This is Part Two of a post contributed by Renata Goroshkova, St. Petersburg State University, Russia.

Find Part One here.

The concept of the window as a frame through which the artist sees what will be depicted in his work first appeared in the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and later this image was widely used by artists of the Renaissance and became not only the framework that serves as a guide to the imaginary world of art (Edgerton 9), but, after “The Dark Ages”, the symbol of opening (in more than one sense) to the world. In the 20th century the window acquired a different symbolism. The windows are an important part of the mosaic world of M. C. Escher: they connect vertical and horizontal labyrinths (look at: Another World (1946), Convex and Concave (1955), Print Gallery (1956), etc.). Escher’s works demonstrate that the image of the window on the engravings created after World War II, as in the Renaissance, is also an indicator of the changed worldview.

The picture of the world opening from the windows is radically changing, and now you can see not a calming landscape, but a bottomless abyss into which you are afraid of falling.

The image of the curtain can also be called the image of Gothic. Swaying curtains in the silent room in “The Raven” (by E. A. Poe) create tension, and fill the soul of the hero with fear: “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me – filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before” (Poe 457). The curtains in Dickens’s Christmas stories become another frame image that switches the narration register to the miraculous and supernatural. Bedside curtains separate Scrooge from a guest from a different reality: “finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would drawback, he put them everyone aside with his own hands, and lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed” (Dickens 42).

Later, this canopy will tell the story more than once. After Scrooge sees himself dead (having crossed the boundary of life and death) the curtains will become a “legacy” left over from the dead, an object of joy for those who tried to sell stolen things at a profit in the junk-shop:

“Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots, dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff:

‘What do you call this?’ said Joe.

‘Bed-curtains!’ ‘Ah!’ returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward on her crossed arms. ‘Bed-curtains!’”

(Dickens 68)

Scrooge here has lost another shell in which he could hide, and crucial ideas finally begin to reach his mind and heart: “He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed” (Dickens 69).

Like the theater curtain, Dickens’s curtains are always ready to hide the scene from the viewer’s eyes. In the following example, the most interesting is seen only until the curtain is drawn, namely the bustle of pre-holiday moments, and the preparation for the Christmas dinner: “the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, … and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness” (Dickens 54). A little later, the image of the silhouettes of people moving behind the curtains will be grotesquely enhanced by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. According to S. N. Zenkin, the image of the shadows revived in the windows in this novel creates the oxymoronic “live things” (Zenkin), that is, a comparison of the incomparable concepts, a paradox that manifests itself not so much on the linguistic level as on the level of visualization.

The image of the door is also important in this context. Marley’s face appears in the door and brings many meanings: “And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change – not a knocker, but Marley’s face” (Dickens 17). The house that Scrooge went into when he saw the face of Marley at the door becomes that evening the home of surprises and deceived expectations – both for the main character and for readers who assume that they had opened the ghost-story announced in the subtitle.

“The notion of boundary is an ambivalent one: it both separates and unites. It is always the boundary of something and so belongs to both contiguous semiospheres” (Lotman 136). Marley, appearing at the door of the house, stands on the border of neighbouring worlds: life and death, reality and fiction, past and future, familiar and alien, virtue and vice. The moment a character crosses a threshold is one of the important elements of the narrative: “Don’t cross the door-step tonight” (Dickens 286), the heroine of “The Battle of Life” Clemency says to Marion, who is about to escape from her father’s house with a young man. Marion’s crossing of the threshold of her home is a new milestone in both her family history and in the entire story, because the fate of all the characters changes completely, and the new turn of the story reveals the hidden intention of the narrator to show the true nature of some people.

In “The Haunted Man,“ Milly often brings healing and joy to other characters, and the only thing that separates her from sufferers is a door. In one of the passages she tries to reach Redlaw and a student (and the phrase is repeated twice): “She was knocking at the door” (Dickens 366). Redlaw, who has lost his memory and deprives others of their memories, despairs at the atrocities he has committed, and here again Milly, who personifies wisdom and truth, tries to get into the locked house of the scientist. Her plea, “Pray, sir, let me in,” is repeated several times, and marks a change in the tone of the narrative. Meanwhile, Marley’s Ghost, who brought salvation to Scrooge, enters the house without asking. Realizing the change that has happened to him, Scrooge first of all remembers the medium through which salvation came: “There’s the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered!” (Dickens 78).

M. M. Bakhtin considered the threshold to be one of the three main categories of images of space (the other two are the home and vastness) (Bakhtin 280). This image, according to him, is linked to the motif of the meeting and to the motif of live change. Both of these points (an encounter with spirits and a dramatic change in the character’s life) are connected in Dickens’s works with the image of the door: as examples from the text of the Christmas stories shows, the door is the medium through which the hero’s life (and narration) changes.

“Gothic texts are fundamentally concerned with the anxiety about boundaries” (Minter). Involving in the text literal or metaphorical boundaries, Gothic literature addresses the main fear of the New Age – the problem of determining the boundaries of the personality: “What distinguishes the ‘me’ from the ‘not me’. Where, if they exist at all, are the boundaries of the self?” (DeLamotte 23).

In Gothic fiction, barriers create obstacles that prevent characters from reaching the exit, and emphasize the dead end of searching for any meaning. Gothic frames point to the mysticism of the events occurring in the text, and the infernal nature of villains, spirits and ghosts who are able to cross any border: physical (walk through walls) and moral (they are capable of the most terrible deeds). For Dickens, the images of the border serve completely different purposes: they open the door to light and meaning.

“Hallways and doors lead us through our reading” (Bernstein 15); the doorway “is a constant reminder of the persistence of a hostile exterior”(Bernstein 1). Frame images are an important device of Dickens’s style, and the thing that points to the fictional nature of any narrative. Just as the heroes of Dickens’s Christmas stories of the 1840s lock up before the arrival of ghosts, readers, plunging into the world of the story, consciously (or unconsciously) enter the confined space of the literary text and – according to Dickens – must open their hearts and feel all that is narrated.

WORKS CITED

• Bakhtin M. M. Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [Aesthetics of Verbal Creativity]. Moscow: Art, 1979. (in Russian)
• Bernstein  S.  Housing  Problems. Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
• DeLamotte E. C. Perils of the Night. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Dickens Ch. Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Edgerton S. The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
• 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)
• LocherJ. L., Veldhuysen J. L. The Magic of M. C. Escher. Thames & Hudson, 2013.
• Lotman Y. M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London: I. B. Tauris, 2001.
• Minter L. “Gothic Science Fiction – a beginning”. URL: http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/guestblog/gothic-science-fiction-–-a-beginning/
• Poe E. A. The Dover Reader. New York: Courier Corporation, 2014.
• WildeO. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Zenkin S. “An Image Without a Likeness (The Receptive Structure of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray)”. URL: https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/154_nlo_6_2018/article/20421/ (in Russian)