Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-h4f6x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-23T11:43:27.565Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Audrey Jaffe
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Dickens's A Christmas Carol exemplifies the literary and cinematic use of visual representation to reinforce ideological values in Western culture. The story positions Scrooge and its readers as spectators of a series of culturally valorized scenes; access to the spectator's idealized self depends on the ability to perceive and desire (to identify and identify with) the values embedded in those scenes. Scrooge saves his life by recovering what the story posits as his natural ability to identify with representations, an ability that characterizes both his ideal, sympathetic self and the ideal subject of commodity culture.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 2 , March 1994 , pp. 254 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127–12.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Trans. Levin, Charles. Saint Louis: Telos, 1981.Google Scholar
Collins, Philip Charles Dickens: The Public Readings. London: Oxford UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Davis, Paul The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Debord, Guy Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.Google Scholar
de Lauretis, Teresa Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles A Christmas Carol. The Christmas Books. Ed. Slater, Michael. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1971. 45–134. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Doane, Mary Ann The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenstein, Elizabeth The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, Sergei “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” Film Form. New York: Harcourt, 1949. 195–255.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Elliot “The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dicker's A Christmas Carol.” PMLA 90 (1975): 22–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Vicki “Images of Catastrophe as Corporate Ballyhoo.” New York Times 3 May 1992, sec. 2: 33+.Google Scholar
Haskell, Thomas “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 339–61, 547–54.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Audrey Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.Google Scholar
Jones, Gareth Stedman Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. New York: Pantheon, 1971.Google Scholar
Metz, Christian The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Miller, D. A The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.Google Scholar
Mullan, John Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Mulvey, Laura “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, Thomas The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kaja Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Todd, Janet Sensibility: An Introduction. New York: Methuen, 1986.Google Scholar