Image and Symbol in Great Expectations

Image and Symbol in Great Expectations
Author(s): Joseph A. Hynes

Source: ELH , Sep., 1963, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep., 1963), pp. 258-292
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872039
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IMAGE AND SYMBOL IN
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
BY JOSEPH A. HYNES
Perhaps no book makes clearer than does Dickens' Great

Expectations the familiar split between illusion and reality;
between expectations and events. From the title straight through
to the ending, irony so prevails that even the most platitudinous
observer hesitates to point at the obvious theme. Yet I should
like to do just such pointing, at least to the extent that theme
is manifested by image and symbol; for my purpose is to specify
as I think has not been specified Dickens' extraordinary reliance
upon image and symbol in this novel.' I should like to show
that Great Expectations is constructed of sets of image-symbols;
that the misvaluing of these is two-thirds of the book; and that
the proper re-reading of them concludes the book happily. Not
the novel's readers, of course, but several of its principal char-
acters, are the evaluators and readers to whom I refer.
' Dickens' use of image and symbol; in this novel has been discussed to some extent
by various persons, none of whom has treated the subject at length. The works which
I have found helpful, and which I doubtless echo in some inevitable ways, I gratefully
acknowledge at the outset: J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1959), pp. 249-278; Dorothy Van Ghent, The English
Novel: Form and Function (New York [19611), pp. 125-138; A. 0. J. Cockshut, The
Imagination of Charles Dickens (London, 1961), pp. 45-47, 159-169, 185-186; Edgar
Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), II, 982-994;
Humphry House, The Dickens World (London [1960]), pp. 156-159; Julian Moynahan,
" The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations," Essays in Criticism, X (January
1960), 60-79; G. Robert Stange, "Expectations Well Lost: Dickens' Fable for His
Time," College English, XVI (October 1954), 9-17; John H. Hagan, Jr., "The Poor
Labyrinth: The Theme of Social Injustice in Great Expectations," NCF, IX (Decem-
ber 1954), 169-178, and " Structural Patterns in Dickens's Great Expectations," ELH,
XXI (March 1954), 54-66; Thomas E. Connolly, " Technique in Great Expectations,"
PQ, XXXIV (January 1955), 48-55; Mark Spilka, " Dickens's Great Expectations: A
Kafkan Reading," Twelve Original Essays on Great English Novels (Detroit, 1960),
pp. 103-124; C. A. Bodelsen, " Some Notes on Dickens' Symbolism," English Studies,
XL (December 1959), 420-431; Charles R. Forker, " The Language of Hands in Great
Expectations," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, III (Summer 1961), 280-293;
Ruth M. Vande Kieft, " Patterns of Communication in Great Expectations," NCF, XV
(March 1961), 325-334.-I should also like to thank the University of Oregon's Office
of Scientific and Scholarly Research for its financial support of this study.
258 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectations"

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"Seems " and " is " tangle admirably in the book, and the
entanglement is neatly and economically conveyed by symbol.
From the outset, for example, Dickens signals the nature of the
confusion which is for so long to plague Pip. On the very first
page,2 Pip the man remembers how as a boy he visited the graves
of his " five little brothers . . . who gave up trying to get a living
exceedingly early in that universal struggle," and how the posi-
tioning of their graves was responsible for his "belief . . . that
they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their
trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence." By means of the first-person point of view, Dickens
here shows the older Pip's sense of that attitude which he had
ironically shared with his brothers: just as they seemed to think
the world owed them a living, so Pip came to think of the world's
obligation to him. Pip's prevalent attitude toward himself is
indicated symbolically in Miss Havisham's addressing herself in
her mirror (p. 59): both she and Pip-like nearly everyone else
except Joe Gargery-are intent upon, and controlled by, limited
visions of themselves. The fact that Miss Havisham is shown
to have a mirror at all helps, indeed, to reinforce her witch-like
kinship with her male counterpart, Magwitch. Each of these
supposes a personal right to wrench the world into a particular
shape, after having been wronged by the world; each attacks the
world by twisting the human nature of a special individual whom
each regards as personal property; each at first mistakes such
regard for love; and each-to come back to Pip and the five little
gravestones-implicitly assumes nothing and no one to be more
important than the satisfaction of his self-regard. Further, we
might note that both of these puppeteer-characters are associated
with labels which help symbolize the ambiguity of their roles.
"Satis House" is in plain enough ironic opposition to "Miss
Have-a-sham (e)" (c" Half-a-sham[e] "?), while the innocent
" Abel " of Magwitch's name, and his pseudonym of " Provis "
(" Provider," probably), must be qualified by the suggestions
present in " Magwitch " (" magus " or " magician " + " witch ") .
Precisely this inability to judge clearly-and therefore to care
about-what sort of motivating principle inspires them, afflicts
2 Because this is a rather detailed textual analysis, I have decided to refer to

specific pages rather than to whole chapters. All references will therefore be to the
readily available Rinehart Edition, introduced by Earle Davis.
Joseph A. Hynes 259

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Pip, Magwitch, and Miss iavisham, then, and attaches ironic
significance to the title as well as to the five complacent grave-
stones. (The conjoining of moral complacency and death is a nice
touch.) A lesser case, no less in point, is that of Belinda Pocket.
She is so ludicrously perverted by a nonsensical consciousness of
her " rightful " social rank, that the very lives of her children are
endangered (pp. 187-197, esp.). Pip goes so far as to describe her
in terms which apply as well to his youthful self after he has left
the forge: " she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly
helpless and useless " (p. 190); and one thinks again of the grave-
stones in reading Pip's assertion about the Pockets' means of live-
lihood: " Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had . . . a noticeable air of
being in somebody else's hands " (p. 191). Mrs. Pocket is but a
caricature, certainly; but her case reinforces the value of the
symbolic gravestones. (The Pockets are of course always out of
pocket.) On this point one may observe, too, Dickens' setting up
a parallel between George Barnwell's career and Pip's (pp. 117-
118).
The complacent gravestones may, then, be seen as introductory
to a whole network of more complicated symbols. For one thing,
prison and all its trappings abound. (This statement will hardly
surprise anyone. Indeed, a rectangular chain surrounds the
number of each chapter in the Rinehart Edition.) As the book
begins, Pip's memory associates his own youth on the marshes
(dead parents and brothers; " dark flat wilderness "; the river as
"the low leaden line beyond [the marshes] "; "wind ... rushing"
in from the sea; Pip himself as a " small bundle of shivers ") with
the terrible and terrifying state of the prisoner whom he encounters
'there: ""A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on
his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an
old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water,
and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and
stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered,
and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as
he seized me by the chin " (p. 2). This series of hardships not only
echoes Miss Havisham's state of physical and moral decay, but,
ceter8 non paribus, reminds us of the trials endured by St. Paul,3
'See It Cor. xi. 23-27: "Are they ministers of Christ? . . . I am more; in labours
more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in death oft. Of
the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods,
260 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectatiom9'

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which are re-echoed in Magwitch's own later summary of his life:
" ' I've been done everything to, pretty well-except hanged. I've
been locked up. . . . I've been carted here and carted there, and
put out of this town and out of that town, and stuck in the stocks,
and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more notion where
I was born, than you have-if so much. I first became aware of
myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun
had run away from me-a man-a tinker-and he'd took the
fire with him, and left me wery cold '" (p. 349). And again:
"' Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could
0 . . a bit of a poacher, a bit of a labourer, a bit of a waggoner, a
bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that
don't pay and lead to trouble, I got to be a man'" (p. 350).
Just as Magwitch was aware of himself first as a thief, so Pip
tells us that his own " first most vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things " came to him on the " raw afternoon " when he
discovered the tombstones of his parents and brothers and was
accosted by Magwitch (pp. 1-2), who forced him to steal (p. 15) .
And of course Magwitch's springing up from behind a tombstone
comes to mind later, when Magwitch says of their relationship:
" ' Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son-
more to me nor any son ' " (p. 324) . This is true, both in the sense
that Magwitch's money fathers a " gentleman," and in the sense
that Pip's experience of Magwitch ultimately qualifies Pip to
make the return to the real " father " of the book, Joe Gargery.
This tie between Magwitch and Pip is continually popping up in
imagery which reminds us of the symbolic first meeting in the
graveyard. To the occasion, for instance, on which Pip goes down
to Satis House to tell Miss Havisham that he knows of her
deceiving him, and to learn from Estella that she will marry
Bentley Drummle, he refers as " a day [which] came creeping on,
halting and whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of
cloud and rags of mist, like a beggar" (p. 358). And later, when
Pip refuses to ask even Herbert whether Estella is in fact married,
he speaks of his miserable condition thus: " Why I hoarded up
this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and
once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the
deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own
countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness,
in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in
watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness."
Joseph A. Hynes 261

