An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny inGreat Expectations
An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character
and her tragic destiny in Great Expectations
by Mandy Huang
Great Expectations written by Charles Dickens is regarded as a masterpiece of English novels. It narrates the story of Pip, an orphan boy who has good luck and great expectations, and then loses both his luck and expectations. The main characters invented by Charles Dickens in the book have displayed their own charms completely because of the extraordinary wealth of Charles Dickens’ invention as exhibited in the number and variety of the characters introduced into his novels, his amazing keenness of observation and his descriptive power, and also his creative ability of humor.
Sometimes in Dickens’ novel, the protagonist is described comparatively feeble, while some secondary characters, particularly those with strange spirit are portrayed vividly. The female character Miss Havisham belongs to such figures. She is one of the figures portrayed quite successfully in the book. So in this essay,the focus is Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny instead of the hero Pip.In Great
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By Mandy Huang
An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny inGreat Expectations
Expectations, Miss Havisham and her strange dress, life style and behavior attract the readers greatly. Most people regard her as a hateful person. However, she is a tragic person worthy of sympathy. And the causes of this tragic character will be analyzed through studying the society, family and Miss Havisham herself. In this way, we can have an objective and all-round understanding of this image.
Born in an aristocratic family, Young
Havisham is very proud and not truly compassionate and charitable who hates her poor relatives .On one hand she retorts those relatives who are fawning, insincere and just in an attempt to cheat her money sarcastically and exposes their lies ironically. On the other hand, she considers her cousin Matthew a man of integrity and honesty and kindness. Therefore Miss Havisham follows Pip’s advice and leaves a large legacy to Matthew and his son as a subsidy. Her life is totally changed by a single tragic event: her jilting by Compeyson on their wedding day. From that moment on, Miss Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak. With a kind of manic and obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as
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By Mandy Huang
An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny inGreat Expectations
a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men. Miss Havisham becomes a rich, eccentric old dowager living in a rotting mansion called Satis House. This not only ruined her normal life, but also ruined her stepdaughter Estella and Pip who loved Estella. Thus it seems that Miss Havisham is a hateful image, but in fact her revenge action cannot hide her kindness. She was very kind to Pip and arranged for his future. All in all, Miss Havisham is a lifelike image because of the complexity and richness of her character.
The social influence on Miss Havisham’s tragic destiny is too apparent to be neglected. Great Expectations is set in Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the nation. Although the Victorian Age meets a material prosperity, the polarization of wealth is widening and the class contradiction is becoming more serious, and this result in the corruption of money to human’s relationship. Marriage, love, courts, jails are based on this. Also,The Victorian Age is a male-centered society, the idea that women should be subjective to men roots in women’s mind. Miss Havisham is just the victim of this society. She is abandoned on her wedding
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By Mandy Huang
An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny inGreat Expectations
day, but she keeps the room like the day she got married, while on the other hand she tries every means to revenge men. Bearing these two conflictive thoughts in mind, Havisham certainly fails to live her own life out of the control or influence from male. She suffered greatly from the pain of love and her quest for revenge. As an ordinary woman, Miss Havisham can’t be independent from men and her fragile souls make her unable to envisage sufferings in life bravely .Thus the tragedy of Miss Havisham is inevitable.
Family also plays a vital role in Great Expectations, Biddy and Joe’ s warm and harmony family, Wemmick’s castle away from the noise of secular and Matthew’s family. Compared with the dark and deserted Satis House of Miss Havisham, this has highlighted Miss Havisham’s miserable fate. For a pretty young lady with high status, her jilting by Compeyson was a dishonored, disgraceful thing and also an unprecedented setback. Therefore the influence of family environment, the social norms have made her unable to bear the lover’s betrayal. In order to avoid worldly disdain, and also because all the illusions that has
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By Mandy Huang
An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny inGreat Expectations
shattered, she chose to be self-enclosed and isolated. This is a tragedy caused by society and family as well.
No matter how great the society and
family have influenced Miss Havisham’s destiny, her personality played the most important role in her life. Miss Havisham was a spoilt child; it was the pride that hurt her. Because of her pride, she discarded the advice of relatives and idolized her lover perfectly; and also because of her pride, she could not accept the tragic love. So she refused to accept other people’s sympathy and help, instead, she hid in the darkness of closed minds which cause she can’t cast off her heart shackles. A failure in her life destroys her faith and also arouses her strong desire for revenge. And the fire of revenge is burning, which hurt the others and also make the ultimate destruction of herself.
