Women's Role

One of the things that I picked up on in A Christmas Carol was the lack of women in Scrooge's life; his sister dies and he loses Belle at an early age. Some people might say that the lack of women in the novel protrays the lack of their role in society at the time. However, it is interesting that the men who had women to come home to (Mr. Cratchit and Fred) were much happier than Scrooge. In our reading at the beginning of the semester ("Gentlemen and Ladies" section in The Longman Anthology of British Literature), it said that during such a huge time of enterprise, women were supposed to be at home waiting to take care of their men. It was a huge responsibility because it was a woman's job to make the man happy and forget what troubles lie outside of the home. Perhaps Dickens' accurate protrayal of society is why women are lacking major roles in the novel. They play large parts; their roles are merely curtained.

-Camille Turner