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given to the winds, how do I know! " (p. 386) This is the typical
kind of image-become-symbol which runs through the whole novel,
as the older Pip's means of showing that the " real " Pip's affinity
is with Magwitch's, Miss Havishmam's, and Estella's moral pov-
erty, hunger, and need. And this shared condition is the narrator's
reason for mentioning frequently the chains which bound him-to
Magwitch, especially.
" It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding ... from
seven to eight by the Dutch clock," says Pip. " I tried it with the
load [of bread and butter] upon my leg (and that made me think
afresh of the man with the load upon his leg) " (p. 11) ; " I couldn't
warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as the iron
was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet " (p. 16);
" the wretched man, after loading me with his wretched gold
and silver chains for years, had risked his life to come to me, and
I held it there in my keeping! " (p. 327) These are a few of the
instances wherein the chain symbol reminds us of Pip's enforced
closeness to Magwitch. The point is not only the closeness, but
its basis in mutual deprivation. If Pip is a prisoner, the reason is
not that no one will free him or love him, but that he locks himself
up in his dream of owning Estella and Satis House, and thereby
locks Joe out. Since Magwitch's money generates the dream, the
chain symbol is well chosen.
One recalls how Pip feared the soldiers bearing handcuffs.
because he felt responsible for Magwitch's escape from bondage;
and how he therefore imagined the soldiers' coming to arrest, not
Magwitch, but Pip (pp. 28-29). In a similar connection, we
remember that Mrs. Joe was felled by the leg-iron which Pip
helped Magwich to sever; that Orlick late in the book is ironically
right in a way which could not occur to him, when he says that
Pip was really the one responsible for Mrs. Joe's being struck
down; and that therefore, despite the literal severing of this leg-
iron, its symbolic function is to demonstrate the inseparability of
these two " thieves " (pp. 121-122, 432-433). This linking, which
Pip for a long time supposes to be broken by virtue of his expecta-
tions, he alludes to again, just after Jaggers' momentous announce-
ment. Pip says: " If I had often thought before, with something
allied to shame, of my companionship with the fugitive whom I
had once seen limping among those graves, what were my thoughts
on this Sunday, when the place recalled the wretch, ragged and

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shivering, with his felon iron and badge! My comfort was, that it
happened a long time ago, and that he had doubtless been trans-
ported a long way off, and that he was dead to me, and might
be veritably dead into the bargain " (pp. 148-149). This series of
' comforting " suppositions is included among Pip's expectations,
of course, and assists us in reading the irony of Dickens' title.
What Pip does not expect is to find himself in the long run such a
miserable, hunted, shivering outcast as he here finds Magwitch.
Pip in fact goes on making references to (especially) the shame
welling up in him at the thought of his ever having had anything
to do with a convict. When he coincidentally shares a coach with
two convicts, one of whom is the messenger once sent by Mag-
witch, Pip writhes at the ignominy of such proximity to convicts,
and thinks these thoughts which splendidly describe the two sides
of himself and of his own career: " their coarse mangy ungainly
outer surface . . . their ironed legs, apologetically garlanded with
pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way in which all present looked at
them and kept from them; made them . . . a most disagreeable and
degraded spectacle " (p. 229). It is not only the memory of
having stepped beyond the legal statutes in helping Magwitch,
nor only Pip's instinctive refusal to face his shameful attitude
toward Joe and Biddy; it is a whole childhood spent in something
like penal servitude, that bends Pip away from his earlier com-
passionate treatment of a fellow-prisoner. And one can under-
stand how he would allow his simple-minded idea of a " gentle-
man " to come between himself and Joe's (or Magwitch's) homely
virtues. One has only to recall the prolonged injustice of Pumble-
chook, in assuming the role of Pip's jailer, to appreciate Pip's
wanting to get altogether away from the associations of his old
life. One remembers that Pumblechook, who emphasizes Mrs.
Joe's having brought Pip up " by hand," 4 " blackened his guilt
by proceeding to take me into custody " after Miss Havisham
had bought the indentures. So it is that Pumblechook has Pip
" bound out of hand" and generally takes credit for what Pip
regards as a prison sentence (pp. 104-106) .
The fact of Pip's imprisonment is emphasized, moreover, by
Pip's size, which in turn is emphasized by his name: a pip is a
'Here as so often, Magwitch's career parallels Pip's. Magwitch tells Pip: " ' [Every-
one] that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him . . . caught fright
at him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to
that extent that I reglarly grow'd up took up "' (p. 349).
Joseph Ai. Hynes 263

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small seed; and "'pip" as a verb sounds like "peep" (to look
clandestinely, as well as to chirp or otherwise utter squeakinglv).
The novel bears out this reading of the name. When Magwitch
first seizes the boy, for instance, the following exchange takes
place between the hunter and the hunted:
" Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror....

" Tell us your name! " said the man. "Quick!"
" Pip, sir."
" Once more," said the man, staring at me. " Give it mouth!"
" Pip. Pip, sir." (p. 2)
These " pipsqueaks " resemble those of a small trapped animal

(more about animals will come up later) -or, perhaps more
closely, those of a bird. The association of Pip with birds works
for the rest of the book as well.
While Joe's exclamatory " 'What larks! ' " seems of slight
relevance to the present point, other details are of more use in
symbolically reinforcing the nature of Pip's tie to Magwitch. On
the occasion of a cannon-signalled escape from the prison-ship,
for example, Orlick remarks that " ' some of the birds [have] flown
from the cages,'" and that the thick fog will make it hard " ' to
bring down a jail-bird on the wing, to-night ' " (p. I 19) . " Jail-
bird " is a most common term for a convict, to be sure, and would
therefore matter little by itself. But when Magwitch speaks of
himself after his return from New South Wales, we ought to
observe his figurative language: "' As to what I dare, I'm a old
bird now, as has dared all manner of traps since first he was
fledged, and I'm not afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If there's
Death hid inside of it, there is, and let him come out, and I'll
face him, and then I'll believe in him and not afore. And now let
me have a look at my gentleman agen'" (p. 336). Death does
indeed threaten Magwitch, but it is more than a physical death;
rather, it is the spiritual complacency implicit in Magwitch's pre-
sumption that he owns Pip-a complacency shared with others in
the book, as I have said. (The bird-to-scarecrow metaphor recurs
in different symbolic shape, and will be discussed in another
context. What matters for the moment is the mere fact of more
bird imagery. Incidentally, we might note in passing that the
mag-pie's feathers, like the convict's clothes, are black and white.)
My immediate point is that Magwitch's being associated with
birds is the means of re-emphasizing his association with Pip.
264 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectations "

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For one thing, Pip is a Finch of the Grove (p. 276). More im-
portantly, however, he resembles Magwitch in casually growing
to an " impression of the identity of things." Magwitch says of
himself: "' I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel.
How did I know it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the
hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it
was all lies together, only as the birds' names come out true, I
supposed mine did ' " (p. 349) . Pip's grasping at " the identity of
things "-and at his own place among his impressions-is nearly
as arbitrary as Magwitch's: " My father's family name being
Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could
make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip." And he goes
on: " I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority
of his tombstone and my sister. . . . As I never saw my father
or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them . . .
my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably
derived from their tombstones " (p. 1) . Here again we see fellow-
prisoners, who are anything but free as birds, clearly related.
Each instinctively imposes his own name upon himself, thus
establishing his identity; and the juxtaposing of the two passages
shows how tombstones both connect Pip's first and second
" fathers," and (taken together with Magwitch's later mention of
death in connection with a scarecrow) lend a sinister connotation
to the frequent linking of Pip and Magwitch to birds.
Pip's name and size regularly contribute to our impression of
his state of imprisonment (with or without Magwitch). Of his
sister's treatment of him, for example, he says: " Joe and I being
fellow-sufferers ... Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment
I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him . . . sitting
in the chimney-corner" (p. 7; italics mine). Pip is self-named
and well-named: his fellow-prisoner Joe describes him as "' on-
common small " (p. 70), and Pip says of himself in comparison
to the " pale young gentleman " Herbert, that though they were
about the same age, Herbert was " much taller " (p. 91). The
passage which perhaps most richly stresses the symbolic uses of
Pip's name, however, occurs just before his first meeting with
Miss Havisham and Estella: " Mr. Pumblechook's premises . .
were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises
of a corn-chandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me
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that he must be a very happy man indeed, to have so many
little drawers in his shop: and I wondered when I peeped into
one or two of the little tiers, and saw the tied-up brown paper
packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted
of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom " (p. 53). On
the more obvious level, this passage serves to motivate the intense
longing that afflicts Pip when a few pages later he enters the
charmed circle of Estella and Miss Havisham. But the symbolic
value is more important. Here Dickens draws the image of a
small boy-Pumblechook's prisoner-peeping at several small
packages of even smaller pips imprisoned in a jail-like drawer.
There is no self-pity here; in fact, Pip at the time indicated in no
way that he knew the situation of the seeds to be his own. But
that the case is eminently his own should be apparent. The older
Pip's narrative has shown the boy to have been a diminutive
prisoner in the hands of Mrs. Joe, of Pumblechook, of Magwitch,
of his own conscience, and of his social class. It is no wonder that
he is psychologically ready to be deluded by Satis House and its
occupants. What we see in this illuminating passage, then, is
what the man Pip retrospectively understands his situation to
have been, although at the time he understood himself but dimly
-even as Miss Havisham may be said to observe herself in a glass
darkly (p. 59; above, p. 259). Both Miss Havisham and Pip
require the experience that is this novel, in order to see them-
selves and their acts in perspective. Only when Pip has been
restored to Joe can he say, " I fancied I was little Pip again ";
"Joe ... took me in his arms . . . as if I were still the small helpless
creature to whom he had so abundantly given of the wealth of his
great nature" (p. 474). It is this same kind of wealth for which
Pip comes finally to prize Magwitch, rather than for the money
which Magwitch wrongly supposes will be Pip's.
But various redemptions come later. At the moment we ought
to comment on the complicated extending and strengthening of
the symbolic chain, after Pip's first meeting with the occupants
of Satis House. Pip speaks of this chain just as he speaks of
Magwitch's " wretched gold and silver chains" (p. 327; above,
p. 262); for Miss Havisham held him captive by the same means.
This is his summary of his first visit to her: " That was a memor-
able day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the
same with any life. . . . Pause you who read this, and think for

