TWISTED TALE, SILENT TELLER: MISS HAVISHAM IN "GREAT EXPECTATIONS"

Author(s): EVELYN M. ROMIG

Source: Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1 (MARCH 1988), pp. 18-22
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45292479
Accessed: 02-01-2024 12:56 +00:00

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18 DICKENS QUARTERLY
TWISTED TALE, SILENT TELLER: MISS HAVISHAM IN GREAT
EXPECTATIONS

EVELYN M. ROMIG

storyteller: author or character, old or young, man or woman - the

speaker who holds us mesmerized by the power of the tale. For instance,
So speaker storyteller: often who in our author holds study us or mesmerized of character, narrative, old by we the or lose power young, sight of man the of tale. the or woman figure For instance, of - the the

I cannot think long about Pip without hearing the voice of Miss Havisham.
From the mists of Great Expectations and my own memory she rises terrify-
ingly, dressed in her tattered bridal finery like "some ghastly waxwork . . .
no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes . . . and a weird smile
that ha[s] a kind of boast in it. (Ch. 8)' She overshadows all the action of the
novel, shaping the reader's expectations as she shapes Pip's. Imagine my
surprise then, on turning back to the story with this paper in mind, when I
discovered that Miss Havisham in fact tells almost nothing of her own story.
Storytelling she most certainly does, but not of the factual, autobiographical
sort. I felt a bit like Pip, watching my own narrative expectations crumble to
dust. So what is happening in Great Expectations ? Why does Dickens, most
deliberate of artists, seem to seat us at the feet of Miss Havisham - what
does he want us (or Pip) to hear?
First of all, Miss Havisham does not tell her own story because the facts
of the tale no longer concern her. Her narrative centers around her interpretation
of those facts and her need to convince her hearers to act on that interpretation.
Consider the difference in emotional impact of Herbert Pocket's matter-of-fact
discussion of Miss Havisham' s courtship -

"There is not doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her
affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from
her . . . The marriage day was fixed ... the day came, but not the
bridgegroom." (ch. 22)

- with her own impassioned recounting to Pip:

"I'll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-
humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against
the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as
I did!" (ch. 29)

The power of her reaction to betrayal, decades after it happened, grips Pip
and the reader far more than the facts of the case warrant.
Miss Havisham is not concerned with repeating her tale; she has visibly
frozen the salient facts in the stopped clocks, the darkened house, the worn
bridal finery, and the rat-eaten bride's cake. What she does repeat is her
vision of love and its effects to young and impressionable listeners, principally
Estella. Estella defines herself as audience to storyteller: "I who have sat on
this same heart on the little stool that is even now beside you there, learning

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DICKENS QUARTERLY 19
your lessons and looking up into your face, even when your face was strange
and frightened me!" (ch 38). And the story works, for she speaks of her
acceptance of Miss Havisham's version of reality:

"Or," said Estella, " - which is a nearer case - if you had taught her,
from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might,
that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her
enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted
you and would else blight her; - if you had done this, and then, for a
purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she couldnot
do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?" (ch. 38)

