WhatTheDickens?

Beginning around this time last year, I started listening to a lot of podcasts. While thinking about the role advertising plays in our daily lives, I decided to focus on the role advertising plays in podcasts. Podcasts are always episodic in nature like television or like chapters in a book, but the NPR podcast, Serial, changed the game by telling one serialized story over the course of a “season.” Thus, we can think of Serial as a similar comparison to how we think of Dickens’s work: one installment of a story at a time, surrounded by advertising.

Verbal advertising is interesting in the ways it differs from visual advertising. Podcast advertising is more noticeably collaborative. A lot of the podcasts I listen to involve the podcast host delivering the advertisement, often incorporating his/her own thoughts about the product. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast even lets its listeners record the ads for them, which means its audience is incorporated into the overall product as well. Also, because there are usually only 2-3 ads in an episode, the sponsorship aspect between the advertisers and the podcast is more obvious. Hosts often say something like, “Make sure you check out XYZ Product’s website and use the special promo code WOW1. They help keep the podcast free.”

When the same ads become obviously present in every episode of a podcast, the ad itself gets somewhat incorporated into the identity of the podcast. There is an expectation to hear that ad, and if it’s not there, it can often feel like something is missing. We can see an example of this idea of advertising becoming integrated into the podcast’s identity in this Funny or Die parody of Serial with the mentions of MailChimp, one of Serial‘s ad sponsors.

Over the break, I saw a Walmart commercial selling “consumer items.”  These items are aimed at a target audience of consumers rather than users because the items Walmart advertised are seasonal and not reusable. The goal of the commercial was to sell a festive, but wholesome atmosphere of a Halloween party.

The commercial started out with “How to Spookify Your Halloween.”  In the video, a lady who appears to be a party host gives step by step instructions on how to create different treats.  These are all consumer items because the decorated cupcakes, punch, and cookies are all food which is meant to be ingested today and thrown away tomorrow. However, what makes this food different is that these treats center around a Halloween theme, so these treats have an even quicker approaching expiration date than typical things you would find at the grocery store.  The first way the video says you can “trick-out your treats” is to stick some lime-green and red spattered hand shaped lollipops, which appear to be homemade, into a chocolate cupcake (so the hand would appear to come out of the dirt).  The lady also introduces colorful, fresh-baked monster cookies to the audience.  The woman in the commercial mentions the cookie mix when the camera give the cookie mix and introduce white chocolate chips with brown dots that can be used for “monster eyes.”  I wonder where you can get those chips? (Hint: It’s where you can Save Money. Live Better.)  The mother calls these cookies “monsterlicious.”  Even the language of the commercial is tinged with punny overtones, meant to appeal to the characteristics of the holiday.  “You can make them a big hit with boys and ghouls” is a cute phrase that hosts can easily coin and use in their own Halloween parties.  The lady in the commercial shows the audience members how to make party punch “creepy cool” by filling a non-powdered latex glove with water and freezing it.  The frozen, finished product can be taken out of the glove and put in the punch bowl.  By the end of the commercial, not only are the treats on display, but there are also orange cups, black and orange straws, and other miscellaneous items on display at the table.

Just like Dickens sells Christmas, Walmart  is selling a an extravagant version of Halloween that is very palatable for its audience of adult grocery patrons and their children.  The commercial attempts to convince the audience to go out and find the coolest way to out-do their neighbors for best Halloween decorations, which they can find at their local Walmart!

Here’s the link for the video!

For an hour and a half tonight, I sat in a great room in the Kissam Center listening to a jazz concert that quickly turned into a jam session. It began as a scheduled event with three blair students, playing piano, double bass, and percussion. And right from the start, it was incredible. What struck me, as I sat watching this music in creation, was that these three students were not looking at their music stands — they were looking at each other. The bassist was watching the pianist, and the percussionist was watching the hands of the bassist. Sure, they had sheet music, but jazz is about collaboration, and as I watched I was reminded of our discussion of collaborative authorship in The Wreck of the Golden Mary.

