Fascination and Terror: Orientalism and the Return of the Repressed in A Tale of Two Cities and "A Christmas Tree"

Abstract:Dickens's works, like those of many of his contemporaries, are haunted by Europe's racial other(s). Taking A Tale of Two Cities and "A Christmas Tree" as its primary examples, this paper traces how the racial imagination prefigures characters, subjectivities and narratives in a manner that produces the Other as the double subject of fascination and horror. Informed by anticolonial critique and Freudian psychoanalysis, this paper moves beyond the calling out of Dickens's racism to reading the ways whereby fascination with the Other resolves, in the Dickensian text, the repression that produces racial horror.Although fascination has always been integral to the colonial animus to acquire and dominate, I read, in certain moments of Dickens's texts, a healthier prospect for giving in to the Other's mystery, and I propose the field of Dickensian Studies as a field wherein mutual fascination can be liberated from the epistemic yoke of Orientalism and colonialism.