Lady Scrooges

I noticed it last Christmas: It’s the women who really hate Ebenezer Scrooge. In the opening scene of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the main victims of Scrooge’s scorn are his nephew Fred and his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Fred enters Scrooge’s office with a “God save you!,” offers a warm but futile invitation to Christmas dinner, and departs “without an angry word.” Bob promises to be in early on Boxing Day and leaves in good spirits for his commute from Cornhill to Camden Town (quite the trek on foot, if you know London). At Christmas dinner the next day, Bob toasts Scrooge as “the Founder of the Feast” and won’t hear a word against him. Fred, at his own dinner, expresses immense patience for his uncle, that “comical old fellow,” and declares that “[Scrooge’s] offences carry their own punishment and I have nothing to say against him.”

By contrast, the ire of Mrs. Cratchit is legendary. “I wish I had him here, I’d give him a piece of my mind to feast upon,” she cries, unable to tolerate such “an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge.” Fred’s wife has “no patience” with Scrooge, a sentiment echoed by “[her] sisters, and all the other ladies” present.

And all the other ladies. We imagine—or imagine a Victorian novelist would imagine—that women are more empathetic than men. Yet both Mrs. Cratchit and Fred’s wife are, well, “unfeeling” toward Scrooge. “He’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!” says Mrs. Cratchit bitterly, and Fred’s wife can say only that she is sure Scrooge is “very rich”—suggesting that if money is his only joy, it’s the lot he chose. It is left to Fred to speculate on how Scrooge “loses some pleasant moments” by dint of his humbuggery. What accounts for this divide between the sexes? Why are the women of A Christmas Carol so much less eager than the men to extend forgiveness to Scrooge?

Every household is political. Aristotle observes in his Politics that “the polis is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually.” Christian teaching, we should note, has often rejected Aristotle’s assertion of the priority of the polis. In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII affirmed the family as “a true society, and one older than any state,” with rights and duties upon which the state cannot intrude. Yet this does not mean that households and individuals exist unto themselves. They are, Leo says, “part of the commonwealth.” Both should be directed outward toward their neighbors in love. Aristotle tells us that any man who isn’t part of the community of the polis, as if he had no need of it, is “either a lower animal or a god.” This is Scrooge, “secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” Lower animal it is, then.

Scrooge, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” is not simply the neighborhood grouch. He is a political problem for the surrounding households, whether his family, his employees and debtors, or others who cross his path. Scrooge is estranged from the polis and must be reconciled, for his own sake and others’. It is not simply a matter of being friendly to an oddball. Scrooge’s isolation results from his own choices. He is a sinner, a great sinner. He is in the polis but not of it, because he is against it. Aristotle again: “The natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war.”

How do you solve a problem like Scrooge?

Some might be surprised, upon opening C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, to find that this work of basic apologetics includes a whole chapter on “Christian Marriage.” Lewis not only addresses premarital sex and divorce, he commends the headship of husbands over their wives and the need for wives to obey their husbands. “Two questions obviously arise here,” Lewis says. “(1) Why should there be a head at all—why not equality? (2) Why should it be a man?” The answer to that second question is, he says, so obvious that even a bachelor (as he was himself at the time) can weigh in on it:

The relations of the family to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.

Lewis shifts Aristotle slightly here. Rather than depicting each household as part of the polis, he depicts each as its own little polis, but one necessarily confederated with others—a united states of households. For Aristotle, Scrooge is a domestic policy problem, for Lewis a foreign policy one. But the point is the same: Scrooge is a rogue unit in the political community. He must be reintegrated. And this requires forgiveness.

For Lewis, inter-household foreign policy is carried out “in the last resort” by the husband, “because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to outsiders.” Women, by contrast, have a remit to be “unjust” to outsiders. Women can tend toward isolationism: Household First, Make the Home Great Again. Although women form rich inter-household bonds, their vocation is ultimately to their families—a vocation so demanding in its mundane, concrete acts of sacrificial love that, quite rightly, the woman cannot concern herself with the business of other households when intractable conflicts arise. As Dickens quips when we first encounter Fred’s wife: “Bless those women; they never do anything by halves. They are always in earnest.”

