Please don't tell me I'm the only one who's been mentally comparing Dickens' A Christmas Carol to Dante's Inferno.
I mean, come on. Jacob Marley's ghost comes to warn Scrooge on Christmas Eve (an important Christian holiday just like in the Inferno) about his sins. Similarly, after Dante undertakes his journey, he will probably think twice before doing anything that will send him to one of the wretched Circles after he dies.
The narrator of A Christmas Carol describes Scrooge as "a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone [...]! A squeezing, wrecking, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!"
Dante probably wouldn't have described himself as such (indeed, he does not). However, both are guided on their journeys by spirits (Dante by Virgil, and Scrooge by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come). Scrooge and Dante are also both warned about sins like ignorance and want. (Though Scrooge of course is more pointedly warned about these particular sins.) Both are also given a sneak peek of what their futures could be like if they were to, in Dante's case, give into temptation and sin, or, in Scrooge's case, continue on his same path. Next, just as Dante and Virgil travel deeper into Hell and encounter "worse" sinners and are exposed to harsher punishments, the last Ghost shows Scrooge a much scarier prospect than either of the first two. Finally, both Dante and Scrooge probably emerge from their ordeals as changed men. Scrooge certainly does, and it's a bit difficult to imagine that Dante would just be unaffected by journeying through Hell. In fact, we know he is affected with some frequency, since he often says things like, "I can't even look at frozen lakes anymore without having horrible flashbacks to my time in Hell!"
Clearly there are difference here (for example, Scrooge is in very real danger of becoming a ghost condemned to wander the Earth forever, like Marley, whereas Dante apparently thinks he's already got a ticket into Heaven). But I still thought the similarities were kind of striking or at least worth considering.
On that note, I wonder how things would've gone if Scrooge had been one of the souls Dante spoke to in Circle IV...
Thoughts?
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3 comments:
Immediately when I read what you wrote about Dante seeing frozen lakes, I imagined a modern Dante thinking, "tbt to that time I went to hell and saw all this messed s***." So cool that you made connections to Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I've always thought Scrooge's story was quite scary at times, especially when he saw the future. While Dante's Inferno is considerably more gory, there are elements of self-awareness and, in a way, divine punishment in A Christmas Carol. Dante and Virgil are spectators to sinners' sufferings; Scrooge's unearthly guides are the ones who inflict suffering upon Scrooge when they show him the error of his ways, though this suffering is somewhat fleeting and specially exclusive to Scrooge, not an otherworldly population of evildoers. Dante believes he is innately moral whereas Scrooge kind of just doesn't concern himself with morals up until his transformation; they both, however, definitely go through irreversible transformations, Scrooge for the better and Dante...for better or for worse, really. He is more informed than he was previously, true, but he is undoubtedly scarred by what he has seen, as you pointed out. Again, very cool, Ally.
This is so cool, Ally, as Margot said. I really hadn't thought about this comparison, but, now that you bring it up, it does make a lot of sense. In fact, Dickens uses infernal imagery in other works of his as well. His "Hard Times" is about a city called Coketown, and many critics have tied the connection between landmarks in Coketown to imagery in Dante's Inferno. Also, the main characters in the novel go from a life of sin to a life of purity and grace. This is reminiscent of Dante the Pilgrim's journey as he begins the comedy lost and eventually is able to find his way back around with the assistance of Virgil and others. Your comparison led me to a bunch hof cool research.Thanks for posting this!
Nice comparison, Ally. Check out these links: http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2013/12/medieval-plays-in-modern-times-dickens-dante-and-la-pastorela/ and http://through-a-glass-brightly.blogspot.com/2013/12/kindred-spirits-juxtaposition-of-dante.html.
Basically, it points out some other similarities that I’ll summarize here:
-Dante and Scrooge both start off with their vision obscured (physically/spiritually)
-Dante meets three beasts (leopard, lion, wolf), and Scrooge meets three omens (hearse, door-knocker, ringing bell)
-The first encounters between Dante/Scrooge and Virgil/Marley
And when I saw him standing in this wasteland,
"Have pity on my soul," I cried to him,
"whichever you are, shade or living man!"
"No longer living man, though once I was," […]
vs.
"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"
"Much!" — Marley's voice, no doubt about it.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me who I was."
"Who were you then?" said Scrooge, raising his voice. "You're particular, for a shade."
-The concept of contrapasso (Marley wears a chain to represent his past sins)
Basically, there are a whole lot of striking similarities between Dickens and Dante. But I guess we’ll never truly know the source(s) from which Dickens drew his inspiration.
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