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a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers,
that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the
first link on one memorable day" (p. 72) . He refers to " one
memorable day," not because his meeting with Magwitch is any
less significant than his visit to Satis House, but because this
latter occasion prompts him to misvalue all the signs about him,
and of course to misvalue himself and many of the people about
him as well.
This " long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers," Pip
wrongly assumes Miss Havisham to have cut away from him.
Not only has she not cut the chain, however, but she strengthens
it by deceptively encouraging him to sustain his illusion. Indeed,
as we look back upon the steps by which Pip came to shape his
expectations and some idea of the person responsible for them, we
find him more pitiable than censurable. All events are calculated
to fool him, and especially is this true of the appearance of
Magwitch's messenger-convict (pp. 74-79). For reasons which
the boy cannot state, he is frightened of this man as well as
puzzled by him. The reasons for Pip's reaction are to be found
in the symbols combined in this episode, rather than in anything
altogether rationally knowable or statable. For one thing, the
visitor appears to be sighting Pip down the barrel of a gun, and
is thus said to have a " marksman's eye." For another thing, the
mystery man bears a file which Pip privately identifies (against
all probability) as the file which he stole from Joe in order to
help Magwitch escape. Finally, the convict gives Pip a shilling
wrapped in two one-pound notes. What is symbolically going on
here, I think, is that the appearance of another convict in Pip's
life, in addition to that convict's giving Pip, Magwitch's money,
serves to strengthen the chain of gold or iron linking Pip to
Magwitch. Also, the " marksman's eye " not only keeps Pip in
sight for Magwitch, but keeps us reminded that Pip and Mag-
witch, as fellow-prisoners, are conscious of being hunted. The file,
therefore, is symbolically ironic, since it only seems to have done
a separating job. As the episode ends, Pip's reaction is violent: the
pound notes " remained a nightmare to me many and many a
night and day." And he continues: " I had sadly broken sleep
when I got to bed, through thinking of the strange man taking
aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily coarse and
common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with
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convicts-a feature in my low career that I had previously for-
gotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that
when I least expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed myself
to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham's next Wednesday; and in
my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing
who held it, and I screamed myself awake " (pp. 78-79). Hunter's
gun, plus convict's money, plus file add up to a reawakening of
the old shame, which Pip ironically tries to drive out by thinking
of the refined Miss Havisham. The point seems to be that no
matter which way Pip turns, the " file of freedom "-so we may
label it-is not to be found. Nothing ultimately can undo the tie
which connects him to Magwitch; nothing can undo the effects
of his suppositions about Miss Havisham's being a fairy god-
mother; and nothing-least of all money-can free him from his
commitment to humanity in the person of Joe Gargery. What
Pip learns is nothing new. It is that such freedom or liberation as
is humanly available, comes as the paradoxical result of giving
one's self. The giver gains; he who would gain his life must lose
it; the " file of freedom " was Joe's at the outset, and remains
Joe's. In realizing this literal and symbolic fact, Pip comes full
circle and ends where he began.
But of course he is far from ready to complete the circle; he is
only now entering that dream world where his chains will grow
longer and tighter. Because his sister tells him he will probably
end up in the hulks, because of the guilt that follows his theft of
food for Magwitch, because his house is like a prison-since
(among better reasons) the front door is locked on every day but
Christmas-and because he thinks of his suit as his " Sunday
penitentials" (pp. 13, 15, 21-22), Pip not surprisingly-and quite
rightly, as is usual with his unspoiled instinctive reactions-thinks
first of a prison when he sees Miss Havisham's house. This manor
was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to
it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that re-
mained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a court-yard
in front, and that was barred. . . . I peeped in " (p. 54; italics
mine). It is his forgetting this symbolic setting, of course, that
makes the book possible. And it is Pip's later remembering of the
similarity between Miss Havisham's environs and the boy's native
marshes that provides an especially rich symbolic harvest.
Just after Pip has left Magwitch, having promised to bring

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food and file, he looks back over his shoulder at Magwitch and
at the setting: " The marshes were just a long black horizontal
line . .. and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly
* . . so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines
and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I
could faintly make out the only two black things in all the
prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was
the beacon by which the sailors steered-like an unhooped cask
upon a pole-an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a
gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a
pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were
the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook
himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so "
(p. 5) . On one hand, this is vivid atmosphere. But the passage is
echoed so closely that we must specify its symbolic content. We
shall have occasion later to discuss the merging of black and red,
and the value of river and beacon. Right now I should like to
call attention to cask, chains, gibbet, pirate, and the act of re-
hooking. While the river comes up more importantly later, we
may note here that the river holds the prison-ship, that Magwitch
may well be associated with pirates since he has been a criminal
occupant of this ship, and that this pirate's waylaying Pip is the
book's first fact. The chains re-emphasize Magwitch's union with
Pip. Also, they thus early signal Magwitch's future course: for
just as Magwitch later figures himself as an old bird which may
be alighting upon a scarecrow harboring death (p. 336; above, p.
267), so we see in retrospect that the scarecrow is a figure of the
gibbet to which this " old bird " does indeed re-attach himself
after years in New South Wales. Pip is terrified because of his
sense of complicity with Magwitch, as becomes evident a few
pages later: " If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine
myself drifting down the river . . . to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate
calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged at
once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I
must rob the pantry " (p. 13). Thus the image-symbol of the two
leagued thieves persists. When Pip does rob the pantry, he
imagines a hanging hare to be winking at him (p. 14); and when
Magwitch returns he remarks: "'It's death to come back.
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There's been overmuch coming back of late years, and I should
of a certainty be hanged if took'" (p. 327) .
These examples help us to an emotional sense of Pip's vision of
Miss Havisham, as he walks among the casks in her brewery on
his first visit: " I turned my eyes-a little dimmed by looking up
at the frosty light-towards a great wooden beam . . . and I saw
a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white,
with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that
the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and
that the face was Miss Havisham's, with a movement going over
the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me. In the
terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain that
it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it and
then ran towards it" (p. 64). Pip's aversion-become-compassion
in this situation is a foreshadowing of his later attitude toward
that Miss Havisham who, though she has twisted his life, needs
his forgiveness. Also, certainly, the passage links the morally
tattered Magwitch, Miss Havisham, and Pip to one another, in
mutual punishment for wrongdoing and in mutual need for love.
Dickens' desire to make this link apparent is, I suppose, what
accounts for the description of a beacon as " an unhooped cask"
-similar to the casks among -which Pip envisions Miss Havisham
hanging. Pip's membership in this group of hanged sufferers is
implied by the manner in which Orlick-who is in a sense one of
Pip's victims-seizes Pip: " I had been caught in a strong running
noose, thrown over my head from behind " (p. 429). That aver-
sion can become compassion in Pip indicates his conscious need
of forgiveness and of reunion with humanity, as well as his sense
of sharing this need with Magwitch and Miss Havisham.
If the prison symbols embrace Pip, Magwitch, and Miss Havi-
sham, they soon extend to Estella, too, for she is just as much the
product of an adoptive parent's shaping as is Pip. Indeed, her
perception of this fact is sharper than his. In handing Miss
Havisham's purse to Pip (a neatly ironic gesture, that), Estella
says: "' Oh, you must take the purse! We have no choice, you
and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our
own devices, you and I ' " (p. 268). This is true, of course, though
true for Pip in a way which neither he nor Estella suspects at the
time. On the same occasion, Pip says to her, "' You speak of
yourself as if you were some one else'"; and he thereafter writes:

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"Her [behaving] as if our association were forced upon us and
we were mere puppets, gave me pain " (pp. 269, 271). It pains
him for the same reason that the vision of hanging terrifies him:
in neither case can be allow himself to admit that his " expecta-
tions " are inadequate to remove him from the responsibilities
of his human nature.
He therefore clings doggedly to his illusion of freedom, and thus
becomes a slave of that very illusion. As narrator, he looks back
at his young and foolish behavior, and figuratively shakes his head
at what he had assumed to be the powers and rights of wealth and
rank. Although he was ashamed of Joe, he had acquired a
perfectly needless appendage in the person of a little valet whom
he regarded as personal property, and who of course merely
burdened Pip. The older Pip rightly calls the small boy " the
Avenger," since his enforced presence continually weighed upon
his supposed owner, who found himself " in bondage and slavery"
(pp. 220-221, 250). He is in bondage, as are Magwitch and Miss
Havisham, to the unnatural idea that a person may be used and
manipulated with impunity. (Interestingly, Magwitch speaks of
having been a " 'tool "' in Compeyson's hands-pp. 36, 351
and here as elsewhere, the manipulated " tool " takes its revenge
upon the user.) So gross is the presumption of these three, and
of Estella, in their treatment of others, that we would find them
scarcely credible or worthy of serious consideration, but that they
have all been warped by others' treatment of them. On this
thematic subject of the split between persons and possessions, we
might observe that Wemmick's schizophrenia beautifully demon-
strates the point. The "city" Wemmick of the "'post office
mouth " mechanically accumulates " portable property " for its
own sake; the "country" Wemmick, though still very much
intent upon owning property, wouldn't think of subordinating his
Aged Parent or Miss Skiffins to ownership of even his miniature
castle. Wealth in this novel is not evil per se, of course: the
wealth of both major puppeteers-Magwitch and Miss Havisham
-does make possible a decent life for both Herbert and Pip.
Wealth as " chain of gold " is relevant only where the presumed
prerogatives of wealth preclude human considerations. In an im-
portant sense, the novel is " about " the conversion of nearly all
the main characters from one Wemmick-view to the other. Each
one is saved when he sees himself clearly and ceases to regard him-
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self "i' as if [he] were some one else.'" Yet another way to come
to the samne conclusion is to note that Joe and Biddy, as moral
constants, differ from the other characters. Pip remarks that " all
that Biddy said seemed right. Biddy was never insulting, or
capricious, or Biddy to-day and somebody else to-morrow " (p.
131) . And late in the book Pip takes another look at Joe: " There
was no change whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my
eyes then [i. e., in my childhood], he was in my eyes still; just as
simply faithful, just as simply right " (p. 475) .
The "right " attitude toward money is again illustrated, as we
might "expect " it to be, by Joe Gargery's conduct. On the one
hand, he refuses to think of young Pip and of cash money as
participants in the same nature, and thus almost angrily spurns
Jaggers' offer of money as compensation for surrendering the
apprentice blacksmith (pp. 142-143); on the other hand, it is
ungentlemanly Joe, he of no " expectations " whatever, who, like
the " country " Wemmick, sanely and gladly uses money for the
sake of people: ironically, he pays the debts of Pip, who is bank-
rupt in more than one sense (p. 479). Significantly, the boy who
was about to take food to Magwitch had this attitude: " I was
going to rob Mrs. Joe-I never thought I was going to rob Joe,
for I never thought of any of the housekeeping property as his "
(p. 11); and when the captured Magwitch tells Joe that he has
eaten " ' your pie,"' Joe's answer refuses the suggested compari-
son between human need and property rights: "' God knows
you're welcome to it-so far as it was ever mine,' returned Joe,
with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. 'We don't know what
you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it,
poor miserable fellow-creatur.-Would us, Pip?'" (p. 39)
Pip blinds himself to his own status as a " ' poor miserable
fellow-creatur,' and regards the burning of his indentures as
somehow a dissolving of his former relations with Joe and Biddy
(p. 148). Thereafter, captivated by the promises seemingly held
out to him by his fairy godmother, he grows less and less humanly
tolerable, and becomes thoroughly entangled in the chains he
supposes severed. Not only is he the victim of his supposition that
Estella is meant to be his (pp. 252-253), but he and Estella
ironically share a pronounced aversion to their real or symbolic
origins. As he leaves Newgate and prepares to meet a coach
arriving with Estella, Pip rightly suspects that he carries prison

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dust with him, and regrets the necessity of exposing Estella to it:
" how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this
taint of prison and crime. . . . I thought of the beautiful young
Estella, proud and refined, coming toward me, and I thought with
absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her"
(p. 267). Then when he has met her and they have taken another
coach together, they pass by Newgate. To her question, " ' What
place is that?'" Pip recalls his reaction: "I made a foolish
pretence of not at first recognizing it, and then told her. As she
looked at it, and drew in her head again, murmuring ' Wretches!'
I would not have confessed to my visit for any consideration"
(p. 272).
Their inseparability from each other and from their adoptive
(and in Estella's case, real) parents is symbolically communicated
not only by chains and prisons, but also by frequent references to
pairs. Significantly, the convicts' death-masks hanging in Jaggers'
office are two in number (see esp. pp. 164-165, 201-202), and
thereby remind us of other linkings-in-death. Particularly rele-
vant here are the references to animals-sometimes hunting, some-
times hunted, often paired. On the marshes in his youth, Pip
became chained to Magwitch, and also became aware that Mag-
witch and Compeyson were chained together. Pip notes the
"decided similarity between the dog's way of eating and the
man's," as Magwitch tears at his food (p. 18). On the same
occasion, Magwitch remarks to Pip: "'You'd be but a fierce
young hound indeed, if at your time of life you could help to
hunt a wretched warmint, hunted as near death and dunghill as
this poor wretched warmint is! '" (p. 17) Magwitch and Com-
peyson are presented as wild beasts fighting on the marshes (pp.
85-36); Compeyson's last pursuit of Magwitch, and their last
fight, are the behavior of animals (pp. 450-452); the Magwitch
who survives this death-struggle is seen as a " hunted, wounded,
shackled creature " (p. 453); Pip speaks of the newly returned
Magwitch as like a " snake " (p. 325) or a " wild beast " (p. 328);
Magwitch refers to his old self as a " ' hunted dung-hill dog wot
you kep life in ' " (p. 824), and to his later self as resolved always
to keep " ' a genteel muzzle on ' " (p. 843); Pip refers to Orlick's
quarters at Miss Havisham's as having a " slovenly, confined and
sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse," which " indeed
he [Orlick] was " (p. 236); Orlick, having trapped Pip, addresses
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him as "C' wolf ' " (pp. 430 if.); in support of this epithet, Orlick
says: "' You and her [Miss Havisham, probably-though perhaps
he is thinking back to Mrs. Joe] have pretty well hunted me out
of this country, so far as getting a easy living in it goes'" (p.
434); Pip regards himself in something of the same light when,
earlier, he defeats young Herbert at boxing: " I . . . hope that
I regarded myself . . as a species of savage young wolf or other
wild beast " (p. 92); he thinks of his early attempts at learning in
these metaphorical terms: " I struggled through the alphabet as
if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and
scratched by every letter" (p. 44); and when Estella, on Miss
ilavisham's orders, brings him refreshments, " I was taken down
into the yard to be fed in . . . dog-like manner " (p. 89); and
when he is later forced embarrassedly to share a coach with paired
convicts, he thinks of them as " lower animals " with " coarse
mangy ungainly outer surface" (p. 229; above, p. 263); in at-
tempting to get Magwitch away safely, Pip " had a feeling that
we were caged and threatened " (p. 448).
On three other occasions, the imagery of paired animals is sym
bolically valuable. When Magwitch is captured on the marshes,
and is being returned to the prison-ship, in the company of
Compeyson, " somebody . . . growled as if to dogs," and Pip
" saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the
shore, like a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and moored
by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes
to be ironed like the prisoners " (p. 39). Something much like
this imagery arises again in Pip's dreams on the night before he
leaves the forge for London: " All night there were coaches in
my broken sleep, going to wrong places instead of to London, and
having in the traces, now dogs, now cats, now pigs, now men-
never horses. Fantastic failures of journeys occupied me until the
day dawned and the birds were singing " (p. 161). Finally, years
later, in leaving the coach which holds the paired convicts, Pip
re-lives the scene of Magwitch's capture: " As to the convicts, they
went their way with the coach, and I knew at what point they
would be spirited off to the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat
with its convict crew waiting for them at the slime-washed stairs
-again heard the gruff ' Give way, you! ' like an order to dogs-
again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on the black water."
And here is Pip's reaction to his visionary remembrance: " I could
274 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectations "'