Mrs. Cratchit and Fred’s wife resist forgiving Scrooge because he has scorned (and in Mrs. Cratchit’s case injured) their households. Fred’s wife sees her husband’s goodwill rebuffed every Christmas, and presumably during the rest of the year as well. Mrs. Cratchit’s contempt is more intense, since not only does she see her husband demeaned and underpaid, but she also sees her children go hungry and Tiny Tim’s illness go untreated. Both women are in the right as far as it goes: Scrooge deserves their opprobrium. There is nothing these dishonored wives can do to get even with him. As one character observes in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, “A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.” All she can give a man like Scrooge is her contempt.

Perhaps we wonder about the honor of Fred and Bob, who may be rather too tolerant of Scrooge’s abuses of themselves and their families. Scrooge has yet to repent, and repentance customarily precedes forgiveness. But if Dickens’s men err on the side of mercy, their error is preferable to today’s censorious culture, in which some sins are publicly declared unforgivable, in a perverse extension of the woman’s commitment to the welfare of her household.

In 2019, the BBC released a TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Guy Pearce. It was abysmal in every sense. Scrooge was reimagined as not simply an old miser, but a sexual predator toward Mrs. Cratchit. The series ends not with Scrooge’s transformation, but with his giving Bob a £500 payoff and closing down his business. “Your £500 will be welcome. But it will not buy forgiveness,” Mrs. Cratchit tells him. Scrooge replies: “Nor shall forgiveness ever be earned, or expected, or wanted. My business now is the future. I will just be the best I can be.” And off he goes into the snow—still solitary as an oyster. Of course, were Scrooge really a sex offender, it is natural that the practical outworkings of his forgiveness should differ from those of a mere miser. The earthly consequences of such sins usually preclude full reintegration into community in this life, since the bonds are so broken, the risk of recidivism so alarming. But surely one effect of adapting A Christmas Carol in this way is to make forgiveness as such a questionable idea, even for regular Scrooges.

Over the past century or more, we have lived through what many have called the “feminization” of society. The greater presence of women in public life has changed our public discourse, as women have entered (and dominated, in many cases) workplaces, universities, and politics. Many regard this development as an unalloyed good. But if public life can suffer from the vices of men, it can likewise suffer from those of women.

Women’s entry into public life has coincided with their increasing childlessness. Causation may be complex, but the correlation is undeniable: Women are substantially less likely to be mothers now than they were when they first entered public life. But their proclivity for righteous injustice, described by Lewis, has not gone away. It has merely been transferred. In the absence of children, many women now see themselves as the “special trustees” of minority groups with varying degrees of real and imagined victimhood. In her 2021 book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, Mary Eberstadt observed that when family life breaks down and people cease to see themselves primarily through the lens of family, identity politics fills the void: “Our macropolitics have [sic] become a mania about identity, because our micropolitics are [sic] no longer familial.”

The damage is widespread. When indignation arises, not just on behalf of the home but on behalf of all members of some far less concrete group identity, Scrooges—perceived and actual—multiply endlessly. This is a recipe for political breakdown. If the conclusion of Guy Pearce’s Christmas Carol were the norm, we would be up to our knees in base animals, lovers of war.

Our public life is currently marked by a peculiarly feminine form of unforgiveness—a maternal mutation. It is no stretch to imagine that part of the solution will be a reassertion of the male strength for forgiveness. Sometimes, that strength will need to make clear that some do not need forgiveness in the first place. But in either case, it will often be men, especially in their roles as husbands, fathers, and pastors, who must open the door, so that even a Scrooge might be welcomed in.

Rhys Laverty is an editor at the Davenant Institute.

Image by John Leech, in the public domain. Image cropped.