Ambivalent Father Figures and the Enigma of Male Identity in Dickens’s Fiction by Max Véga-Ritter

“…In a Freudian/gender approach to the issue of male sex identity in Charles Dickens’s fiction, the present article starts from Edmund Wilson’s seminal study ‘The Two Scrooges.’ It throws light on the way Dickens functioned in his earlier novels ambivalently or irresolutely, but alternately, on two opposite poles of his mind, those of self-identification with the benign—but eventually possibly inadequate—father image in the Pickwick Papers—the second Scrooge—or of a counter identification with its opposite negative image—the Rebels—in Oliver Twist, leaving the question of sex identity open or in a state of conundrum. …”
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Screening A Christmas Carol (Dickens, 1843): Adaptation as Completion by Florent Christol

“…Indeed, the story of Scrooge’s life-changing encounter with the Christmas Spirits has been adapted, revised, condensed, retold, and modernized on screen more than any other work of English or American literature. …”
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A Night at the Pictures : A Christmas Carol et la séduction du simulacra by Florent Christol

“…In this « ghost story of Christmas, » romance assumes the familiar shape of the Spirits of Christmas, who show Scrooge images of the poor and the destitute and make him aware of a reality to which he was completely blind, maybe because reality can only be apprehended through a representation, its projection on a screen through which it becomes visible.…”
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