As a bildungsroman (a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main
character), Great Expectations presents the
growth and development of a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to
himself and to the world as Pip. As the focus of the bildungsroman, Pip is by
far the most important character iGreat
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. On
the one hand, 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 to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once
he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want
to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions
extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily
castigating himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip’s 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 he thinks a gentleman is supposed to
act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.
On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very
generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his
numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly
buying Herbert’s way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all those
who love him. Pip’s main line of 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.
Not long after meeting
Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip’s desire for advancement largely overshadows his
basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes
seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of
idleness. But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss
Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pip’s oversimplified sense of his
world’s hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while losing
Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that
one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and that
his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about
him most. Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the man who
narrates the novel, completing the bildungsroman.
Often cited as
Dickens’s first convincing female character, Estella is a supremely ironic
creation, one who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves as a
bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired. Raised from
the age of three by Miss Havisham to torment men and “break their hearts,”
Estella wins Pip’s deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the
warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold,
cynical, and manipulative. Though she represents Pip’s first longed-for ideal
of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip;
as Pip learns near the end of the novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the
coarse convict, and thus springs from the very lowest level of society.
Ironically, life among the upper classes does
not represent salvation for Estella. Instead, she is victimized twice by her
adopted class. Rather than being raised by Magwitch, a man of great inner
nobility, she is raised by Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express
emotion and interact normally with the world. And rather than marrying the
kindhearted commoner Pip, Estella marries the cruel nobleman Drummle, who
treats her harshly and makes her life miserable for many years. In this way,
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: had Estella been
poor, she might have been substantially better off.
Despite her cold
behavior and the damaging influences in her life, Dickens nevertheless ensures
that Estella is still a sympathetic character. By giving the reader a sense of
her inner struggle to discover and act on her own feelings rather than on the
imposed motives of her upbringing, Dickens gives the reader a glimpse of
Estella’s inner life, which helps to explain what Pip might love about her.
Estella does not seem able to stop herself from hurting Pip, but she also seems
not to want to hurt him; 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. Finally, Estella’s long, painful marriage to Drummle causes her to
develop along the same lines as Pip—that is, she learns, through experience, to
rely on and trust her inner feelings. 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.”
The mad, vengeful Miss
Havisham, a wealthy dowager who lives in a rotting mansion and wears an old
wedding dress every day of her life, is not exactly a believable character, but
she is certainly one of the most memorable creations in the book. Miss
Havisham’s life is defined by a single tragic event: her jilting by Compeyson
on what was to have been their wedding day. From that moment forth, Miss
Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak. She stops all the
clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the moment when she first
learned that Compeyson was gone, and she wears only one shoe, because when she
learned of his betrayal, she had not yet put on the other shoe. With a kind of
manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a
weapon to achieve her own revenge on men. 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. Miss
Havisham is completely unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and
Estella. She is redeemed at the end of the novel when she realizes that she has
caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than
achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss
Havisham immediately begs Pip for forgiveness, reinforcing the novel’s theme
that bad behavior can be redeemed by contrition and sympathy.
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