Estella accepts Miss Havisham's story and is molded by it precisely because

she misses what the other listener, Pip, comes to realize: that it is not the
betrayal and the jilting that has crippled the hysterical old spinster, but her
deliberate choice to make that betrayal the central fact of her life. Her betrothal
is not only the beginning of her victimization. She wills herself, for a variety
of reasons, to repeat that role endlessly. Why? She wants, according to J.
Hillis Miller, "to crystallize her grief and bereavement into an eternal moment
of shock and sorrow, like those of Faulkner's characters who remained im-
mobilized with their backs to the future, facing some terrible event in the
past which has determined the meaning of their lives."2 She wants to be
revenged and is willing to wait, continuing her role as victim, until a suitable
avenger (Estella) can be shaped. And she wants to make sure that she does
not forget, does not heal, for then the enormity of the crime against her would
be lessened; her hurt would become merely human rather than enormous and
mythic in proportion. No wonder that Pip realized even as a boy that here
was "the intensity of a mind mortally hurt and diseased" (ch. 38).
Like Estella, Pip is carefully chosen as a listener and as appropriate raw
material. He is not without family, like Estella, but his family ties are fragile.
He is already critical of the values with which he has been raised - not of
Joe yet, but of the hypocrisy of his sister, Pumblechook, Wopsle, Biddy's
aunt, and most of those who surround him. He is untried by the outer world
but about to embark and make his way in it. And he is wrestling with his
denial of his heritage, slight though it is, and carries a heavy cargo of guilt
over his separation from old relationships. Add to that his shame at having
chosen an impossible object for his love and his knowledge that attaining her
would only add to his misery, and Pip is ripe to listen to the world according
to Miss Havisham.
And central though her story is, we must remember that Miss Havisham
is just a part of the interwoven narrations of the novel. In fact, Pip's journey
toward maturity is marked by his increasing ability to analyze and discard or
accept the versions of reality that surround and bombard him. There are the
opening paragraphs of the novel, and his fantasizing about the character of
his mother based on her epitaph "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above." There
is his sister who brought him up "by hand," casting herself as domestic martyr
and put-upon wife. There is Mr. Pumblechook, self-styled "founder" of Pip's

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20 DICKENS QUARTERLY
fortunes. There is Mrs. Pocket and her fantasies of missing a titled marriage,
Wemmick of two separate realities - the office world and Walworth, and
Jaggers whose world is limited to facts, affidavits, and motives. And there
is the crushing reality of Magwitch's world. "Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made
a gen'leman on you! It's me wot done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I
earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as
ever I spec'lated and got rich, you should get rich . . . Look'ee here, Pip.
I'm your second father. You're my son - more to me nor any son" (ch. 39).
The mists of the marshes are mirrored in the fogs of false appearance, self-de-
ception, and partial truths that pass for communication in Pip's world. Or,
perhaps more accurately, they are like the half-light of Satis House that throws
little illumination and many weird and misleading shadows.
Miss Havisham is emblematic of what each of these storytellers is doing:
creating in his or her world according to whomever not worlds but prisons,
not possibilities but limitations. Newgate, Satis House, and Barnard's Inn are
just visible reminders of the verbal and attitudinal prisons that confine the
characters. Mrs. Joe's communication is not more impaired after the blow to
her head when she can only scribble on a slate than when she deliberately
tuned out the needs of Pip and Joe. All that Mrs. Pocket needs to know can
be found in the pages of a single social register, and two words ("What
Larks!") sufficiently encompass Joe's need to write. I have always loved Joe's
scanning the newspapers to find the two letters JO together - all he needed
to know of the news; is not that essentially the same missed communication
as Miss Havisham scanning the world of love and seeing only men who betray
and women who suffer?
So Pip is faced with some troubling choices. He can freeze reality at a
point of his own choosing (like Miss Havisham) and define his life only in
those terms. And for a long time he does that, interpreting every event and
communication as a reinforcement of his theory that Miss Havisham is his
patron and intends him for Estella. But Pip cannot stop the clocks - or, to
be precise, the footsteps on the stairs. The reality of Magwitch forces reapprai-
sal. Possibly, he can meet the obsession of Magwitch to mold him with an
equal obsession to escape him, even if it means "going for a soldier" (ch.
41). He might try to turn back to his own past and return to Joe and Biddy
at the forge. All prisons.
Or - and what a modern approach Dickens has - Pip can enter the mists,
the unknowable; "in the destructive element immerse," to borrow from Joseph
Conrad. And immerse himself he does. Literally in the elements of the river
and the mists, the ghastly fire that consumes Miss Havisham and the heat of
the lime kiln and figuratively in the elements of true communication -
flexibility, forgiveness, humility, and the risks that come with caring freely.
The principal scene of Pip's immersion (and I mean for that word to carry
its baptismal associations) is his final conversation with Miss Havisham. His
awakening and growth has been gradual (hers, too); here is the first and most
significant of several vital conversations that lead to the novel's conclusion.
Pip has learned the simple validity of forgiveness. He does not need to swear
on Magwitch's Bible or write "I forgive her" on Miss Havisham's tablet.