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not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
undefined and vague. . . . I am confident . . . that it was the
revival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood " (p. 232).
These three frightening episodes combine with Pip's similarly
frightening dream of the " file of freedom " (pp. 78-79; above,
p. 267), so that once again the reader sees symbolically con-
veyed the thematic value of paired prisoners. But he sees as well
that the fact of mutual imprisonment, in being associated with
Noah's Ark, is by implication the means of renewal; that the
juxtaposition of river and prison-ship and paired convicts re-em-
phasizes a motif which recurs until the end of the book; that
"failures of journeys "-caused by all sorts of coupled animals
improbably attached to stage-coaches-perfectly labels Pip's
various unnatural efforts to break away from human ties; that
just as the " file of freedom " paradoxically symbolizes a desirable
and necessary human attachment, so the linked prisoners make
the point that Pip's successful journey will be the one which
returns him to a human involvement with Joe, Magwitch, Miss
iavisham, and Estella. Dawning day and singing birds are indeed
appropriate images for the sort of renewal implied by a novel so
reliant upon bird imagery and gloomy atmosphere.
Atmosphere, and especially varieties of light, will come in for
treatment later. At this point, however, I should like to observe
the ways in which Dickens symbolically communicates the signi-
ficance of contrasts such as those between role and person, prop-
erty and person, position and person: in short, between the human
person as himself and as "'some one else.'" Mr. Pumblechook
is a fine example of the way in which " seems " or role rules the
world. His word is regarded as more reliable than Wopsle's be-
cause Pumblechook drives " his own chaise-cart-over every-
body," and is neatly dressed. Wopsle, on the other hand, has
" no coat on," and is for this reason (among other reasons) not
likely " to inspire confidence" (p. 41). The " gentlemanly"
Compeyson's impressive surface draws a light sentence, while
Magwitch's " hardened " surface draws a heavy one (pp. 350-
355). Pumblechook readily changes his colors, as often as he is
aware of any alteration in Pip's social rank. Trabb the tailor
makes precisely the same kind of " alteration," amusingly, when
he hears of Pip's expectations. Seeing Pip as just another small
boy, he greets Pip casually, " in a hail-fellow-well-met kind of
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way." But when Pip hereupon announces his financial prospects,
Trabb addresses him as " ' My dear sir,' " bows, scrapes, touches
Pip " on the outside of each elbow," and humbly asks him to enter
the shop. " Mr. Trabb measured and calculated me in the parlour,
as if I were an estate and he the finest species of surveyor" (pp.
152, 153). Trabb's boy is a nuisance to the " new " Pip because
he will not allow Pip to forget that the uniform is not the man
(pp. 248-249). Mr. Wopsle's fellow-villagers are shown to be
doubtful about the real Wopsle, as a result of Jaggers' accusatory
series of questions put to that poor man (pp. 135-137); and when
Wopsle turns up in London, he has significantly enough become a
professional actor, and has trouble keeping his two roles-those
of Wopsle the church-clerk and of Waldengarver the actor-
separated in even his own mind (pp. 259-260). Wemmick is,
again, a fine instance of two divorced beings: hard, skeptical, and
mercenarily unbending in the city; soft, trusting, and humanely
pliable in the country-at home, notably (pp. 171-172; 207-211).
Jaggers, whom one would least expect to relent, does exactly that
in providing for Estella's mother and for Estella herself-who
"C' was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be
saved'" (pp. 419-421).
All of this confusion helps to color the emphasis placed
play, a verb which appears to mean " to have fun in doing
which, in view of so much value placed upon the split bet
role and person, makes pointed symbolic sense as meaning
take a part, act a role, pretend, make believe." It is important
that the verb should recur in the context of Pip's first meeting
with the gentlefolk of Satis House. Of Miss Havisham's invita-
tion, Mrs. Joe says: " ' She wants this boy to go and play there.
And of course he's going. And he had better play there . . . or
I'll work him'" (p. 50). And as Pip leaves for his engagement,
he has no idea why he is " going to play at Miss Havisham's,"
or "; what on earth [he is] expected to play at " (p. 52). When
he reaches the gate, he meekly announces that he has " ' [c]ome-
to play'" (p. 57), and shortly thereafter feels the misery of this
" playing to order " (p. 59). Looked at in company with so much
other illusion eventually made clear, these excerpts show how
Dickens very neatly uses the metaphor of actors and acting to
reinforce Pip's naive entry into the dream world of Satis House.
Like Wopsle-Waldengarver and the other confusers of roles, Pip
276 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectations,"

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is on the verge here of adopting a part in a " play." Whereas Mrs.
Joe makes a distinction between " work" and "play," Pip for
years unconsciously lives a distinction between " be" and " play."
And it is painfully long before he discovers what he has all along
been " expected to play at," and whose expectations have in their
turn set him " playing to order." Like so many major and minor
characters of the book, Pip thinks of himself, unknowingly, as
"'some one else.' "
Because he is unaware of playing a role, he understandably
misses the reason for his feeling miserable in Joe and Biddy's
presence, after Jaggers' important visit: "I never could have
believed it without experience, but as Joe and Biddy became
more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy. Dis-
satisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is
possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dis-
satisfied with myself " (p. 145); and on the next evening the boy
again finds it " very sorrowful and strange that this, the second
night of my bright fortunes, should be as lonely and as unsatis-
factory as the first " (p. 152). Obviously we must see his trouble
as the real and symbolic separation of "my fortune" from
"myself "; or again, as the illusion that he has been bought, file
or otherwise freed from himself. The role-the illusion-persists
until Magwitch's return. But though Pip comes to recognize the
convict, he of course knows nothing at first of Magwitch's acti
as benefactor, as the one who has bred the illusion. Thus when
Pip identifies Magwitch as " my convict," he thinks also of " the
churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different
levels" (p. 320); and he says to Magwitch: "' I am glad that,
thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to thank me.
But our ways are different ways, none the less '" (p. 321). Their
" ' ways ' " are the same; but it is typical of Dickens' irony in
the book that Pip should suppose otherwise and should use the
word " levels " to describe the difference which he imagines. Pip
means that Magwitch was big and Pip little; that Magwitch was
a fugitive from the law and Pip an innocent boy; that Magwitch
stood on the ground and held Pip upside down or seated on a
tombstone. But the " levels " of which we (and the older Pip, as
narrator) are conscious are the social levels which have governed
Pip's attitudes; whereas it is only when Pip can bring himself to
stop " playing " this game of " levels " (and can confront people
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as themselves), that he is fit for human companionship. The same
may be said of Miss Havisham, Estella, and Magwitch. Mag-
witch's performance as manipulator of persons is particularly use-
ful as an instance of inhumanity, since his behavior-though no
more heinous than the others'-is so grossly evident. He had said
to himself, for example, that "c if I gets liberty and money [an
ironically familiar coupling], I'll make that boy a gentleman!'";
and he says that Pip shall have the "'bright eyes'" he loves,
"if money can buy 'em ' " (p. 325).
The end of this kind of inhuman attachment-the end for both
Pip and Magwitch-shines forth in Pip's saying of his prepara-
tions for the escape-attempt: " Of all my worldly possessions I
took no more than the few necessaries that filled the bag. Where
I might go, what I might do, or when I might return, were
questions utterly unknown to me; nor did I vex my mind with
them, for it was wholly set on Provis's safety " (p. 440) . Similar-
ly, when Magwitch has been captured for the last time, Pip
thinks of him without any of the fear or shame which had always
dominated his earlier reactions to Magwitch and other convicts:
" I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who
had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me
with great constancy.... I only saw in him a much better man
than I had been to Joe" (p. 453). What he is remembering,
doubtless, is the embarrassment he caused Joe by " playing " the
"levels" game when Joe visited London-with the result that
"whenever he subsided into affection, he called me Pip, and
whenever he relapsed into politeness he called me Sir" (p. 9225).
Pip had forced even Joe to play a part.
This distinction between " seems " and " is " appears again in
the symbolic use to which Dickens puts kinds of ships. Through-
out the novel, prison-ships recur as the implied real state of Pip's
case. This remark obviously applies to links among Pip, Mag-
witch, and the other convicts; but it is also true of Pip's relation-
ship with Miss Havisham. When Pip first enters Miss Havisham's
gate, for instance, he hears the wind, and remarks that it " seemed
to blow colder there than outside the gate; and it made a shrill
noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the brewery, like
the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea " (p. 55). The
imagery here reminds us of the association of brewery-casks,
cask-like lighthouse, and gibbet (above, p. 9269). By symbolic