In Melisa Klimazsewski’s essay “Rebuilding Charles Dickens’ Wreck and Rethinking the Collaborative,” she talks about the value of understanding collaborative authorship as layering upon and playing off the collaboration, instead of only deriving value from the individual contributions of authors. These jazz musicians demonstrated that perfectly. Each instrument was played well, but what made the performance so engaging was that they played off each other’s work as they progressed through each piece. Then, other musicians joined in, until the group contained a piano, a keyboard, a bass, percussion, two trombones, a saxophone, a flute, and an accordion. Most of them didn’t have music, and that’s when the best music seemed to be made. The bass, percussion, and piano played almost constantly, and the other instruments layered on top of them. The whole experience was like watching an analogy in motion, though I don’t think I ever expected to compare something like jazz to literary criticism!

Holidays have long been associated with feasting throughout the world. Christmas in particular is thematically a time of abundance and celebration that centers around food. Aside from a central Christmas meal, the giving of food as gifts is a common practice. Advertisers waste no time in preparing how they will market food in new and inventive ways for the Christmas season. They play on the excitement of the season and the increase in food intake among most people to increase sales. Christmas is certainly one of the most profitable times of the year for most retailers.

Though Dickens did not allow advertisements to go along with his Christmas stories such as A Christmas Carol, he did include abundant descriptions of displays of food in his stories that served as advertisements themselves. In A Christmas Carol, when Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by The Ghost of Christmas Present, he first sees him in the midst of an enormous banquet: “Headed upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges…” (Dickens 43), and the list goes on. The Spirit of Christmas himself is enthroned upon food. This outrageously long list of detailed food items certainly served to get Dickens’s readers’ mouths watering, thinking of all the delicious treats they will consume this Christmas season. Likewise, the ameliorative gesture that Scrooge makes toward the Cratchit family is to buy them the biggest turkey available, bigger than Tiny Tim himself! Food serves as a redemptive factor for Scrooge as he changes his heart and attitude toward life.

An article from June 2015 in What’s On magazine revealed that M&S, a prominent British grocer, had already released their list for “Christmas food must-haves for 2015.” The list includes “Brussel Sprout Banger, pork pies in the shape of Christmas puddings and a new Christmas quiche, filled with the best bits of the festive lunch.” What’s On claims it’s “the food porn event of the year so far.” This declaration is enough to show the relationship between food and advertising from Dickens’s time to the present: advertisers understand that food can be an irresistible temptation, even more difficult to refuse in the cheer of the holiday season. Dickens’s luscious descriptions of Christmas fare are just as much advertisements for Christmas food as the dramatic summertime revealing of a store’s coming Christmas menu.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/ms-reveals-christmas-food-must-haves-9556506

In a recent essay by Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker, Nussbaum tracks how advertising fits in with television and how, as the television viewer has become increasingly able to bypass commercials, the television business model has changed. Nussbaum writes, “Advertising is TV’s original sin. When people called TV shows garbage, which they did all the time, until recently, commercialism was at the heart of the complaint.”

To think of Charles Dickens as an entrepreneur is to recognize him as the pioneer of serial narratives. Not only did this format allow Dickens’s work to be more affordable and accessible to more people, advertising could also be sold along with the novel installments. However, some people frowned upon Dicken’s serial format, as if changing the amount of text published at a time and the amount of advertisements that accompany it somehow changes the quality of the content of the novel. Now, when we read Dickens’s novels, the novels are reformatted to be read in one continuous volume instead of serially.

