contexts and demonstrate emotion's inseparability from social configurations. [BACK]

10. See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986), 91-93; and John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). [BACK]

11. See Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, for an account of techniques that emphasize the camera's control over the spectator's vision. In evoking "the boundary that bars the look," Metz suggests, the camera eroticizes seeing, in a "veilingunveiling procedure" that excites the viewer's desire (77). This kind of procedure characterizes Dickens's writing in passages such as the following:

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church . . . became invisible. . . . In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered. . . . (52)

This description is less an attempt at mimesis than an evocation of desire for light (and heat). Other scenes, discussed in the text of this chapter similarly depend not so much on minute description as on a "strip-tease" effect that fetishizes the visual (Metz, 77). Dickens's interest in the interrelation of vision and power resembles that of numerous other Victorian novelists. But in A Christmas Carol readers "see" because of a mechanics of projection and a dynamic of spectatorial desire that produce in then a condition of consumer desire and construct the text as commodity. For discussions of vision and power in the Victorian novel and in Dickens, see D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); and Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). [BACK]

12. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 13-14. [BACK]

13. The cultural value placed on masculine virility, for instance, is conveyed by the detail that, as the old merchant danced, "a positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves" [77]. [BACK]

14. As Mulvey explains, "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that it can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" ("Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and other Pleasures [Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989], 19). This effect is what I refer to as circularity: in representing woman, A Christmas Carol (and, of course, not only that text) highlights a figure already "coded" for visual impact, culturally defined in representational terms. [BACK]

15. Thomas Richards discusses the way the Great Exhibition synthesized, in the manufactured commodity, techniques associated with spectacle, such as the play of light on the object and the imposed distance between spectator and object. But the presence of these techniques in the Carol suggests that both Dickens and the Exhibition drew upon forms of representation widely present in everyday life, forms influenced perhaps most significantly by the use of plate glass ( The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 [Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990], 21). [BACK]

16. This collapse of reality and illusion suggests Baudrillard's simulacra. But I am arguing, not that the commodity form dominates culture, but rather that commodity culture draws its power from its status as an exemplary form of culture—its identity with culture as a system of representations (see Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin [Saint Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1981]). [BACK]

17. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

18. This interpretation offers a solution to what Elliot Gilbert dubs "the Scrooge Problem," "the unconvincing ease and apparent permanence of Scrooge's reformation ("The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, " PMLA 90 [1975]: 22). Scrooge's "ease'' also suggests a projection of the text's ideal reader, compelled, as Scrooge is throughout, by the power of the story's representations. [BACK]

19. The scene after the ball similarly imagines a consolidation of past and present: its fantasy of "presence" combines "the lightest licence of a child" with a man's knowledge of value. [BACK]

20. My assertion is not that readers lack agency—that the story's claims are irresistible—but rather that A Christmas Carol, like any other text, will interpellate those subjects who respond to its call, those for whom the text compels or affirms belief in the feelings and cultural truths it represents. My reading thus participates to some extent in the "always already" structure of Althusser's narrative. I do not mean to suggest that such readers cannot read otherwise; my own argument, as well as discussions by Teresa de Lauretis and Kaja Silverman about the way considerations of gender complicate arguments about interpellation, may contribute to such revision. See Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins; and de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

Silverman's discussion of Jacques Rancière's term "dominant fiction" as a story or image "through which a society figures consensus" (30) helps elucidate the claim I want to make about the Carol —that it figures consensus in the process of identification I outline here. But the best evidence for the story's success at interpellation is the spectacle of social cohesion that takes place around its images each December. Those who resist the spirit of the Carol and of the holiday are, after all, nothing but a bunch of old Scrooges. [BACK]

21. Vicki Goldberg discusses the idea of images as collective culture in an article about the use, in advertising, of news photographs of catastrophes. "Whole populations," she writes, "have the same mental-image files, which constitute a large part of the common culture" ("Images of Catastrophe as Corporate Ballyhoo, New York Times, 3 May 1992, section 2, 33. Such image repertoires, while increased by the existence of cinema and television, would exist as soon as and wherever images are circulated; Elizabeth Eisenstein also suggests as much in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37.

The identity between culture and a series of visual images is reinforced by Dickens's description of his memories of Christmas as a series of images; see Davis, Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, 66-67. [BACK]

22. Scrooge does participate in the economic system; Davis discusses the idea that before his conversion Scrooge promotes a "supply-side" economy (chapter 7). [BACK]

23. Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 560. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

24. The serialization of Scrooge's life (its division into past, present, and future) reflects the link between capitalism, serial publication, and the need for "projection"—living partly in the future—that Haskell defines as necessary to a capitalist sensibility.

Haskell (558) quotes Defoe, "An Essay upon Projects," on the connection between business and metaphorical travel:

Every new voyage the merchant contrives is a project, and ships are sent from port to port, as markets and merchandizes differ, by the help of strange and universal intelligence; wherein some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that a merchant sitting at home in his counting-house, at once converses with all parts of the known world. [BACK]

25. These images reflect the sense in which, by the time of Dickens's story, poverty was a spectacle rather than a visible reality for many members of the middle and upper classes. See Gareth Stedman Jones's discussion of the "separation between classes" in Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (New York: Pantheon, 1971), part 3. [BACK]

26. A Christmas Carol is concerned with relations between employer and employee—between the businessman and his clerk. But this story of class relations is mapped onto the symbolic context of a patriarchal Christian order, and its cross-class appeal attests to the consensus achieved thereby.

The story allegorizes and, in its own terms, ideally effects the inscription of its readers into Victorian culture's dominant ideological structures. To the extent that those structures remain the same for contemporary readers and spectators, the story may be said to achieve the same effects. But in that context it also serves as a different kind of "culture-text," successfully representing Victorian England for present-day readers precisely because of its ability to condense culture into a series of representations. A Christmas Carol exemplifies the way in which, in a spectacular society, images mediate cultural memory. [BACK]

27. "We cannot remember when we first knew this story. It is allied in our consciousness to our awareness of day and night, winter and spring . . ." (Davis, 238). [BACK]

28. A Christmas Carol was the first, and the most frequently performed, of Dickens's public readings. Although the text varied from night to night, the crucial feature of the readings was reportedly the author's impersonation of his characters and his evident identification with the "spirit" of both book and holiday. See Philip Collins, Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 4-7. [BACK]