'A Christmas Carol' and the masque

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1993 by R.D. Butterworth

The masque comes complete, too, with its antimasque. As in the traditional masque there are figures of ugly physical appearance: "monsters ... horrible and dread," "abject, frightful, hideous, miserable," "yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish": the figures of Ignorance and Want (56).(6) As usual, these figures signify disorder and chaos, the disruption of the way things should rightfully be. As always too, though, such forces arc defeatable--if man will "beware." Though Doom is written on the boy's forehead, it remains possible for the writing to "be erased" (57).

If those common features of masque--music, song and dance--are somewhat incidental presences in A Christmas Carol,(7) their general significance as part of the celebratory nature of masque is reflected specifically in the brightness (the "mighty blaze" and "glowing torch"), liveliness and abundance of the setting in which the Spirit of Christmas Present appears, the joyous mood of the Christmas morning street scene, and the "transport" (72) later of the reformed Scrooge who now knows "how to keep Christmas well" (76).

Most importantly, however, writing within the masque tradition allows Dickens to foreshorten character development. As masques do not normally present naturalistic action, Dickens is left with a freedom in the presentation of character, situation and theme that is not usually available to him. The supernatural apparatus enables the writer to present the reclaiming of Scrooge as a process that takes only a night rather than a long time; thus, as Dickens himself says in his Preface, the masque tradition from which "what is peculiar" in the "machinery" of the story is derived enables him to "confine" the story within a "narrow space" (xiv). In the spirit, too, of masque, the process of reclamation is an inexorable one, and one to which the eventual outcome is obvious from the beginning. Scrooge argues, briefly, with Marley's Ghost; afterwards there is no real resistance to the lessons he is being taught, very much in line with the tradition by which the masque "deals, not with the last phase of a conflict, but with a moment of transformation" (Welsford 339).

If Dickens takes up the conventions of masque, however, he also somewhat transforms them. His purposes remain those of a radical reformer and his basic identity as a writer that of a novelist. Thus, his antimasque figures are not mere fascinating grotesques but disturbing characters that are somewhat out of tune with the light, even frivolous, temper of masques. What is more, Dickens presents us, after all, not with the script for a theatrical presentation, but a work of prose fiction, the opening and closing sections of which, at least, follow all the conventions of the novel rather than the masque.

It is, perhaps, the episode of the visit of Marley's Ghost, which constitutes the induction to the masque, that most clearly demonstrates the nature of the hybrid of novel and masque that Dickens is creating. The visit takes place at a significant point, as the narrative begins to modulate from the everyday settings, characters and events of the novel toward those of the masque that are to occupy the central portion of the work. There have been transformations of the knocker into Marley's head and back again, unexplained noises, and the flying open of a cellar door. Finally the figure comes before Scrooge: