Lesley McDowell: Talking turkey at the table

The most famous Christmas story (apart from that one) is probably Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The heartwarming tale of miserly Scrooge, finding his inner Santa Claus and goodwill-to-all-men through a series of phantom encounters with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, has been a festive success ever since it was first published in 1843, when the economy was almost as gloomy as it is now. It is not just a Christmas story, though – it’s a novel with an important social message about charity and not taking your good fortune for granted.

Dickens may have used Christmas to convey a message both to, and about, his own social class but can that be said of any other novelists, who have also depicted Christmas scenes? What exactly does a Christmas scene have to say about a novelist’s own times? A mere five years after Dickens’ salutary tale, Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. It contains a very different kind of Christmas scene altogether, full of violence from the moment that the drunken Hindley Earnshaw orders Heathcliff from the kitchen, just as the Lintons arrive from Thrushcross Grange. Hindley insults Heathcliff’s unruly long hair, and Edgar Linton backs him up:

“He ventured this remark without any intention to insult; but Heathcliff’s violent nature was not prepared to endure the appearance of impertinence from one whom he seemed to hate, even then, as a rival. He seized a tureen of hot apple sauce, the first thing that came under his gripe, and dashed it full against the speaker’s face and neck.”

Hindley takes Heathcliff off for a thrashing and locks him up in his room. A proper Christmas scene eventually ensues (“our pleasure was increased by the arrival of the Gimmerton band, mustering fifteen strong; a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns and a bass viol, besides singers”) but when Cathy fetches Heathcliff from his room he chills Nelly with his words: “I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it, at last. I hope he will not die before I do!”

It is a stunning rebuttal to the message of Christmas about forgiveness and love to fellow men, and represents the flipside to the comfort and wealth the Empire brought to Victorian Britain. Wuthering Heights sees little benefit to our occupation of the world – all it does is divide people, as Brontë’s novel, fill of structural and thematic divisions (Thrushcross Grange vs Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff vs Edgar Linton, Cathy vs Catherine) shows so brilliantly. Heathcliff is an orphan of the Empire after all, the dark-skinned and savage child brought from the Liverpool wharfs, the very site and emblem of the trade and commerce of Empire, by the Victorian father, Mr Earnshaw.

Heathcliff may resent the unfairness of his lot, and be unable ever to come to terms with it, but at the very beginning of Louisa M Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women, Jo March similarly resents her lot, along with her sisters. “’Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. ‘It’s so dreadful to be poor!’ sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. ‘I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things and other girls nothing at all,’ added little Amy, with an injured sniff. ‘We’ve got father and mother, and each other, anyhow,’ said Beth, contentedly from her corner.”

The March sisters have nothing because their father is fighting in the Civil War and their mother wants them “not to spend money for pleasure, when our men are suffering so in the army”. It’s about to get worse for the girls – on Christmas morning, their mother arrives from the house of a very poor family, and the girls agree to give up their Christmas dinner for them.

Alcott’s message was that it really was better to give than to receive, reinforcing the Christmas message that Dickens had depicted 25 years earlier. Whatever viciousness the unfairness of the Victorian world order had wrung out of Wuthering Heights, it was the kindness of human nature that both Dickens and Alcott preferred to embrace.

And yet both these books have their dark side – Tiny Tim will die if his parents can’t afford to feed him properly; families in a war-torn America are literally starving and dependent on the charity of others for their very lives.

What all three novels have in common, though, is the emphasis on family. Brontë may be undermining the message of love and peace with her dysfunctional and damaging family unit even as Dickens and Alcott attempt to shore it up with families who love one another, but “family” as such still takes precedence at this time of year.

At the beginning of the 20th century, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man depicts a Christmas scene through the eyes of his hero, the young Stephen Dedalus. But what begins with a traditionally cosy family setting (“A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the ivytwined branches of the chandelier the Christmas table was spread”) soon degenerates into a brawl, as Stephen’s father and their guests “Dante” Riordan and Mr Casey, argue about the role of the Church in the downfall of the Home Rule politician, Charles Parnell: “Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easy chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door, Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, the cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: ‘Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!’ The door slammed behind her.”

A Portrait of the Artist was published in 1916. The world was caught up in war, and the passion and anger of both sides is exemplified here – not even Christmas, says this Modernist author, can hold it all together. In her 1947 play, Men Should Weep, Ena Lamont Stewart offered no generosity or comfort to the family at Christmas either: the young son of her heroine, Maggie, dies of TB and she and her husband John part company.

Stewart’s original Christmas scene was as harsh as they come: a family is irrevocably broken by poverty. But when she revised her play in the 1970s, she rewrote the ending to depict a very different family Christmas, one where Maggie is given a glamorous new hat by her husband John, now that he has at last found a job. Her son, too, is saved.

Perhaps more wealthy times persuaded Stewart to alter the ending of her play, but the end of the 20th century seems to have heralded less threatening or disturbing Christmas scenes in literature. Helen Fielding’s 1996 bestseller, Bridget Jones’s Diary, which satirised and summed up the experiences of many single, thirtysomething women on the hunt for a husband and a smaller waistline, comically depicted a family Christmas that begins with modern horrors (tasteless presents, confused elderly relatives, unwelcome guests), but turns around when Bridget is rescued by her knight-in-shining armour, Mark Darcy.

For women at the end of the 20th century, it would appear that the ideal Christmas is spent at a luxury hotel where others can do the cooking and serving. But the beginning of the 21st century showed the same reluctance to participate in the family Christmas so beloved of Christmas movies – Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 tragi-comic novel, The Corrections, depicts a family reluctantly coming together to celebrate possibly their last ever Christmas as a group – Alfred Lambert, the paterfamilias, is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and is losing his mind. The youngest daughter, Denise, seems to sum up what modern offspring feel about their parents at this time of year:

“On her first day there, as on the first day of every visit, she warmed to her parents’ warmth and did whatever her mother asked her to. She waved off the cash that Enid tired to give her for the groceries… She wore the lavender synthetic turtleneck and the matronly gold-plate necklace that were recent gifts from her mother. She effused, spontaneously, about the adolescent ballerinas in The Nutcracker, she held her father’s gloved hand as they crossed the regional theater’s parking lot, she loved her parents more than she’d ever loved anything; and the minute they were both in bed she changed her clothes and fled the house.”

That Christmas is family, both ideal and real, is the surprisingly consistent message from this selection of writers from the mid-19th century to the present day. The family at Christmas, with all its horrors and delights, can provide a writer with everything he or she needs: drama and pathos, adventure and suspense, cliché and originality, truth and lies. It can also reflect the political and social mood of a particular era, making it a perfect sign of the times, whether we want to escape it or embrace it.