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DICKENS QUARTERLY 21
"Oh, Miss Havisham," said I, "I can do it now. There have been sore mistakes;
and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and
direction far too much, to be bitter with you" (ch. 49). He has learned when
words are the least part of communication: "I know not how to answer or
comfort her." "No matter with what other words we parted; we parted" (ch.
49). And Pip has learned the real lesson that Miss Havisham has to teach -
not the one in her story, but the lesson of her life.

That she had done a grievious thing in taking an impressionable child to

mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and
wounded pride found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting
out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion,
she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences;
that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and
must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew
equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her
punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth
on which she was placed, in the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse,
the vanity of un worthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been
curses in this world? (ch. 49)

A significant tension, then, in Great Expectations is between the destructive

danger of stasis and the affirmative power of process, and Dickens structurally
reinforces affirmation by subjecting the story itself to process: it is retold and
amended by different narrators, reworked as one teller's version informs
another's. Dramatically, the tale moves quickly, for it is a mystery that Pip
has set out to solve: who is his patron, who are Estella's parents? When the
focus is on the novel as mystery, the factual story is foremost, the fact of
Magwitch as Estella's father and so forth.
This quest for factual solutions becomes more obliquely Pip's quest for
truth, and such quest imagery leads us into the fairytale dimension of the
novel. As a youth, Pip sees his life in terms of a fairy tale quest: "it could
not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to
restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the
clocks a-going and the cold hearth ablazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy
the vermin - in short, do all the shining deeds of the young knight of
romance, and marry the Princess" (ch. 29). Pip's ecstatic rhetoric is supported
by the actuality of the gloomy, enchanted Satis House, like the mansion in
Dombey and Son under an enchanting spell, a sort of curse - but that of a
real woman's obstinacy rather than a supernatural one.
Fairy tales, of course, are related to myth, and mythmaking is the activity
of Miss Havisham. The fairy tale curse on the villain assumes mythic propor-
tions in her shaping hands. She dedicates her whole life to a scenario that
will "finish the curse" on her betrayer with her death; she sees herself in terms
of sacrifice, an object to replace the decayed wedding cake on the bridal table
and to be eternally consumed by death as she has feasted on sorrow and
revenge.

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22 DICKENS QUARTERLY
Miss Havisham' s curse is in fact so powerful that it absorbs the curser as
well as the cursed in hatred and destruction. She has no interest in being
rational, and the power of her story (like the power of her curse) comes from
intuitive feeling and unbridled emotion. And Miss Havisham differs from the
other storytellers in the novel in that her consciousness is exclusively mythical
- her perception of reality is as circumscribed as her perception of time.
Her task is convering event into symbol, elevating personal tragedy into the
realm of myth. Such action is a form of self-aggrandizement, and willing the
self to be larger than normal human scale carries a high price of distortion
and isolation.
In literature, however, this conversion and elevation of event into symbol
is poetry-making, and it is this contradiction that makes Miss Havisham so
fascinating. Mythmaking is only destructive in her extreme application of it
to her actual life, and in her desire for Estella and Pip to participate in the
pattern of revenge and retribution. Poetry and myth are also, we must re-
member, the tools of the artist: Dickens is writing, it seems, a caution to the
artist as well as to the living person - that one should not fall into the trap
of exalting the actual and the trivial into grandeur or tragedy or myth while
ignoring the more important demands of truth, especially the central truth
that all human experience changes and is therefore finally unknowable. Great
Expectations , then, is about the growth of art as well as the growth of self,
and that is why the figures of the storyteller and listener are so appropriate,
dramatically and symbolically. Miss Havisham and Pip are participants in a
process that is ongoing and involves novelist and reader as well: the act of
making meaning - of the past, of art, of the world, and of oneself.

Howard Payne University

NOTES

^Charles Dickens Great Expectations ( Oxford : Oxford UP, 1973) 53. References to this edition
are. cited hereafter in the text by chapters.
ROM Charles Dickens: The World of H is Novels {C ambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959), 256.

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