Guide to life under capitalism in Great Expectations
Charles Dickens lived in times of profound change. The Victorian era was marked by industrialization and the gradual unraveling of values and social structure. In Great Expectations, the old and the new is still in place. There are those who cling to the old order — the high society — and those who remain firmly in their assigned spot without trying to improve their station in life. Naturally, there are also those who try to adapt. Whose strategy works the best in an environment like that? How do you make it in a world that’s in a state of flux?
See your options in parallels
The focal character in Great Expectations is a boy called Pip, a boy from a poor family raised by his older sister in a blacksmith’s house. However, Pip is not the only hero here. There’s also Estella, whose life and station in life stand in parallel to Pip. An orphan, she is also raised by an adoptive mother but in conditions of wealth than poverty. Pushing the parallel further, Pip’s sister doesn’t exactly raise him with love but with terror. On the other hand, Estella is raised by the jilted Miss Havisham with affection that is nevertheless cruel and unloving. Who’s going to do better in life in the cruel, cruel world?
Joe, the blacksmith and Pip’s adoptive father, represents a decent father figure in his life but one that is really quite unambitious. In spite of that, he helps Pip out whenever he can. However, there’s also the annoying Mr. Pumblechook, a corn merchant, who always bumbles his way into the family and tries to play a benefactor while never really benefiting Pip much.
The complexity of the picture in The Great Expectations is truly astounding because the individual characters do actually mirror one another in other characters that conceptually overlap with them. While Estella and Pip are a conceptual pair on the hero-heroine level, each also have their own alter-egos who desire similar things but make different choices. For Estella, it is Biddy, a poor girl who comes to play a romantic interest and eventually a sort of a mother in Pip’s life once she moves into Pip’s house as a help. Pip’s alter-ego is Orlic, a ruffian. Orlic wants to be successful in life. He also wants to be invited to Miss Havisham’s, but unlike Pip, he is stuck and degrades into a lowlife.
Finally, there’s also the criminal Magwitch, who eventually becomes Pip’s secret benefactor, funding his way out of the village to the big city of London. Magwitch makes Pip into a great gentleman and allows him to meet some of his great expectations in life. Then, there’s Mr. Compeyson, the not-secret-but-largely-absent criminal mind that robs Miss Havisham of money and dignity, which puts all the events in the book into motion. The fact that these two are the anti-heroes and are linked is testified to by their epic final battle on the river where Magwitch essentially manages to drown Compeyson although he doesn’t escape the clutch of justice in the end.
The Victorians
There’s a bit of a challenge that we encounter if we try to universalize the experience presented in the book in the fact that the society presented there is Victorian. I mean, duh right? But the contextual clues are superbly intricate and basically impossible to spot unless you know the times very well. I can’t claim superior capacity in understanding the Victorians, but there are two things:
-> The woman’s place was at home. Dickens glorifies heroines that are nourishing mother figures who play it safe. Usually motherless, these heroines must support the hero to their own detriment, they practice self-denial, self-regulation, and selflessness.
-> Men ought to be aggressive and acquisitive. Theirs is the world of money, success, and the public sphere.
-> Overall, the right society is one where the weak support the strong; the female upholds the male.
Side fun fact:
Apparently, the Victorian slang for sex was “spending” and men were supposed to practice sexual economy. No indulgence more than every 7 or 10 days! I wonder if Pip’s sky-high “bills” and overspending meant something else too…
Who’s the winner at the game of life?
The web of mirroring characters allows us to game out the outcomes for the different expectations that are pursued both by characters working with Victorian values and those who aren’t. Clearly, staying put within the old way of life is a bit of a problem. Orlic stays put, and look what happens. He fails. In misplaced revenge, he tries to kill Pip and succumbs to alcohol and crime. It seems like Biddy came out looking the best. Nothing much happens to her, and she seems content. However, I think it is wrong to idealize her. She is just a good girl. The “yes dear” girl. She plays out the submissive Victorian femininity. She never achieves anything and is never asked what it is that she wants. She has no agency in life, and it is a lucky coincidence that her boss marries her instead of Orlic. Joe and Biddy do fine only as long as the word does fine by them. Joe has no answer when his first wife gets murdered. Biddy says yes to everything a man says. Docility certainly doesn’t sound like a recipe for life today. That said, characters who try to do what they want like Pip and Estella do not end up in the best place either. Estella ends up with money and loveless. Pip is sort of stuck between worlds, without money, and loveless.
The only people who seem to make it are the people who mind their own business. Jaggers, the lawyer, and Wemmick, his clerk, pervade the story virtually everywhere. They seem merely instrumental and private; we know next to nothing about them, yet they manage to get things done. Wemmick has a great house, takes care of his parents, facilitates Pip’s charitable business that helps his roommate and eventually even provides Pip himself with a respectable station in life, and even marries a nice poor girl who shelters Magwitch at one point. In the end, when everybody is either dead, on fire, or existentially depressed, it’s Jaggers and Wemmick who merrily skip away into the proverbial sunset. Perhaps there’s great value in the advice that Wemmick hammers into Pip on many occasions to no avail:
“It don’t signify to you with your brilliant look-out, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is, ‘Get hold of portable property.’”
There is also Sasha’s essay:
Comming up on Friday
Dickens, Charles. The Great Expectations.
Hagan, John H. “The Poor Labyrinth: The Theme of Social Injustice in Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations.’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 9, no. 3, 1954, pp. 169–78. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044305.
HOUSTON, GAIL TURLEY. “‘PIP’ AND ‘PROPERTY’: THE (RE)PRODUCTION OF THE SELF IN ‘GREAT EXPECTATIONS.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 24, no. 1, 1992, pp. 13–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532834.