Nussbaum’s article gets at the idea that our society is traditionally uncomfortable with the idea that something can be of great quality and also be commercialized. Whether it be novels or television shows, the immediate conclusion is that the economics of the entertainment business does not allow for the quality of art that we desire. However, our ability to regard Dickens’s novels or shows like Mad Men as great demonstrates that there is an ability to overcome the “original sin” of advertising to create a space in which the two can coexist comfortably.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens’ two main female characters are essentially foils of each other–the chaste Rose and the prostitute Nancy. Clearly, this says a lot about how women were valued in the mid-18th century. Rose, who, despite her uncertain heritage, is basically a perfect model of a pure young woman is highly valued for her chastity. Nancy, while not an evil character by any means, does not have as high a societal position as Rose. Even Nancy values Rose more highly than herself: “if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,–there would–there would!” (333). Here, purity seems to be the most highly valued quality of women.

As we know, this is a debate that has extended far past the end of the 18th century. “Slut shaming” is something that is still a threat to women, certainly more so than in the mid-18th century. Nowadays, chastity is no longer a requirement for a woman to be considered “valued,” but, as a result, the female population that can be criticized for perceived promiscuity has grown. As in Dickens’ time, a double standard exists here–obviously, women who are promiscuous need (often male) partners in order to do the things that they are being criticized for.

Despite Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton being a novel about the plight of the working poor, Gaskell, or rather, her narrator, spends rather a lot of time identifying with the middle and upper class. Gaskell’s preface ends with her denying any knowledge of political economy, the topic on which the novel centers. The denial of female knowledge and expertise, unfortunately, presents a strong parallel between the gender politics of Gaskell’s writing and expectations of women in media today.

In Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, John Forster, a reviewer, writes that, “Unquestionably the book is a woman’s…we might have known it from the delicate points…where women and children are in question.” She published anonymously, but once people found out she was a woman, their perception of the work changed. This reminds me of the often belittling manner in which female celebrities are asked about their work, with questions that undermine their credibility from the outset. Mayim Bialik, who plays a genius on the show The Big Bang Theory was once asked by a reporter if people assumed that she understood complicated mathematics because she plays a character who can. The problem with this question is that he assumed that she can’t do this; in reality, she’s a neuroscientist and studied calculus extensively in college.

In this case, it isn’t Bialik discrediting her own knowledge like Gaskell does in saying that she knows nothing of political economy; she is being discredited by the assumptions society makes about female creators versus their male counterparts. This is not so different, however, from Gaskell’s situation in that Gaskell perhaps needed to deny knowledge of political economy so as not to unsettle gender norms and politics of the time.

After reading two of Charles Dickens’ novels and seeing the format in which they were originally published, it is clear that his writing and advertising went closely hand-in-hand. Dickens was perhaps not the first author to capitalize on the financial benefits of advertising, but advertising and creative content have only become more intertwined as time has gone on.

One extreme example of this strengthened relationship–one that Dickens’ might have found ingenious–is the development of television and film characters who are designed solely to be merchandised. For instance, Legos are a very popular toy among children. Since 2001, The Lego Group has begun a brilliant strategy of producing children’s films, sometimes Lego adaptations of films like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and sometimes with original characters, like in The Lego Movie. They then produce Lego sets to go along with these movies, and once kids see the movies, they want the Lego sets as well. So, in this sense, The Lego Group uses original creative content to advertise for its own products, along with traditional advertising.

Conversely, the creators of South Park have become critical of this trend. In response to the over-marketing and exploitation of their characters, they created a ridiculous new character called Towelie, who is a talking towel. Ironically, clothing bearing Towelie’s image and his slogan, “Don’t forget to bring a towel!”, have been produced and sold.

