Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital Brandon Chitwood Marquette University Recommended Citation Chitwood, Brandon, "A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital" (2012). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 181. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/181 A VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS IN HELL: YULETIDE GHOSTS AND NECESSARY PLEASURES IN THE AGE OF CAPITAL by Brandon Chitwood A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin May 2012 ABSTRACT A VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS IN HELL: YULETIDE GHOSTS AND NECESSARPLEASURES IN THE AGE OF CAPITAL Brandon Chitwood Marquette University, 2012 This dissertation explores how the cultural and literary development – one might argue, creation – of a specifically Victorian Christmas arose in response to social anxieties related to the expansion of industrial capitalism, Darwinian theories of evolution, and the increasingly problematic definition of the family during the nineteenth century in Britain. Using a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens, the dissertation explores how the liminal figure of the ghost pervades the literary narrativization of the Christmas holiday, and how such ghosts provided uncanny comforts to a reading public increasingly horrified by social, economic, and natural forces seemingly beyond their control. The dissertation argues that the success of the literary institution of Christmas as a necessary assurance of cultural pleasure in the face of social anxiety has made it perhaps the most long-lived of Victorian artifacts. Indeed, the importance of Christmas to our late capitalist present suggests post-modernity is not so far removed from Victorian sensibilities as we might suspect. The first chapter of A Victorian Christmas in Hell examines the seminal role of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol in constructing the Victorian Christmas narrative, and its astonishing longevity as a living cultural touchstone to the present day. The chapter argues that A Christmas Carol’s success is due in large part to its construction of a seductive injunction to enjoy that deflects and transcends social anxiety. The second chapter examines the role of mourning and grief that pervades Victorian Christmas texts, and how this focus on melancholy paradoxically underwrites the command to enjoy Christmas. The third chapter focuses on how the uncertainty of the role of women in Victorian culture helped lend a volatility, urgency, and horror to the genre of the Christmas ghost story – a genre developed in large part by women writers. The fourth chapter explores the role of children in Christmas ghost stories, and argues that the social guilt of child abuse gave rise to the figure of the child ghost: a transcendent figure with the power to believe in the fantastic and phantasmic aspects of Christmas for an increasingly skeptical, and guilt-ridden adult population. A brief postscript considers the possible evolution of the Christmas narrative beyond its capitalist trappings. What would a post-Victorian Christmas look like after capitalism? Is it even possible, or desirable, to exorcise our Victorian Christmas ghosts? i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Brandon Chitwood If the pleasures of Christmas are often ambiguous and ambivalent, the pleasures of writing about them in this study were unalloyed and unequivocal. I have many people to thank for this happy state of affairs: chief among them, Diane Long Hoeveler. She has been an enthusiastic supporter and shepherd of this project from its beginnings, and her scholarship, council, and wisdom have pushed me, and this dissertation, in delightfully fruitful directions. I am deeply grateful to have had her as a dissertation director. I would also like to thank Al Rivero and Ed Block, who have been the most supportive, yet critical of readers. I could not have been blessed with a more ideal committee. I would like to thank Bill Dyer and Don Larsson, two wonderful professors who shaped me as a scholar and provided invaluable help in developing the ideas that would inform this dissertation. I need to thank my colleagues Eric Dunnum and Buddy Storm for their comradeship, insights, and support over the years. Farther afield, I would like to thank my brothers in Army Defense for sticking by me through this journey – and for inciting some of the more interesting ideas in this study. And to Amara Graf, whose love as much as her ideas and insights contributed so much to this dissertation, thanks are simply insufficient. My love and gratitude to my family, who over the years have made Christmas a truly magical time for me. To my friends Andy Carlson and Zac Hanson, two scholars who fell along the way: your example lives on. To my uncle Dennis Neutzling, who introduced me to the pleasures of the intellectual: I will always wonder if this is what you had in mind! And to my mother, Linda Neutzling, my most cherished ghost: love always. Finally, I want to thank Wendy Sterba, a teacher, scholar, and friend, for believing in me, even when she really had no good reason to do so. I have reached this page because of her. