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I had neither the good sense
nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had
been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me. I felt impatient
of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he heaped coals of
fire on my head.
“Us two being now alone, Sir,”----began Joe.
“Joe,” I interrupted, pettishly, “how can you call me, Sir?”
Joe looked at me for a single instant with something faintly
like reproach. Utterly preposterous as his cravat was, and as his collars
were, I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look.
“Us two being now alone,” resumed Joe, “and me having the
intentions and abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now
conclude—leastways begin—to mention what have led to my having had the
present honor. For was it not,” said Joe, with his old air of lucid
exposition, “that my only wish were to be useful to you, I should not have
had the honor of breaking wittles in the company and abode of gentlemen.”
I was so unwilling t see the look again, that I
made on remonstrance against this tone.
This excerpt is a dialogue between Joe and Pip in Pip’s house
after Pip becomes a gentleman, which shows that Pip has betrayed Joe.
However, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic
young man. He shows his generous kindness to the oppressed throughout the
book, such as helping Magwitch and secretly buying Herbert’s way into
business, etc.. Also he loves those who love him. As his expectation is
shattered, Pip realizes his false, and breaks himself away from the
bourgeois great expectation and restores his honesty and goodness. Pip’s
development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his
innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.
Estella is often cited as Dickens’s first convincing
female character who is extremely ironic and darkly undermines the notion of
romantic love. Though she is brought up by the upper class, she is not
retrieved by them but is victimized twice by her adopted class. First is by
her raiser, Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express emotion and
interact normally with the world. The second prosecutor is her cruel husband
with a noble birth, Drummle, who treats her harshly and makes her life
miserable for many years. Dickens uses Estella’s life to reinforce the idea
that one’s happiness and well-being are not deeply connected to one’s social
position. Dickens also gives the reader a glimpse of Estella’s inner life,
which helps to explain what Pip might love about her. She repeatedly warns
him that she has “no heart” and seems to urge him as strongly as she can to
find happiness by leaving her behind. Estella’s long, painful marriage
teaches her that she must rely on herself. In the final scene of the novel,
she has become her own woman for the first time in the book. As she says to
Pip, “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching. . . . I have been
bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.” Undoubtedly, Dickens
depicts her as a sympathetic figure.
The mad, vengeful and wealthy Miss Havisham, though
unbelievable to some extent, is certainly one of the most memorable
creations in the book. She keeps her broken heart since the unfinished
wedding ceremony and determines to revenge all men. With a kind of manic,
obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon
to achieve her own revenge. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded
vengeance pursued destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her
life suffer greatly because of her quest for revenge. She is redeemed at the
end of the novel when she realizes that she has only caused more pain rather
than achieving any kind of personal revenge, her pleading for Pip’s
forgiveness, reinforces that bad behavior can be redeemed by contrition and
sympathy.
We may take Pip as the hero in Great Expectations,
yet it does not contain a traditional single antagonist. Various characters
serve as figures against whom Pip must struggle at various times: Magwitch,
Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, Estella, Orlick, Bentley Drummle, and Compeyson.
With the exception of the last three, each of the novel’s antagonists is
redeemed before the end of the book.
In Great Expectations, two settings, Satis House
and the mists on the marshes, play important roles. In Satis House, Dickens
creates a magnificent Gothic setting whose various elements symbolize Pip’s
romantic perception of the upper class and many other themes of the book.
Miss Havisham’s wedding dress is an ironic symbol of death and degeneration.
The stopped clocks throughout the house symbolize her determined attempt to
freeze time by refusing to change anything from the way it was when she was
abandoned on her wedding day. The brewery next to the house indicates the
connection between commerce and wealth: Miss Havisham’s fortune is a recent
success in industrial capitalism rather than the product of an aristocratic
birth. The misty marshes near Pip’s childhood home in Kent are used several
times to symbolize danger and uncertainty. As a child, Pip brings Magwitch a
file and food in these mists. Whenever Pip goes into the mists, something
dangerous is likely to happen. Significantly, Pip must go through the mists
when he travels to London shortly after receiving his fortune, alerting the
reader that this apparently positive development in his life may have
dangerous consequences. These two settings are always closely related to the
theme in Great Expectations and always set a tone that is perfectly
matched to the novel’s dramatic action.
In all, this novel successfully combines the
description of individual life with social criticism together. Dickens with
great artistic skills reveals the destructive effect of social evils on
individual’s growing-up. In a depraved and distorted society, any idealized
expectation for happiness is unpractical and inexistent. “In Great
Expectations, on the contrary, Dickens seems to have attained the
mastery of powers which formerly more or less mastered him. He has fairly
discovered that he cannot, like Thackeray, narrate a story as if he were a
mere looker-on, a mere knowing observer of what he describes and represents;
and he has therefore taken observation simply as the basis of his plot and
his characterization.… The book is, indeed, an artistic creation, and not a
mere succession of humorous and pathetic scenes, and demonstrates that
Dickens is now in the prime, and not in the decline of his great powers.”（The
Atlantic Monthly | September 1861)
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