I watched A
Christmas Carol for the first time when I was in fourth grade. Of course, with no prior knowledge besides
the title, one would assume the story would be a heartfelt Christmas tale with
jolly ole’ Saint Nick, a “Jesus is the reason for the season” message, and
maybe even a singing of an actual Christmas carol or two. Instead, the story has a total of four
haunting ghosts as main characters and is a creepy tale about humanity and
caring for others, before you die and regret the life you led. Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved share a theme of being haunted by your past and struggling
between “certitude and open-eyed humanity” as Michel Faber puts it in his
article on theguardian.com.
“Marley was dead, to begin with,” is the first line of A Christmas Carol. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” is the first line of Beloved. Neither Charles
Dickens nor Toni Morrison takes time to get to the point. The first line automatically establishes an
eerie and mysterious tone that almost sounds like the end to a story rather
than a beginning. Of course, any good
ghost story has to begin with an end, that being a death. In Beloved,
that death occurs when Sethe murders her two-year-old daughter to save her from
the life of slavery Sethe had endured.
After killing her daughter, Sethe feels incredibly guilty. In A Christmas Carol, the death is that of
Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s old business partner, equally greedy and dead
of seven years at the beginning of the novella.
Unlike Beloved,
Marley is not murdered and Scrooge does not feel guilty about his death because
he had no part in it. Beloved haunts
Sethe because Sethe is stuck in her past and Beloved is a major regret from
Sethe’s dreadful past. Marley haunts
Scrooge to save Scrooge from a similar fate of a greedy and ungrateful life, “I
wear the chain I forged in life… I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I
girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” Beloved does not serve this same saving
purpose. At first arrival, she seems
to. Denver and Sethe love Beloved and
take care of her kindly, but soon Beloved becomes more parasitic and drains 124
of its life until finally Denver is forced out to save the family. Both ghosts scare the protagonist into a
better life, but Beloved does it in a more indirect way. The roads to recovery for the two are not easy
for either Scrooge or 124. As Amy from Beloved once said, “Anything dead coming
back to life hurts.”
 |
| “I wear the chain I forged in life… I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” |
In Michel Faber’s article, Spectral Pleasures, for The Guardian, Faber claims that in A Christmas Carol, it is never significant “how little the
supernatural entities in the story have to do with the change in Scrooge; there
is no force used, magical or other
Scrooge is humbled not by goblins, but by the paths of his own lost
chances.” This reinforces my point that A Christmas Carol and Beloved are connected by the theme of
ghosts influencing the lives of the living.
Both novels are the genre of magical realism, meaning the reason how the
ghost are real is not as relevant as to why.
Marley’s purpose is to save Scrooge from a similar fate and Beloved’s
purpose is to haunt 124 in spite of her murder, but indirectly saves the
family.
wise.
Even though Beloved
isn’t a Christmas tale, neither is A
Christmas Carol in a lot of ways. The
two ghosts stories end up having a lot more in common than meets the eye.
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