A very great man once said that if you can keep your head while all those around you are freaking ou...
A very great man once said that if you can keep your head while all those around you are freaking out, you probably missed the point. - sounds like a rubbish one-liner but its true! (and Bob Dylan was the great man, i believe...)
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How Does Dickens present Miss Havisham as a mysterious and complex presence in Great Expectations and how does she relate to the wider themes of the novel?
"A mind mortally hurt and diseased" - this is perhaps one of the most significant quotes in Great Expectations. It articulates the essential complexity of her character, describing her as a victim who became an aggressor as a consequence of her maltreatment during childhood by her father, and her maltreatment during womanhood by Compeyson.
Great Expectations was a novel first serialised in 'All The Year Round' on the 1st December 1860. It was a weekly serial, allowing for cliff-hangers at the end of every section. The fact that Great Expectations was serialised was an excellent opportunity to create a mysterious and complex presence, about whom the truth would not be revealed until much later on. This mysterious and complex presence is Miss Havisham.
When we first meet Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Pip has been summoned to 'play' at her house. Despite the fact that this house is in a nice area, it is very much run-down. Also it is barred up - the windows and the gates are barred and locked although at this time it seems that this is to keep people in as well as to keep people out. The house itself is gothic reflecting a somewhat dark image, which is added to by the sheer size of the house. We first meet Miss Havisham when Pip enters into her room, which was lit up solely by candle-light. Pip looks around and sees a dressing table, and an armchair in which was sitting Miss Havisham. She is dressed in rich materials - satins, and lace, and silks - all of white, and she wore a long white veil and bridal flowers on her head, and jewels on her hands and neck. However, as Pips eyes become used to the light and he takes a step closer he sees that all which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. He could see that the dress she was wearing had been put on the figure of a young woman and the figure upon which it now hung had shrunk to skin and bone. As he walks towards her he sees that all the clocks have been stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and she says: "Look at me, you are not afraid of a woman who has not seen the sun since you were born."
Miss
Havisham was brought up daughter of a wealthy, albeit not very aristocratic father. Her father owned breweries, which was not considered a very upper class way of making money, but all the same made a lot of money. Dickens explains that her childhood was immensely spoilt, "her father denied her nothing", and that she had no maternal influence over her as a child. This accounts for her lack of love for Pip and Estella and her wholly intensive methods of treating them. She was courted by Compeyson who along with her half brother conspired against her for her money and split the profits between them. She was to be married to Compeyson when he sent her a letter which she received on the morning of the wedding day at twenty minutes to nine breaking off the engagement and their relationship, as he had made all the money he could out of her. At this point, as revealed to us by Herbert Pocket in Chapter 22, she stopped all of her clocks and kept everything as it was, such as the wedding cake and her state of being half dressed, and never again left the dim candle-light of Satis house.
On meeting her, Pip likens her to "a ghastly wax-work" he saw once at a fair of some-one lying in state, and also to a skeleton he once saw at a church. Both of the above are representations of life for which time has stopped - the wax-work does not age because it is made in wax, and the skeleton has finished ageing. In my opinion Dickens intends for us to liken Miss Havisham to both of these two representations, which would conjure the image in the reader's mind of a wasted old woman who has attempted to stop time at the point where she received the letter - at twenty minutes to nine. She has succeeded as far as stopping her own proceedings but has obviously not been able to stop nature as everything in the room is faded and old-looking or rotten and covered in spiders' webs. The way we might imagine Miss Havisham is as a witch; she has some eccentric habits and a strange appearance. This is reinforced by the obsession for revenge she has. Because of her "mind so mortally hurt and diseased", caused by her maltreatment in childhood and womanhood, she is absolutely obsessed with getting revenge against Compeyson and all of the male sex in general.