Hard Times deals with divorce in an interesting way in relation to its time period. Victorian marriage laws made divorce next to impossible, as it required an act of Parliament, something extraordinarily expensive to achieve. In 1854, Caroline Norton wrote extensively on the unfair nature of Victorian marriage law in The Making of Modern Law.  Norton describes how divorce was a “luxury fairly belonging…to the superior and wealthy classes” (19). She argues that in stating various cases of difficult marriages and needed divorce, she does not “petition for sympathy” but “claim[s] justice”, and that one should “blame the law” for the terrible cases she describes. Dickens, on the contrary, does invoke sympathy for those stuck in unfair marriages in Hard Times. For a poor working man like Stephen Blackpool, divorce was an actual impossibility. He could not escape the immoral, alcoholic wife he so hated. Although Dickens sets up Stephen and Rachael in a beautiful, loving and trusting relationship with each other, prompting hopes for the reader that the two may find a way to be happy at last, he knows that their union is impossible. Either Stephen or his wife would have to die in order for their marriage to be dissolved. Interestingly enough, Dickens does not kill off Blackpool’s wife as would be expected for good feelings all around, but rather Stephen Blackpool himself. Dickens thus creates a pathos for Stephen that urges the reader to pity a man unfortunate enough to end up in such a bad marriage. He does not give the desired happy ending, going so far as to let Rachael live out the rest of her days caring for Stephen’s terrible widow.

In contrast, Mr. Bounderby and Louisa’s separation leaves divorce unclear. He simply sends her packing and resumes his bachelor life. Bounderby dies a few years later, and Louisa grows up to never have children, which leads the reader to believe she was unable to marry again. If Bounderby dies, however, shouldn’t Louisa be able to get remarried? Dickens leaves this matter unclear, though it could be assumed that Bounderby has enough money to pay for a divorce. The harsh treatment of Stephen by Bounderby when he explains his awful marriage predicament comes back to haunt him when he finds Louisa never loved him and has abandoned their marriage. Dickens thus outlines two scenarios in which a husband and wife may be incompatible and could benefit greatly from fair marriage legislation. The unhappy endings for Stephen Blackpool in death, Rachael in husbandless care of her desired lover’s widow, Louisa in never marrying again or having children, and Bounderby in premature death imply that there is no escaping the mark of a bad marriage under such cruel, unmovable laws.

Norton, Caroline Sheridan. English laws for women in the nineteenth century. London,              1854. The Making of Modern Law. Gale. 2015. Gale, Cengage Learning. 28                              September 2015

In Oliver Twist, the relationship between Nancy and Rose Maylie signifies the relationship between prostitution and the middle class in Victorian England. Nancy, a woman seen as “a disgrace to her sex” (Dickens 331), encounters Rose’s initial kindness with a sense of shock and gratitude. Nancy exclaims, “Oh, lady, lady…if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me…” (Dickens 333). This claim is remarkably untrue in light of the relationship between different classes of women in Victorian England. Middle class women generally married young, while men spent their bachelor years “sowing their wild oats,” waiting to marry until they were older and more financially stable. Therefore, men satisfied their sexual desires through relations with prostitutes during a large portion of their youth and middle age. Though prostitution was morally offensive and much decried in Dickens’ era, it was also a necessary institution held in place by the middle class social structure.

In 1868, the Daily Telegraph ran a series called “Marriage or Celibacy?” in which these very issues were discussed. The series began with articles crying out against the horrid nature of prostitution. One such article declared, “Society will not contemplate the hideous traffic…the eyes of the kind and good turn from the proof of the evil…[and] we conspire together to forget the event, lest the open mention of the abomination should make the air of public discussion too foul for Virtue to breathe” (Robson 11). Obviously, society could not morally support the existence of prostitution. The Times soon took up the subject, presenting arguments explaining the reason for prostitution’s existence in terms of middle class marital norms. One argument states, “The preposterous measure which is taken of the income needed to support a family, if a young man would not sink in the social scale, is no doubt a fruitful cause of the deplorable evil of which we are speaking” (Robson 21). One reader wrote in that perhaps “freer intercourse” should be allowed “between young persons of different sexes and of equal position in society” (Robson 21). It seems that by 1868, the relationship between prostitutes and the middle class was finally being addressed in a way that Dickens could not present in 1837’s Oliver Twist.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London: Penguin, 2002.

Robson, John M. Marriage or Celibacy? The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma.             Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.