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implication, then, Pip is from this day forward as closely im-
prisoned with Miss Havisham as with the more obvious convicts;
and the wind, which blows so cold despite the delusions of those
on board the ship, does ironically take this " Noah's Ark "-prison-
ship toward a kind of redemption. Another demonstration that
foul is fair appears in the repetition of this same kind of bad
weather-cum-ship imagery that recurs as Magwitch is about to
be finally captured. On the morning of that day, when Pip
c" awoke, the wind had risen, and the sign of the [inn] (the Ship)
was creaking and banging about " (p. 449) , and thus manifesting
that symbolic prison-ship motif to which we have become accus-
tomed. Again, that is, the " sign " is ominous though the experi-
ence will in fact be morally therapeutic.
Conversely, fair is foul. Dickens shows Pip's head to be filled
with pleasant symbols which eventually collapse. Even before
Jaggers' visit, for instance, Pip's imagination is cluttered with
sailboats-the symbolic opposite of prison-ships-and of course
he associates these lovely boats with the grandeur and freedom
which he assumes that Estella and Miss Havisham embody:
" Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea with their
white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and
Estella. . . . [They] and the strange house and the strange life
appeared to have something to do with everything that was
picturesque" (p. 110). On a walk with Biddy, Pip is lulled by
the sight of sailboats into telling Biddy about his longing for all
that Estella seemingly represents. The sight of the boats over-
whelms him, as usual, so that he blurts out his wish "' to be a
gentleman.'" Biddy tries to warn him that he may hurt himself
if he persists in this desire. Interestingly, she keeps her eyes
almost entirely upon the same sailboats, and thereby enables us
to suppose that she appreciates the symbolic value of the boats
for Pip (pp. 1928, 129, 131). After this emphasis on boats, then,
we are ready for the symbol by which Pip expresses the force of
Magwitch's revelation: " it was not until I began to think, that
I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in
which I had sailed was gone to pieces " (p. 328) . This is true, of
course, though Pip wrongly imagines the wreck to be harmful
rather than beneficial.
Just as types of boats help to distinguish illusion from reality,
so do various contexts in which the idea of time is important.
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As Pip prepares for the first -ime to visit Satis House, he has occa-
sion to observe how various tradesmen conduct their affairs. What
he notices is " that Mr. Pumblechook appeared to conduct his
business by looking across the street at the saddler, who appeared
to transact his business by keeping an eye on the coach-maker,
who appeared to get on in life by putting his hands in his pockets
and contemplating the baker, who in his turn folded his arms and
stared at the grocer, who stood in his door and yawned at the
chemist. The watchmaker, always poring over a little desk with
a magnifying glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group
in smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-
window, seemed to be about the only person in the High Street
whose trade engaged his attention" (pp. 53-54). This passage,
which at first looks merely whimsical and gratuitous, is nothing
of the sort. For one thing, it reminds us of the five little com-
placent gravestones and of their association both with death and
with the Pip-Magwitch tie. Then, by extension, it reminds us in
retrospect that Pip at this stage is about to join his brothers and
these tradesmen in a state of moral collapse. Finally, because it
draws attention to the busy watchmaker, the passage suggests
not only the importance of attending to business and earning
money, but the need to remember that life must be lived in the
day-by-day realm of time concretely measured and accounted for
by clocks, rather than in the irresponsible, rose-colored, timeless
realm of illusion. I think this interlude especially significant in its
context, for Pip is soon to enter the tomb-like house where Miss
Havisham, in her own monstrous complacency, has stopped the
clocks (see, e. g., pp. 58, 59, 79, 131.) -an act clearly symbolizing
the lunatic illusion that she can set up her own rules for governing
her fellow-man in a world that is by its very nature bound to
exact vengeance for such presumption.
It is to this realm that Pip for various more or less understand-
able reasons allows himself to become addicted. And it is because
Pip leaves what we may riskily refer to as the " real world "-the
one measured in time-and enters Miss Havisham's world of
deadly illusion, that Pip as narrator seems almost to be punning
in his use of the apprentice-worker's idiom. " ' Joe and I would
perhaps have gone partners,'" Pip says to Biddy, "' when I was
out of my time ' ' (p. 129); and again, " perhaps after all Miss
Havisham was going to make my fortune when my time was