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………..i INTRODUCTION: Ghosts of Christmas Past………….…………………………...........1 CHAPTER I. A Christmas Card Always Reaches Its Destination…………………………..63 II. Mourning Becomes A Christmas Tree…………………………….………..114 III. Wuthering Lights, or: Yes, Virginia, There is Such a Thing as Woman......154 IV. A Ghost Is Being Beaten…………………………………………………..215 POSTSCRIPT: Ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come…………………………………......262 WORKS CITED.……………………………………………………………………….273 1 Introduction: Ghosts of Christmas Past Christmas hath a darkness Brighter than the blazing noon, Christmas hath a chillness Warmer than the heat of June -- Christina Rossetti, “Christmas Eve” Phantasms, ghosts, in this midnight hour, hold jubilee, and screech and jabber; and the question rather were, What high Reality anywhere is yet awake? […] Is our poor English Existence wholly becoming a nightmare; full of mere Phantasms? --Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present I The 1890’s in Britain were, in terms of literature at least, fantastic. This was the decade that saw the birth of Dracula, Mowgli, Svengali, Dorian Gray, The Invisible Man, and a full-blown invasion from Mars. Add to this the studied decadence and fetishized cigarettes of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and J. M. Barrie (before Peter Pan definitively made him a children’s writer in the mind of posterity), the Celtic wonderlands of the young Yeats, and one comes away with a sense that this was a period of febrile young minds in revolt, devising abundant phantasmagoria as if in neurotic expectation of replacing the prim bourgeois naturalistic world presided over by their waning bourgeois queen. The revolt seems abortive, however, when we remember that the Queen herself was an eager devourer of these fantasies. And no one’s fantasies were more appealing to her than those of Marie Corelli, the best-selling writer of the decade. Whether one views the literature of this period approvingly as an imaginative hotbed of Hazlittian gusto, or 2 more soberly as a wasteland of excess and purple prose, critical judgment must at least pause to awe at the deliria of Ms. Corelli, who, whatever her failings, was certainly the most fantastic of the fantasists. What may be most fantastic of all is that such writing was so popular; that such strangeness -- digested by so much of the public and indeed earning the imprimatur of the decidedly pedestrian taste of Victoria Regina – was, in effect, normal. Consider “The Devil’s Motor: A Fantasy,” a brief tale from 1896, which, while representative of Ms. Corelli’s style and content, has a power of compression and cohesion lacking in some of her more rhapsodic novels. As a narrative, this story details the first joy ride of the Prince of Darkness in what was then a real novelty: an automobile. From the opening lines, though, it is clear Corelli has something much more cosmic in mind than relating a curious anecdote: In the dead midnight, at that supreme moment when the Hours that are past slip away from the grasp of the Hours yet to be, there came rushing between Earth and Heaven the sound of giant wheels, -- the glare of great lights, -- the stench and the muffled roar of a huge Car, tearing at full speed along the pale line dividing the Darkness from the Dawn. And he who stood within the Car, steering it straight onward, was clothed in black and crowned with fire; large bat-like wings flared out on either side of him in woven webs of smoke and flame, and his face was as white as bleached bone. Like glowing embers his eyes burned in their cavernous sockets, shedding terrific glances through the star-strewn space, -- and on his thin lips there was a frozen shadow of a smile more cruel than hate, -- more deadly than despair. (141) Just as Corelli’s style finds a happy medium between biblical cadence and the more pictorial descriptiveness of a comic book, her subject is painted with a Miltonic sense of opposition and paradox. Time and space exist in a contradictory twilight of in- betweenness. We are thrust into an infinite now poised between past and future, that “supreme moment” of an ungraspable present, and into an impossible space between 3 Heaven and Earth,