Great Expectations: Sociology Essay - 1,654 words

Great Expectations: Sociology In Charles Dickens novel, Great Expectations, Dickens conveys the idea that wealth leads to
isolation. The novel begins when Pip, a young orphan, encounters an escaped convict in a cemetery. Despite Pips efforts to help this
terrifying personage, the convict is still captured and transported to Australia. Pip is then introduced into the wealthy yet decaying
home of Miss Havisham where he meets Estella, a little girl who takes pleasure in tormenting Pip about his rough hands and future
as a blacksmith. As Pip continues to visit Miss Havishams house, he becomes more and more dissatisfied with his guardian, Joe, a
hard working blacksmith, and his childhood friend Biddy. Several years later, when Pip becomes the heir of an unknown benefactor
and the recipient of great expectations, he leaves everything behind to go to London and become a gentleman.

Pip spends many years in search of his benefactors identity and is later disappointed to find his benefactor to be the same convict
whom Pip had helped in the marshes many years ago. Pip also discovers that having expectations is not what he thought it would be,
and only through the loss of his unlikely fortune does he regain the love and innocence that he once possessed in his childhood years
at the forge. Charles Dickens explores the idea that wealth is the agent of isolation through the novels characterization, through its
setting, and through its underlying themes. (Wilson 117)The characterization in Great Expectations suggests that money causes
people unconsciously to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Pip, upon spending time with Miss Havisham and Estella,
becomes discontented with his apprenticeship and coarse upbringing at the forge and wishes that Joe had been rather more genteelly
brought up, and then I should have been so too (Dickens 74). Pip becomes ungrateful to those who brought him up by hand and longs
desperately for the magnificent romance of Satis House.

Without realizing it, Pip grows further and further away from the genuine reality of his life at the forge. Later, when Pip is endowed
with his unexpected fortune, he becomes selfish, greedy, and makes excuses for himself not to keep in touch with Joe and Biddy. As
he goes through the process of making out his bills, he illustrates his ability to fool himself and to turn his face away from reality
towards what is empty and false. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves and a skeleton truth
that we never did (Dickens 336). Dickens uses Joes character to contrast the main current of action and false values. In himself, and
his very presence, Joe seems to chase away the feelings of emptiness and gloom. Immediately, he rejects the principles of the
importance of property, proper speech and manners.

From the very beginning, Joe has the wisdom that Pip suffers to obtain, and Joe is able to live in domestic tranquility and to
experience the love and company of others. Joe is naturally forgiving, generous, and virtuous. All these qualities will enable him to
love and be loved by others. He is a gentle Christian man who has never experienced monetary wealth, but who all his life
experiences the wealth of honest companionship of others, and Whatsumeer the failings on his part, remember reader he were that
good in his heart (Dickens 154). Dickens use of setting in the novel illustrates that money is the root of isolation. Pips visit to
Walworth and Wemmicks double life points out how Pip has divided his own life between the hardness of London and Joes warm
cottage. Wemmick, when in his home at Walworth, acts like a tender and loving man who enjoys the company of the Aged and Miss
Skiffins.

However, once Wemmick returns to the busy and moneymaking office of Mr. Jaggers, he turns into the same boring and callous man
whom Pip had met upon his first arrival in London. A similar relationship exists between Pips hardened life in London and his
previous comfortable residence at the forge. (Wilson 43) Unfortunately, and unlike Wemmick, Pip has chosen to favor the London
facade rather than the honest rural life with its more real and less isolated delights. At the forge, there is always a place for Pip; no
matter how many times Pip has neglected the genuine love of Joe and Biddy. Whenever Pip goes back to the forge, there is a
luminous aura about it that Pip longs for, but from which he stays away because his true feelings are tainted by his desire for wealth
and Estella. Pip remembers how Estella treated him when he had the black hardened hands of a blacksmith, and although he longs
for the love and warm comfort which he once felt at the forge, he does not dare return because of how he will seem to Estella.
However, Estella cannot feel love or hate or provide warm comfort, so Pip is once again left alone upon deceiving himself about his
true path and identity. Miss Havishams house i
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