"Scrooge Nouveau": Margaret Atwood Resites a Christmas Carol

The Three Scrooges Over 150 years after the publication of A Christmas Carol, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood takes up the in which Charles Dickens, according preface, ventured to raise the Ghost of an Idea. Dickens's expressed hope was that this Ghost would haunt the houses of readers pleasantly and no one wish lay long after December 1843 (Preface). In certain sense, Atwood fulfills these expectations she returns the story of Ebenezer Scrooge's sins and salvation in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. (1) The subtitle of her nonfiction book, published in 2008, already suggests its affinities with Dickens's story. Original, Atwood calls the famous miserly character (following the lead of certain soft-drink and potato-chip companies), is the very embodiment of the Shadow Side of Wealth (Payback 173). (2) Like the division of A Christmas Carol into five staves--an allusion the stanzas of song or carol--Atwood's book is composed of five chapters. In fact, Payback originated recited rather than written text: series of radio-broadcast lectures sponsored by Massey College at the University of Toronto and CBC/Radio-Canada. The Massey Lectures, according the front matter of Payback, are intended provide forum for major contemporary thinkers raise important issues of our time. Adhering these directives in her own inventive way, Atwood repeatedly invokes the exemplum of Ebenezer Scrooge while deliberating on the topic of debt and how it has shaped human thought and behavior for millennia until, in her fifth and final stave, she proceeds embellish the tale of the two traditional Scrooges. The first one, readers will recall, was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner; the second, as good friend, good master, and good man any in the world (Christmas Carol 8, 76). To the unforgettable tight-fisted first (Scrooge Original) and the open-handed second (Scrooge Lite--lighter both in purse and in spirit), Atwood adds third, upscale character named because, she clarifies, when you're introducing high-end quality it's just well make it sound little French (Payback 173-74). Another offshoot of Ebenezer Scrooge's fecund afterlife, (3) this particular product represents the shadowy and shark-like side of megacorporative voracity: his very white and expertly restored teeth gleam eerily in the dark (174). In introducing Scrooge Nouveau into her narrative, Atwood not only departs from the down-to-earth, publicist, nonfiction genre of her preceding four chapters into the other-worldly realms of fantasy fiction. She also transports Dickens's story out of its Victorian-era urban setting into present-day global contexts. (4) Nonetheless, even while reciting Christmas Carol for our times and resiting old Scrooge in the early twenty-first century, Atwood closely draws on Dickens's cautionary tale and remains expressly indebted it. Hers is not an adversarial relationship the text she adapts but, on the contrary, an admiring (albeit free-wheeling) one. As my discussion proposes show, she pays tribute to, well plays with and against, venerable Original. Paying Dues Indeed, it seems only fitting that in lecture series devoted the motif of economic, moral, and other types of debt, Margaret Atwood should pay back, which is also say, acknowledge the debt due writer in whose works she had thoroughly herself graduate student of Victorian literature at Radcliffe in the 1960s. I use the word immersed here in its literal and figurative senses, for Atwood was invited give public lecture upon receiving the Radcliffe Alumnae Award in the spring of 1980, she shared this waterlogged recollection with her audience: Walking around Cambridge today [in the rain], trying find out what I was supposed be doing--a continuation of lifelong endeavor--I was reminded of the many happy afternoons spent in the bathtub on the third floor of 6 Appian Way . …

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