Miss Havisham Analysis

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations In Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations, two minor characters stand out as cornerstones to understand the main character Pip Gargery. The convict, a mysterious prisoner encountered by Pip in the first chapter of the novel, and Miss Havisham, a demented lady who invites Pip to play in her vast manor in chapter eight. Both of these have mysterious background and are very important in displaying motifs, developing theme, and helping our understanding of Pip the main character.

Both these entities have their own relation to Pip, but they strangely seem to be related in a complex manner. Both the characters Miss Havisham and the convict are linked closely with their respective surroundings, as Dickens

She is manic and often seems insane, fitting around her house in a faded wedding dress, keeping a decaying feast on her table, wearing only one of her shoe, and surrounded herself with clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine. With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, she adopts Estella and deliberately raises her as a weapon in order to break men’s heart. 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. While Estella was still a child, Miss Havisham began casting about for boys who could be a testing ground for Estella's education in breaking the hearts of men as vicarious revenge for Miss Havisham's pain. Pip, the narrator, is the eventual victim; and Miss Havisham readily dresses Estella in jewels to enhance her beauty and to exemplify all the more the vast social gulf between her and Pip. When, as a young adult, Estella leaves for France to receive education, Miss Havisham eagerly asks him, "Do you feel you have lost her?” This quote shows that Miss Havisham takes a perverted pleasure in hurting Pip and that her desire for revenge still as strong as