By describing the image of Miss
Havisham, Dickens has showed us the contradictions and the conflicts of the capitalist society in Victorian era. He has disclosed the corruption of money in the upper-class society. Through the analysis of society, family and Miss Havisham herself, it reveals the weak
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By Mandy Huang
An analysis of Miss Havisham’s character and her tragic destiny inGreat Expectations
position of women. Itsets people thinking that in a male-centered society, women should be self-respective, self-confident, self-reliant and self-developed; otherwise women would be in the subordinate status in perpetuity, or even undergo self-destruction.
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第二篇：英文读后感《远大前程》
Reading report
《Great Expectations》
【England】Charles John Huffam Dickens
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Impression of the book“Great Expectations”
With so many famous masterpieces on the booklist, it is really a pretty hard job to choose one to read first. After much hesitation and deeply thought, I finally decided to borrow Great Expectations from the small library.
Great Expectations is about love, family, and rejection as Pip and Miss Havisham have both been rejected in certain ways. Pip is a boy around 13 years old, easy to fright, and goes through his life suffering lots of sadness. He is in love with a girl named Estella and wants her to find his love, but for him being shy and not showing himself to her, it makes it very hard for him.
Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens’s early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father’s bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoepolish warehouse. Pip meets an escaped convict, Magwitch, and gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives.
When Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor he snobbishly abandons his friends for London society and his“great expectations”.
I set up my mind to select it for the reason that I have read a brief
introduction of this masterpiece in my high school English textbook before. In 2
addition, a Tale of Two Cities which is also written by Charles Dickens, the outstanding and special English writer, left me a wonderful and deep impression, when I finished reading the marvelous story.
Of course, Great Expectations didn’t let me down, either. What’s more, the whole structure of the novel is well and elaborately designed. The plot is
extremely attractive and full of unexpected twists. Quite a few characters have a distinguishable personality. Moreover, those words and sentences are so beautiful and meaningful that I even took them down carefully in my notebook. By reading them no less than three times, I have learned not only some new phrases and sentences, but also a philosophy of life.
Among the characters, which impressed me most are not Pip and Estella who should be regarded as the leading roles, but Joe and Magwitch. I feel awfully sorry that I was not brave enough to read the original edition that is as thick as a brick. Otherwise, I may appreciate Joe and Magwitch more. Yes, they are not the main characters in the novel. However, what they said and what they did deeply touched me. It’s interesting, isn’t it? They are quite the
opposite guys. One is a totally good man without the least bit of wickedness while the other is a prisoner who is believed to have committed every evil.
I believe that everyone who reads the book is to like Joe. When he talked about his heavy drinking father who hit him a lot, he said he had a lot of love. Faced with his rude wife, he would rather seem a bit weak or foolish than stand 3
up to her and fight for himself. Knowing peacockish Pip was ashamed of his uneducated manners, he left sadly and quietly. The world rushes on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness. But when he was informed of Pip’s illness, he immediately came to take good care of Pip. He is always contributing everything and requiring nothing. Such a man is Joe, kind, tolerant and selfless. "Nothing is so mild and gentle as courage, nothing so cruel and pitiless as cowardice," says a wise author.
However, why do I appreciate Magwitch, the bad guy? You may wonder. Indeed, Magwitch did a lot of evil things when he was young. But how can you be unmoved when you get to know that the old man kept himself going just by thinking of the boy who once did him a small favor？ He lost his only daughter and Pip had no parents, so he considered himself as the boy’s second father, making up his mind to help his dear boy became a gentleman. He did every kind of job and led a hard life in Australia. At last he made a big fortune and promised himself that all the money would go to Pip. He could have led a better life in Australia ,but Ihe chose to go back to London .with the simple intention of seeing Pip, he went back at the risk of being hanged! “whatever the fault he had from the start, remember, reader, he had a good heart.” Joe used these words to describe his father. But I think these words can better describe
Magwitch. He lived with the fear of death all his life. Who shuts love out, in turn shall be shut out from love. However, thankfully, because Pip finally realized his good heart, his ending was peaceful.
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Dickens has Pip as the writer and first person narrator of this account of his life's experiences, and the entire story is understood to have been written as a retrospective, rather than as a present tense narrative or a diary or journal. Still, though Pip "knows" how all the events in the story will turn out, he uses only very subtle foreshadowing so that we learn of events only when the Pip in the story does. Pip does, however, use the perspective of the bitter lessons he's learned to comment acidly on various actions and attitudes in his earlier life.
I know how to fully understand this novel, twice is far from enough. Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, Biddy even Mr Wemmick, every single character has a story that is well worth my attention. I love this novel so much that I am determined to read the original edition one day. Believe me. But before that day comes, I will see the movie Great Expectations first.
Search for knowledge, read more, sit on your front porch and admire the view without paying attention to your needs.
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