This post has been contributed by Renata Goroshkova, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Read Renata’s previous posts here and here.

This post is in two parts. Find the second part here.

Dickens in the Christmas stories of the 1840s uses specific frame images, many of which previously appeared in Gothic literature. In his works these images acquire a different connotation and generate new meanings: Dickens “promises an older conventional form of Gothic that is then denied” (Warwick 52). In this translation of  my article “Frame Images in Charles Dickens’s Christmas Stories of the 1840s” (https://doi.org/10.30853/filnauki.2019.4.81) I compare Dickens’s works with the works of other famous authors in order to identify what Dickens’s innovation is in the use of framework images.

Marina Grishakova writes that “the concept of ‘frame’ provides a link between the ‘real-life’ and ‘fictional experience’” (188). So, this is one medium through which the reader enters the world of fiction. On the other hand, the very concept of “fiction” is ambivalent to framework and conventions, because “narratives are based on a deviation or break from the predictable course of events and include an element of surprise” (Grishakova 190). In light of the increased interest in modern literary criticism in the methods of narrative framing, the analysis of frames becomes particularly relevant and helps us to understand how the text is organized and how this text tries to influence the reader.

The window is one of the most wide-spread frame images of the Gothic. For example, in A. Hare’s “The Vampire of Croglin Hall” overwhelming terror enters the narrative as the window opens: “Then a long bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window, and the window opened, and the creature came in; … and her terror was so great that she could not scream” (4). In E. A. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” a feeling of incomprehensible all-consuming anxiety begins to appear when the narrator is looking at the windows in the room where the events of the story will take place. The windows impress the reader and the hero by their inaccessibility,indicating the isolation and the possible threat emanating from them: “The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and, at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within” (Poe 585). And it is after one of the windows opens that the most terrible things begin to happen, and a woman buried alive wakes up covered in blood and falls on her brother, killing him: “…he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm” (Poe 604).

An important place is also given to the image of a window in the internal “arrangement” in Dickens’s Christmas stories. The importance of this image is underlined in “The Chimes.” In the context of the details of the church space, the Gothic arched window is an explicit element of Gothic. It is the Gothic window that will allow Toby, having climbed the church tower, to seethe world through completely different eyes: not from the position of a “weak, small, spare old man” (90), but from the perspective of the human being who tries to be close to the divine truth. After getting to the church tower, Toby meets with strange and terrible creatures – “dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bell” (125), and the Gothic entourage (mist, darkness, arched/gothic windows) has already prepared the reader for this event.

The motif of arched windows as elements of architecture belonging to the Gothic is also present in the story “The Haunted Man”, hinting at a kind of transition from one space to another: “I’ll go nowhere to-night. Boy! straight down this long-arched passage, and past the great dark door into the yard, – you see the fire shining on the window there” (Dickens 142). The passage literally predicts the entire future course of “The Haunted Man”: salvation for the fallen heroes will come from Milly, and it is the light in her window that Redlaw points out to the lost boy. The passage can be read metaphorically as well: after a long, dark and scary “gothic” passage the narrative will pass to “the light” –  to a new level where dark and gothic concepts no longer prevail.

Behind a window an infinite number of other images can be revealed, so the functionality of this visual image is quite wide: you need only to open a window or move the curtain. Looking out of the window the characters receive news from another world: in the story “A Christmas Carol in Prose”, Marley leads Scrooge to the window and, continuing in the tradition of Virgil, who accompanied Dante to the underworld, shows the street teeming with sinners: “Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out. The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives” (Dickens 26). In some parts of the story the narrator looks to the narrative as if he is a reader or bystander. Meanwhile, through the window the characters watch the world while, simultaneously, the world studies the lives of the characters: “Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe” (Dickens 87).

Through the window the character can spy on the celebration that takes place inside, but go unnoticed: “But, the red light came cheerily towards him from the windows; figures passed and repassed there; and the hum and murmur of voices greeted his ear sweetly” (Dickens 301).

We can find similar scenes of peeking in on the Christmas holiday in Washington Irving’s “The Stage Coach”: “In the evening we reached a village where I had determined to pass the night. As we drove into the great gateway of the inn, I saw the light of a rousing kitchen fire beaming through a window” (Irving 22). It was Dickens, however, who made this image one of the important attributes of the Christmas holiday: “By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms, was wonderful” (Dickens 54). After Dickens, the window in literature and theater becomes not only a meaningful medium, but also a decoration,an indispensable attribute of Christmas. In H. C. Andersen’s “The Little Match-Seller,” for instance, on New Year’s Eve “lights were shining from every window” (552), and throughout the story the poor little girl tries to imagine what is going on behind windows. The rhythm of “The Heavenly Christmas Tree” (written by F. M. Dostoevsky) is based on the fact that the boy looks behind the “glass”, that is, in the windows of houses where Christmas is celebrated, or in the shop windows where gifts are exhibited. And in the first act of the ballet The Nutcracker, the ensemble of large windows is the decoration which creates (along with a Christmas Tree) the first impression of a holiday atmosphere. Another function of the window in Dickens’s stories is to underline the stories’ fictionality, pointing to the fictional nature of any narrative. Ali Baba, one of the first literary characters Scrooge met as a child, appears specifically in the window: “Suddenly a man, in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood” (Dickens 31). On the other hand, who, if not Ali Baba, should “look out” from the frame and remind the reader about the origins of this narrative technique (framework narrative), which appeared in his homeland: this specific type of storytelling was first used in the Middle Eastern set of folk stories The Thousand and One Nights (Gerkhard 354). Dickens, appealing to frame images, goes beyond the narrative or pushes frames aside to show the methods of creating text, and to point to the details which helped to build the story.

To be continued: Part Two.

WORKS CITED

• Andersen H. C.   Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Auckland N. Z.: The Floating Press, 2010.
• Dickens Ch. Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Dostoevsky F. M. The Heavenly Christmas Tree and Other Stories. Max Bollinger, 2013.
• Gerkhard M. I. Iskusstvo povestvovaniya. Literaturnoye issledovaniye “1001 nochi” [The Art of Storytelling. Literary Study of One Thousand and One Nights]. Мoscow: Science, 1984. (in Russian)
• Goroshkova R. R. “Frame Images In Charles Dickens’s Christmas Stories of the 1840s”. Philological Sciences. Issues of Theory and Practice. Tambov: Gramota, 2019. № 4. Pp.390-394. (in Russian)
• Grishakova M. “Beyond the Frame: Cognitive Science, Common Sense andFiction”. Narrative, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May 2009), The Ohio State University. Pp. 188-199.
• Hare A.  “The  Vampire  of Croglin  Hall”. Children of  the  Night: Classic  Vampire  Stories. London: Wordsworth Edition, 2007.
• IrvingW. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Leipzig: Bernh. Tauchnitz Jun., 1843.
• Poe E. A. The Dover Reader. New York: Courier Corporation, 2014.
• Warwick A. “Victorian Gothic”. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Edited by Spooner C. and McEvoy E., Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.  Pp. 49-60.