The women in the novel, Great Expectations, are not given the ample opportunities that they would have liked in order to live out their lifelong dreams and hopes. Instead, they have some type of devastating impact that has been brought upon them through a situation that they themselves cannot help. This is evident in the lives of Mrs. Joe, a mere teenager who is forced to raise her brother in a time that is hard to support herself, and Miss Havisham, an elderly woman who’s dreams were torn away when she was left at the altar. Dickens’ female characters do not fit into the ideals of Victorian society as a wife and mother, which causes them to be destructive to themselves and/or men.
Mrs. Joe, a character in the novel, Great Expectations, is a prime example of how a woman should not have acted during the Victorian time period. Mrs. Joe does not have the appearance that a Victorian woman was supposed to portray. In fact, “Far from being described as buxom, or maternal, she is tall and bony” (Ayes 1). Throughout the novel, Mrs. Joe is conveyed as taking over the masculine power in the relationship with her husband, Joe, and that he has portrayed the sense of the feminine part. Instead of being called by her Christian name, which is never revealed, she is called Mrs. Joe in order to show readers that her masculinity is present by her taking Joe’s name for herself. Not only does she let off a sense of masculinity this way, but she is also the one who does the disciplining of Pip in the novel. Pip acknowledges her authority by explaining that she has “…a hard and heavy hand and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand” (Dickens 5)...
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...land, yet lived on the property with their husband. A woman in this time period would have not used their child to get back at the opposite sex, fulfilling their own dreams instead of letting their child have their own great expectations for life. These two women in Great Expectations just show how they were not portrayed as the typical housewife and mother that would have been expected for this time period.
Works Cited
Ayres, Brenda. Dissenting Women in Dickens' Novels: the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. 86-88. Print.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001. Print
Houston, Gail Turley. "`Pip' and `Property': The (re)production of the self in Great
Expectations." Studies in the Novel 24.1 (1992): 13. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO.
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Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod. A Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 5-222
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