We learn in Chapter 22 that Miss Havisham had adopted Estella with the purpose in mind being to bring her up to break men's hearts. This is just the beginning of her cruelties to Estella and Pip. Throughout the novel she plays with their lives for instance when she pretends that it was her who was Pip's benefactress. She is controlling from the very start, for instance when Pip comes to play at Satis House; she mutters witch-like incantations at him: "Play, play, play…" and "love her, love her, love her…". Pip falls under her spell and falls madly in love with Estella, something that Miss Havisham wants. She relishes the fact that Pip has fallen for Estella and in seeing some-one love another person so strongly only to have their heart broken. However, the feeling is not mutual and she treats both the children in this ghastly way because of the actions of a man many years before.
Perhaps the most important theme of the novel is the idea that appearance does not necessarily give away a person's character, and it occurs throughout the book in many different forms. For example, it is often referred to that gentlemen by class i.e. upper class men are not always gentlemen by nature. Herbert Pocket's father Matthew Pocket said that "a true gentleman at heart never is a true gentleman in nature". For instance, Joe Gargery is far from a true gentleman in nature, as he is a blacksmith and so looking at him one wouldn't necessarily think of him as a gentleman, however at heart he is a true gentleman, and it takes Pip the entirety of the novel to realise that some men who do not appear to be gentlemen are in fact more so than some who do, and that Joe is in fact the true gentleman in the story. Pip's first instance of thinking that appearance was the most important factor of being a gentleman is when he is first at Miss Havisham's house and Estella remarks on his coarse hands and thick boots. Estella represents a beautiful ideal for Pip, one that is unattainable for him, yet we discover later on in fact that Estella is the daughter of the convict Magwitch. Magwitch is also a character we do not think very highly of at the start of the novel when pip meets him in the graveyard. He appears to be a bad man - a convict, however nearer the end of the story we find that he remembered Pip's obedience and kindness albeit somewhat forced towards him and devoted his life to making sufficient money to catapult Pip into the upper class. Miss Havisham is another example as she had the capacity to love someone and yet when her heart was broken her bitterness fuelled her to live a life full of lies, deception and manipulation. We can see at the end of the novel that she has remorse for what she did to Pip and this perfectly exemplifies the idea of no varnish being able to hide the wood. Pip in fact has every right to become bitter as a cause of how Miss Havisham treated him, and yet he shows that he is a true gentleman by forgiving her.
There is one strong similarity between Magwitch and Miss Havisham in that both of them were cheated by Compeyson, and yet their actions to get revenge on Compeyson are very different. Magwitch uses Compeyson's evil to do good by helping Pip, "I lived rough so you could live smooth". Although in doing this Magwitch is not getting direct revenge on Compeyson he is making Pip a gentleman which would have been very insulting to Compeyson. The whole novel is based on a theme of revenge incited by a sense of insecurity, hurt and a feeling of injustice. Dickens obviously targets Compeyson, perhaps because to him Compeyson represents the idle 'gentleman' who did not earn his wealth but inherited it and only does as much is necessary to maintain 'society'. Miss Havisham's revenge is different in that she uses Compeyson's evil to become evil and manipulative herself. She makes Pip and Estella both very miserable in their childhoods. Her disdain for Pip and Estella's feelings is very cruel and heartless and this is something which would have given someone such as Compeyson a feeling of victory and gratification.
Miss Havisham and Magwitch are both controlling figures of authority to Estella and Pip respectively. They both use the youth of their children to their favours, undermining the class system in the case of Magwitch and men in the case of Miss Havisham. At the end of the novel Miss Havisham accidentally sets her dress on fire while bending over the hearth. Dickens intends for this to seem like a witch being burned at the stake as had been customary not very many years before. This is the last reference to her being a witch-like figure in the story, and in ways can be seen to be her being cleansed by fire, a biblical reference.
Miss Havisham is presented as a mysterious presence in Great Expectations by primarily not actually being revealed until chapter 22. However, her obsession with revenge and her likeness to a witch also are contributory factors, and conjure images and perceptions in the reader's head as the novel is serialised of what Miss Havisham is really like and what she looks like. Although revealed she is still kept a mysterious presence as she is killed by being set alight - a witch-like way to die, and in her time of dying she apologises to Pip and Estella for all the wrong she has done to them.
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A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a ... more
summons to meet the bitter decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor - these form a s...
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May 28th, 2008
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