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out" (p. 134). Pip the man seems to be giving us here an idea
of his own youthful confusion in the matter of telling time, of
discerning reality; for, " not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,'"
Pip's " time-out " is the entire middle one-third of the book.
Only when Pip has become thoroughly entranced by his suppo-
sition that Miss Havisham is the source of his expectations does
he waken to reality as symbolized by timepieces. Here is Pip's
recollection of events just as Magwitch is about to reveal himself:
" I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my
book at eleven o'clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul's, and all the
many church-clocks in the City-some leading, some accompany-
ing, some following-struck that hour. . . . I heard a footstep on
the stair " (p. 318). This passage is interesting not only because
it revives the suggested similarity between St. Paul's trials and
Magwitch's (above, pp. 260, 261), and because St. Paul's leads all
the clocks in marking this occasion, but mainly because the older
Pip makes such a point of this eleventh hour as the moment when,
contrary to his expectations, he began his return to the land of
the living, the real, the timed. Once more, that is, foul is fair.
Time starts again, and Pip is on the road back to human stature
after Magwitch's revelation, even though timepieces fit in with
everything else (as Pip rouses himself from fitful sleep the next
day) to mark a disillusionment: " the clocks of the Eastward
churches were striking five, the candles were wasted out, the fire
was dead, and the wind and rain intensified the thick black dark-
ness " (p. 329).
If the live clocks serve to reintroduce Pip to reality, the dea
fire helps us attend to the imagery which Magwitch later uses
describe his own sensation when first he was disillusioned:
"' Summun had run away from me-a man-a tinker-and he'd
took the fire with him, and left me wery cold'" (p. 349; above,
p. 261). Symbolically, then, by means of the dead fire, we are
reminded of the way in which these two prisoners, both ruined in
their youthful expectations, remain shackled as each other's best
hope of recovering some sense of belonging to the human race.
They must rely upon themselves as fellow-prisoners if they intend
to re-light the fire.
Once we see how the gutted fire symbolizes Pip's and Magwitch's
deprivation, as distinct from their suppositions, we can see as well
that the same symbolic value occurs elsewhere. Miss Havisham
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dwells out of the fiery sun (that most natural of all clocks) and
in a kind of tomb (pp. 58, 60). Pip observes that although at
Miss Havisham's house a " fire had been lately kindled in the
damp old-fashioned grate . . . it was more disposed to go out than
burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed
colder than the clearer air-like our own marsh mist" (p. 84).
Again, he notes that " [tghe candles that lighted that room of hers
were placed in sconces on the wall. They were high from the
ground, and they burnt with the steady dulness of artificial light
in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked round at them, and at
the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped clock, and at the
withered articles of bridal dress ... and at her own awful figure
with its ghostly reflection thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling
and the wall, I saw in everything the construction that my mind
had come to, repeated and thrown back to me" (pp. 307-308;
italics mine). These two passages show very neatly that fire has
a difficult time surviving here, that " artificial " candle-light
illumines the gloomy room, that the mist of illusion fills this weird
fairyland just as it still covers the marshes of Pip's mind in spite
of his suppositions to the contrary, and-must importantly-that
Pip at the time saw not the realities of death and decay, but only
the illusory expectations he had sold himself on. Such dim light
as candles make available is used typically to suggest the destruc-
tive realm of illusion,5 just as mists of various kinds are more
obviously symbolic of Pip's poor moral vision.
Pip's drift into fancy is demonstrated, moreover, on several
occasions when he finds the light of day too bright for eyes which
gradually accustom themselves to indistinctness. After his first
visit, for instance, he follows the candle-bearing Estella down-
stairs: " The rush of the daylight quite confounded me, and made
me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room
many hours " (p. 61). On a similar occasion he asks a rhetorical
question: " What could I become with these surroundings? . .
Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as, my eyes
were, when I came out into the natural light from the misty
yellow rooms? " (p. 96) And such sunlight as he seeks and enjoys
is part of the general picturesqueness we have already remarked
r Thus Pip sees Miss Havisham walking along her dim corridor: " She carried a bare
candle in her hand . . . and was a most unearthly object by its light " (p. 312). And
Estella speaks of herself as lighted candle around which moth-like men-Pip included-
hover, to their own eventual destruction (p. 315).
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upon in connection with the use of sailboats as symbols of illusion
(above, p. 279): " whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon
a cloud or sail or green hill-side or waterline, it was just the same "
-i. e., the same dream. Finally, we might note in this connection
that Pumblechook's wine and flattery combine to make Pip half-
believe the man's patent hypocrisy-because of course Pip finds
it pleasant to believe that his own merits have somehow gained
him a promise of expectations. Drunk literally and figuratively,
he " went out into the air, with a dim perception that there was
something unwonted in the conduct of the sunshine" (p. 157).
In short, Pip grows used to candle-light, representing his illusion,
and grows away from the light of day, representing (often) that
human reality to which he has symbolically returned by the time
he takes a recuperative outing with Joe, after Pip's serious illness.
One need note only that Pip's recaptured sense of Joe's worth goes
hand-in-hand with burgeoning vegetation, singing birds, and
bright warm sunshine (pp. 474-475).
Dickens' fondness for light imagery crops up once more in the
way he uses stars. Estella's name is immediately relevant, of
course, but we ought to note also that stars connote even more
generally-until the very last scene-what candles and extin-
guished fires connote: the illusion which Pip basks in. On the
night when Mrs. Joe will announce Miss Havisham's invitation to
Pip, there is a fine contrast evident between fire and starlight-a
contrast made while Joe and Pip wait for Mrs. Joe's arrival:
" Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to
the door to listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night,
and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A
man would die to-night lying out on the marshes, I thought. And
then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be
for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and
see no help or pity in the glittering multitude" (p. 49). This
section suggests all sorts of contrasts: e. g., the difference between
the book's many " prisoners " with and without one another's
help; the difference between a deluded Pip with his eyes on a star
(Estella), and an awakened Pip aware of his and Estella's tie
with Magwitch; the pitiless gaze of Estella before her chastening
marriage, as distinct from the gaze of an Estella restored to the
human race even as Pip is restored. All of these contrasts are
implicit-retrospectively-in the symbolic opposition between
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warm hearth and dry, cold, frosty, white, hard, starlit night; and,
by extension, between Joe's warmth and the others' cold manipu-
lation of one another. When Estella says that it is not in her
nature to love (p. 366), she speaks of a fact which in one or
another degree is true for Magwitch, Pip, and Miss Havisham as
well, before their various interwound conversions. The same
theme is suggested again as Pip leaves for his first meeting with
Estella and Miss Havisham: " they [the stars] twinkled out one
by one, without throwing any light on the questions why on earth
I was going to play at Miss Havisham's, and what on earth I was
expected to play at" (p. 52; above, p. 276). Only with Mag-
witch's return does Pip become aware of the game he has been
"c playing," and of how inhumanly cold he has become.
Such are some of the associations offered by stars, which con-
tinually remind us of the real coldness and inhumanity of the
particular illusion shown in this book. Thus, Estella's " light [a
candle] came along the dark passage [in Satis House] like a star"
(p. 59); later "I saw her pass among the extinguished fires [of
the brewery], and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a
gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky" (p.
63); despite the " ashes " of Miss Havisham's " bridal feast," and
that lady's looking like a " figure of the grave," " Estella looked
more bright and beautiful than before, and I was under stronger
enchantment" (p. 242); the juxtaposing of Estella and Miss
Havisham's jewels reminds us that Estella, like the gems, is cold,
brilliant, beautiful, and valuable as property owned and used by
Miss Havisham (pp. 89, 245, 273); like these jewels, Estella is
"i' out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who see her ' "
(p. 117; see also pp. 237, 241, 251); after meeting Estella, Pip
regards the stars as " poor and humble stars for glittering on the
rustic objects among which I had passed my life " (pp. 145-146);
speaking unknowingly of his own daughter, Magwitch regards her
as jewel-like property, just as Miss Havisham does, and says to
Pip that the c" ' bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the thoughts
on . . . shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy 'em (p. 325;
above p. 278), and thus crassly echoes the sentiments of the
"; city " Wemmick, whose "'; guiding star always is, Get hold of
portable property ' " (p. 202) . This contrast between illusion and
reality is shown again in Pip's statement that ""Biddy . . .
look[ed] at me under the stars with a clear honest eye " (p. 288).
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In the context, Pip is deceiving himself in telling both himself
and Biddy that he will come frequently to visit Joe, whereas
Biddy knows that he will not be able to reconcile his promise with
his gentlemanly pretensions.
Interestingly, stars eventually help to signal Pip's and Estella's
coming to their senses, humbly seeking forgiveness of each other,
and presumably seeing all things, including love, in clear-if
subdued-light. Thus, " the stars were shining beyond the mist,
and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark";
Estella's " once proud eyes " manifested a " saddened softened
light "; and " as the morning mists had risen long ago when I
first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in
all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw
no shadow of another parting from her " (pp. 491, 493) . This last
use of stars, though different from the consistent use of stars
throughout the book, is not in violation of the characters' ex-
periences or of the star symbol elsewhere. Further, the stars here
support, rather than oppose, Dickens' decision to accept Bulwer-
Lytton's suggestion for the ending: i. e., throughout the book,
stars have symbolized illusion; quite appropriately, then, stars
here symbolize the very illusions which Pip and Estella have
healthfully dropped, as well as the cooler, more " tranquil," but
very real promise left to them after they have shed all misleading
glamor. In my opinion, then, Dickens' choice of endings is both
psychologically and symbolically valid.
This paradoxical but perfectly accurate use of symbol appears
also in the way gardens are treated. Like stars, gardens here are
almost always associated with the illusory, the inhuman, the
destructive, the unnatural. Miss Havisham's is " a rank garden "
(p. 63) wherein one looks " upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks,
and one box tree that had been clipped round long ago, like a
pudding, and had a new growth at the top of it, out of shape and
of a different colour, as if that part of the pudding had stuck to
the saucepan and got burnt" (p. 80; see also p. 90). Pip the
man sees ugliness and unnaturalness for what they are, even as
he was earlier appalled by the " city " Wemmick's walking calmly
through a " garden " full of " plants," " shoots," and other growths
in his Newgate " greenhouse " (pp. 264-266) as distinct from his
strolling about the little garden of natural growths in Walworth
(pp. 208-211). But Pip the dupe misses the symbolic similarity
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between himself as unnatural plant raised by others' manipula-
tions, and these ugly growths in Newgate and in Miss Havisham's
yard. This same confusion turns up again as Estella tries to tell
Pip that his devotion to her is based upon illusion. Significantly,
since they are walking through Miss Havisham's decayed garden,
the ruin all about them is as nothing to Pip, for whom " it [the
garden] was all in bloom" by virtue of Estella's accidentally
brushing against his shoulder (pp. 238-241). In his right mind,
of course, Pip sees the garden for the anti-Paradise which it has
been in his life (p. 406); and this is why, again, Dickens was right
to conclude the novel as he did. Just as Pip and Estella see the
stars for what they seemed and for what promise they still hold, so
finally and just as credibly they see the garden both as it seemed
and as it suggests belated growth and renewal. Stars and garden
work together symbolically to suggest neither a burgeoning of
young love nor the permanent improbability of all love, but rather
the mutual emotional rejuvenation made accessible by mutually
suffering for illusions. The suffering which such unnatural careers
imply makes Pip's and Estella's eventual love for each other as
natural as the mist's lifting from the stars or the garden's display-
ing at this late date a second growth of ivy " growing green on
low quiet mounds of ruin " (p. 490; see pp. 490-493).
By way of partial recapitulation, let me remind the reader that
this starlit garden is part of our general discussion of the values
of light in the book-whether starlight, candle-light, or firelight.
The last of these remains; and I think it accurate to say that
firelight is easily the most prevalent and important symbol in
Great Expectations.
Firelight is always the atmosphere which signals truth or reality,
as distinct from the candle-lit atmosphere typical of the poorly
seen and illusory. This is why I have said that the symbolic task
of Pip and Magwitch (as well as of Miss Havisham and Estella)
is to re-kindle human truth in their lives, and it is also why
humanly constant Joe is said to be more at home in his working
clothes around the kitchen fire or the blacksmith's forge than
imprisoned in his Sunday clothes and visiting either village or
city. When Joe tells little Pip how he married Mrs. Joe and
gladly assumed responsibility for her infant brother, and how he
prefers to suffer the inconveniences imposed upon him by Mrs.
Joe, rather than to fight back and take the risk of causing her
as much pain as his father inflicted upon his mother, he is notably
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poking and stirring the fire all the while, and thereby-as I hope
to establish-letting us know that such selflessness is the moral
burden of the novel (pp. 45-49). Again, after Pip has delivered
himself of some splendid lies in describing his first visit to Satis
House, he refers to the fire in a way that appears quite gratuitous
except as symbol: " 'Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like
to tell you something'" (p. 69) . And when he has told Joe that
he lied, Pip penitently sits " down in the ashes at [Joe's] feet "
(p. 70). Joe is hereby made into a sort of smithy-confessor, the
center and symbol of truth.
Since Joe and the symbolic forge-fire are the moral constants of
the novel, it is ironic that Herbert Pocket should label Pip " ' the
Harmonious Blacksmith'" (p. 179); for Joe's is the only har-
monious nature, as he unconsciously shows in bidding farewell to
Pip after an embarrassing encounter in London:
" You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet
anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood
among friends. It ain't that I am proud, but that I want to be right,
as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I'm wrong out of
the forge, the kitchen, or off the meshes. You won't find half so much
fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in
my hand.... You won't find half so much fault in me if, supposing
as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in
at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old
anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I'm awful
dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last.
And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!" (pp.
226-227)
Just as he swings his hammer to the tune of " Old Clem" (pp.
95, 108), so Joe here harmoniously " ' beat[s] out something nigh
the rights of this ' " distinction between " ' what is private, and
beknown, and understood among friends,"' and the role which
" ' these clothes ' " force upon him; and significantly he issues an
invitation to return to the forge if ever Pip should wish to do so.
As we have seen, Pip has great need of such a return. One other
conclusion to be drawn here is that Joe knows himself-is in
harmony with himself-whereas Pip is all wrong. This is why,
when Magwitch reveals himself, Pip says that the news set his
" heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action " (p.
323); and-further to justify Dickens' listening to Bulwer-
Lytton-it is why Estella retains the smithy metaphor as the
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book ends: "' I have been bent and broken, but-I hope-into
a better shape'" (p. 492). Her husband, Bentley Drummle, is
apparently so named for a reason. It can be seen, then, that the
association of Joe with truth, with natural humanity, and with
forge-fire is symbolically much more important than might be
inferred from such typical platitudes as that the forge was " the
glowing road to manhood and independence " (p. 107), and that
" there was no fire like the forge fire and the kitchen fire at home "
(p. 275). These statements are clear enough,6 but one requires
the symbolic underpinning in order to see what motivates them
psychologically; to see, for example, why Dickens chose to have
Jaggers make his announcement of Pip's illusory expectations not
by the light of the forge or of the kitchen fire, but by the light of
a single candle in the tomb-like state parlor (p. 138).
The accurate and humanly valuable revelations-those which
serve not only to develop more clearly the group of persons
central to the plot, but to expose bit by bit their interdependence
-invariably come by firelight. Firelight becomes so pervasive, in
fact, that it is probably at least as accurate to speak of its asso-
ciational value as of its symbolic value. " 'I have been think-
ing,' " Herbert says to Pip, " ' since we have been talking with our
feet on this fender, that Estella cannot surely be a condition of
your inheritance, if she was never referred to by your guardian' "
(pp. 252-258). This is the sort of insight into the real state of
affairs that comes time and again by the fireside. " As we contem-
plated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to realize
this . . . Capital sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets,"
says Pip (p. 255) -surely a fine image summarizing the truth seen
in the fire as well as the complacent illusion that Pip shares with
the five little gravestones. Again, it is when Pip, Estella, and Miss
Havisham are " seated by the fire," and while Miss Havisham and
Estella are " looking down at the fire," that they both realize for
the first time what a " ' hard and thankless ' " woman Estella is,
even "C' on the hearth where she was reared ' " (pp. 308-311).
Both women appear to see-in the fire-Miss Havisham's in-
fluence as the reason for Estella's coldness; and we cannot help
seeing how Pip's expectations have similarly turned him coldly
from Joe's warmth.
'For Pip's plain statements of the " Joe qualities "--the virtues which Pip and the
others come to value-see pp. 71, 102, 108, 112, 288, among other references.
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From this point on, Miss Havisham's attention is repeatedly
given to the fire, rather than to thoughts of the wronged self
whom she sees in her mirror; and the result is that she warms
to other people in an attempt to atone for what she has done to
Pip and Estella. Thus, when Pip asks her to help Herbert, she
considers his request after "with[drawing] her eyes from me, and
turn[ing] them on the fire" (p. 365; see also pp. 401, 403). The
value of fire as symbolic of a wish to belong to others is fully
apparent in Miss Havisham's case when we remember her final
suffering. Pip says, " I saw her seated in the ragged chair upon
the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards me. In the
[next]moment ... I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the
same moment I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of
fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above
her head as she was high " (p. 407). This is a splendid merging of
the frightening witch-like Miss Havisham into the pathetically
human Miss Havisham symbolically purified by fire and begging
forgiveness of Pip, whom she has wronged by using him. Pip's
own involvement in her guilt-and his own need for forgiveness--
are manifest in his being severely burned as he attempts to save
her (pp. 407-409) .8
Immediately following this episode, and while Herbert is dress-
ing the burns of his gradually purified friend, the two of them get
onto the familiar subject of Magwitch's safety. They talk " more
by the light of the fire than by the outer light" (p. 410), and
slowly put together the pieces of Magwitch's life, until Pip asks
Herbert-for reasons which have no practical basis at all-` can
you see me best by the light of the window, or the light of the
fire? ' " Herbert's answer-" 'By the firelight' "-prepares us for
the revelatory deduction which their discussion has led Pip to:
" ' the man we have in hiding down the river, is Estella's Father'"
(p. 413).
Perhaps the most elaborately arranged revelation is Magwitch's
7Th1at Miss Havisham has indeed switched her attention from herself to others is
appropriately communicated by the mirror symbol. She says to Pip: " 'until I saw
in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what
I had done fin setting you to love Estella in vain] "' (pp. 404-405).
8Interestingly, when Pip first supposed himself to see Miss Havisham hanging, his
sight had just been blurred by " frosty light " (p. 64; above, p. 270). At this late stage,
however, his second hallucination (p. 407) is followed by the sight of Miss Havisham
in towering flame, running to his embrace. The difference between cold candle-light
and purifying firelight again appears evident.
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identifying himself as Pip's benefactor. All the imagery of their
first encounter is revived so dramatically that one is tempted to
speak of certain images as constituting a " Magwitch motif." Just
as, in Pip's youth, " the marsh winds made the fire glow and glare,
[and Pip] thought [he] heard the voice outside, of the man with
the iron on his leg who had sworn [Pip] to secrecy, declaring that
he couldn't and wouldn't starve until to-morrow, but must be fed
now " (p. 11); and just as Pip notes the beacon and the gibbet as
the only objects upright against a background of prison-ship,
river, and red-black sky (p. 5; above, p. 269); so the same scene
operatically re-announces Pip's fellow-prisoner, in a setting of
"mud,' of " shipwreck and death ": "[Our lodgings were] exposed
to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the wind
rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges
of cannon or breakings of a sea. .. . I might have fancied myself
in a storm-beaten light-house . . . the staircase lamps were
blown out . . . the lamps in the court were blown out, and . . .
the lamps on the bridge and the shore were shuddering, and
I . . the coal fires in barges on the river were being carried away
before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain " (p. 318). Mud,
wrecked ships, wind, river, black coal, red fire, cannon signifying
a convict on the loose, Pip's imprisonment in a light-house that
guides the sailor Magwitch home, association of the light-house
with the gibbet that awaits Magwitch and with the death that is
Pip's and Magwitch's expectations-the parallels are brilliantly
clear: once more " the man with the iron on his leg " approaches,
and again he " must be fed now." Then, standing at the top of
the dark stairs with a single lamp in his hand, and finally allowing
Magwitch to come within that light (p. 319), Pip in his dramati-
cally lighted reunion reminds us of Magwitch and Compeyson
symbolically united by vivid torchlight on the marshes (pp. .37-
39). The light symbolically includes Pip, too, as we see from
Wopsle's recollection of the marsh torches blended with his
description of Pip's and Compeyson's sitting together in the
theater (p. 391). Finally, on this occasion, Magwitch shocks Pip
with his revelation. After setting fire to the two pound-notes with
which Pip tries to repay him, Magwitch " got up, and stood at the
side of the fire." His " boot began to steam; but, he neither looked
at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at me," says Pip, remem-
bering how once more the truth had come out by firelight (p.
323) .

