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Great Expectations
This is a novel belonging to Dickens’ latter period. In the first person
singular, this novel describes an orphan’s physical and psychological
growing-up with his disillusion of great expectation for happy life. The
orphan, Pip, is brought up by his sister and her kind and honest husband,
Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. After experiencing the hardship in his childhood,
Pip, unexpectedly gets a large fortune from an unknown man. This arouses his
great expectation for his future. Pip thinks the money is from a rich,
eccentric and weird old woman Havisham， who is abandoned by the bridegroom
in wedding ceremony and thus hates all men. Havisham deliberately adopts a
beautiful girl Estella, in order to revenge men. Pip loves Estella, and
becomes a gentleman with the money. He then goes to London to find new life
and is shamed of his poor brother-in-law, Joe. Later, Pip discovers that it
is the escaped criminal that he has helped in his childhood rather than
Havisham who offers his money. At last, Pip loses his fortune and his
sweetheart. Estella marries another man. At the end of the novel, Pip
returns home and receives Joe’s sympathy as well as forgiveness.
The relationship between ambition and self-Improvement
is the most obvious moral theme of Great Expectations, that is,
affection, loyalty and conscience are more important than social
advancement, wealth and class. At heart, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can
conceive of something that is better than what he already has, he
immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees Satis House, he
longs to be a wealthy gentleman; when he thinks of his moral shortcomings,
he longs to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to get
some education. Thus in this novel, ambition and self-improvement take three
forms—moral, social, and educational forms. First, Pip desires moral
self-improvement. He is extremely hard on himself and feels guilty when he
acts immorally in order to be better in the future. When he leaves for
London, for instance, he torments himself about having behaved so wretchedly
toward Joe and Biddy. Second, Pip desires social self-improvement. In love
with Estella, he longs to become a member of her social class, and,
encouraged by Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, he entertains fantasies of becoming
a gentleman. Significantly, Pip’s life as a gentleman is no more
satisfying—and certainly no more moral—than his previous life as a
blacksmith’s apprentice. Third, Pip desires educational improvement. This
desire is deeply connected to his social ambition and longing to marry
Estella because a full education is a requirement of being a gentleman. As
long as he is an ignorant country boy, Pip understands the fact that without
education he has no hope of social advancement. Thus he learns to read at
Mr. Wopsle’s aunt’s school. Yet, ultimately, through the examples of Joe,
Biddy, and Magwitch, Pip learns that social and educational improvement are
irrelevant to one’s real worth and that conscience and affection are to be
valued above erudition and social standing.
Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores
the class system of Victorian England, ranging from the most wretched
criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and
Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss Havisham).
The theme of social class is central to the novel’s plot and to the ultimate
moral theme of the book—Pip’s realization that wealth and class are less
important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth as mentioned above. The
social class picture of this novel is based on the post-Industrial
Revolution model of Victorian England. Dickens generally ignores the
nobility and the hereditary aristocracy in favor of those who have earned
their fortunes through commerce. Even Miss Havisham’s family fortune was
made through the brewery that is still connected to her manor. In this way,
by connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and
self-advancement, Dickens subtly reinforces the novel’s theme of ambition
and self-improvement.
As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations
presents the growth and development of a single character, Pip. As the focus
of the bildungsroman, Pip is by far the most important character in Great
Expectations: he is both the protagonist, whose actions make up the main
plot of the novel, and the narrator, whose thoughts and attitudes shape the
reader’s perception of the story. As a result, developing an understanding
of Pip’s character is perhaps the most important step in understanding
Great Expectations
Because Pip is narrating his story many
years after the events of the novel take place, there are really two Pips in
Great Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character—the voice
telling the story and the person acting it out. Dickens takes great care to
distinguish the two Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with
perspective and maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels
about what is happening to him as it actually happens. This skillfully
executed distinction is perhaps best observed early in the book, when Pip
the character is a child; here, Pip the narrator gently pokes fun at his
younger self, but also enables us to see and feel the story through his
eyes.
As a character,
Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his
innately good conscience. Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and
attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His
longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same
idealistic desire as his longing to learn reading and to be moral. Pip does
not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. His idealism often leads him to
perceive the world rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify
situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the
people who care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for example, he
immediately begins to act as those profligate sons of the rich，which leads
him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.
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