Spirits, Miracles and Clauses: Economy, Patriarchy and Childhood in Popular Christmas Texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2007vol17no1art1201Keywords:
Christmas, Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street, The Santa Clause, childhoodAbstract
In this paper I explore the notion of childhood as it is re/configured in Christmas texts through the discursive frames of industrialisation and global capitalism. Through a poststructuralist analysis of three Christmas texts from the 1840s, 1940s and 1990s, I map discursive shifts in the ways that children and childhood are constructed in relation to the discourses of capitalist societies. Three texts are examined in detail: A Christmas Carol, published by Charles Dickens in 1843; the 1947 version of the film, Miracle on 34th Street; and the 1999 Walt Disney film, The Santa Clause. While these texts provide only a small sample from the thousands of texts available, their commercial success and sustained popular appeal makes them particularly significant sites of analysis. Dickens' text is widely considered 'the most often repeated and imitated secular Christmas story of all' (Belk 2005, p.18), which has itself 'become sacred Christmas literature' (Belk 2005, p. 19). The success of Miracle on 34th Street led to several remakes for television audiences, with major motion picture remakes released in 1973 and again in 1994, while The Santa Clause the role credited with launching actor Tim Allen from a successful television career into a string of Hollywood blockbuster films won the 1995 People's Choice Award (USA) for Favourite Comedy Motion Picture, and was followed by sequels in 2002 and 2006 (IMDb, 2007). When considered together, these three popular, enduring and commercially successful texts illustrate some of the ways in which cultural texts are implicated in constructing children, over time, as particular kinds of economic subjects.
Metrics
References
Armstrong, N. (2004) ‘Christmas in Nineteenth- Century Britain and America: A Historiographical overview’, Cultural and Social History, 1: 118-125.
Aronowitz, S. and Giroux, H. (1991) Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism. Minneapolis and Oxford, University of Minnesota Press.
Belk, R. (2001) ‘Materialism and the Modern U.S. Christmas’, Advertising and Society Review, 1, 1. URL (as accessed 09/02/05): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v001/1.1belk.html
Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Clark, C. D. (1995) Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children’s Myths in Contemporary America. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.
Cleverley, J. and Phillips, D. (1987) Visions of Childhood: Influential Models from Locke to Spock. Sydney, Allen and Unwin.
Cranny-Francis, A. (1992) Engendered Fictions: Analysing Gender in the Production and Reception of Texts. Kensington, NSW, University of New south Wales Press.
Curtis, B. (1995) ‘The strange birth of Santa Claus: from Artemis the goddess and Nicholas the saint’, Journal of American Culture, 18, 4: 17-33.
Davies, B. (2003) Shards of Glass: Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities, revised edition. Cresskill, NJ, Hampton Press.
Davies, B. (2005) ‘“The Fairy Who Wouldn’t Fly”: A story of subjection and agency,’ Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 5, 2: 151-174.
Dickens, C. (2003) ‘A Christmas Carol in Prose Being A Ghost story of Christmas’, in R. Kelly (ed.) A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens. Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Literary Texts, pp. 35-125.
Eagleton, T. (ed.) (1987) Hard Times/Charles Dickens. London and New York, Methuen.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. New York, Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-1977. London, Harvester Press.
Foucault, M. (1999) ‘About the beginnings of the hermeneutics of the self’, in J. Carrette (ed.) Religion and culture by Michel Foucault, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Foucault, M. (2002) the subject and power, in J. Faubion (ed.) Michel Foucault: Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3. London, Penguin.
Gee, J., Hull, G., Lankshear, C. (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. St. Leonard’s, Allen and Unwin.
Giroux, H. (2002) Breaking In To The Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics. Malden, Massachusetts & Oxford, UK, Blackwell.
Giroux, H. (2004) Are Disney movies good for your kids? in S. Steinberg and J. Kincheloe (eds.) Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood, 2nd Edition. Boulder, Co, Westview Press, pp. 164-180.
Hendrick, H. (1997) Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: an interpretative survey, 1800 to the present, in A. James and A. Prout (eds.) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Isseus in the Sociological Study of Childhood, 2nd Edition. London, Routledge Falmer, pp. 34-62.
Internet Movie database (IMDB). URL (accessed 2 January, 2006): http://www.imdb.com/
James, A. and Prout, A. (1997) Re-presenting childhood: time and transition in the study of childhood, in A. James and A. Prout (eds.) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, 2nd Edition. London, Routledge Falmer: 230-250.
Kelly, R. (ed.) (2003) A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens. Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Literary Texts.
Kenway, J. and Bullen, E. (2001) Consuming Children: Education, Entertainment, Advertising. Buckingham, Open University Press.
Ketabjian, T. (2003) ‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the animal machine in Hard Times, in Victorian Studies 45, 4: 649-676.
Lewis, J. (2001) Let’s get serious: Notes on teaching youth culture, in T. Miller (ed.) A Companion to Cultural Studies. Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishers, pp. 317-330.
Miller, T. and Lawrence, G. (2001) Globalization and culture, in T. Miller (ed.) A Companion to Cultural Studies. Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishers, pp. 490-509.
Pasquin, J. (director) (1999) The Santa Clause. Walt disney Pictures.
Restad, P. (1995) Christmas in America: A History. New York, Oxford University Press.
Rose, N. (1998) Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Schmidt, L. (1995) Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Steinberg, S. and Kincheloe, J. (eds.) (2004) Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood, 2nd Edition. Boulder, Co, Westview Press.
Stephens, J. (1992) Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London and New York, Longman.
Timko, M. (2001) Why Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, The World and I, 16, 12: 301.