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This symbol is yet more extensive. As the narrative unfolds,
more and more of the principals are imagined or seen in the glow
of firelight, against a black night. Thus Pip working at the forge
at night seems to see " Estella's face in the fire, with her pretty
hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me." Then, he
says, " I would look towards those panels of black night in the
wall . .. and would fancy that I saw her just drawing her face
away." Thereafter, home made him feel drearier and more
ashamed than ever (pp. 108-109). Again, when Pip first sees
Molly, Jaggers' housekeeper, he says, " I had been to see Macbeth
0 . . and . . . her face looked to me as if it were all disturbed by
fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out of the Witches' caldron "
(p. 214) -a passage associating this " witch " with her husband
Magwitch, and with the witch-like Miss Havisham. Years later,
speaking of his frustrated love for Estella, Pip says that " it was
impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched
hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my
boyhood-from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first
made me ashamed of home and Joe-from all those visions that
had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on
the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the
wooden window of the forge and flit away. In a word, it was
impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present,
from the innermost life of my life " (p. 238). Then when he is
driving past Newgate with Estella, Pip is aware of their coming
" into a sudden glare of gas," so that he is as " dazed . . . as if
[he] had been in Lightning " (p. 273; see also pp. 240-241). The
same sensation, coming upon him later in Molly's presence,
enables Pip-or forces him-to sense that Molly is Estella's
mother. He does this by intuiting the association between
gestures, faces, flowing hair, lightning-like firelight, dark (even
caldron-black) backgrounds, and the prison aura-all these
image-symbols on the one hand-and the two women on the
other hand (p. 396).
By virtue of this contrast between fire and blackness, Dickens
establishes a symbolic link among three closely related characters:
Estella, Molly, and Miss Havisham. It remains for him to bring
Pip and Magwitch together and to link them with the three
women. This he does beautifully by recapitulating the very early
imagery of red-black sky, hanged convict, and river (p. 5; above,
Joseph A. Hynes 291

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pp. 269, 290). Thus, as Pip and Magwitch try to escape literally
in the same boat, even as they have all along sailed in the same
symbolic prison-ship, they see " the red sun . . . in a purple haze,
fast deepening into black; and there was the solitary flat marsh."
Then, in a short passage that succeeds in joining Pip and Mag-
witch both to each other and to the women, Pip says: " It was
very cold, and a collier coming by us, with her galley-fire smoking
and flaring, looked like a comfortable home. The night was dark
as it would be until morning; what light we had, seemed to
come more from the river than the sky, as the oars in their
dipping struck at a few reflected stars" (p. 446). The red-black
contrast is sufficient to close the circle of intimately related
principals, all of them much in need of love and forgiveness.
What is more important about this passage, however, is its
firmly establishing Joe as the moral norm. That is, not only are
we symbolically shown again that reality is close at hand in the
light reflected in the river which Pip and his fellow-prisoner have
sailed, and in the blazing red fire surrounded by coal and night,
as distinct from the vague starlight cast from a distance; and
not only do we see that Pip's selfless interest in Magwitch has
symbolically restored the fire stolen from both their lives by their
expectations; but we see that the firelight shining out in token of
the restoration of these five principals is the very light which
Pip saw years ago as a frightened boy on the dark marshes:
"c when I neared home the light on the spit of sand off the point
on the marshes was gleaming against a black nightsky, and Joe's
furnace was flinging a path of fire across the road " (pp. 92-23).
The conclusion of novel and article alike is, then, that five
prisoners, linked by the evil which they inflict upon one anothe
as mutual victims of inhumanly illusory expectations, come even-
tually in their prison-ship back to the simple "home" truth of
this novel-that the links which Joe blazingly forges against the
outer darkness are fortunately requisite to human freedom.
University of Oregon

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Image and Symbol in Great Expectations

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Image and Symbol in Great Expectations

Author(s): Joseph A. Hynes

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Perhaps no book makes clearer than does Dickens' Great

258 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectations"

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2 Because this is a rather detailed textual analysis, I have decided to refer to

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262 Image and Symbol in " Great Expectations"

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" Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror....

These " pipsqueaks " resemble those of a small trapped animal

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