GREAT LITERARY LADY: Miss Havisham
Literary ladies need not be nubile and sweet. Charles Dickens’s iconic and embittered Miss Havisham, is a ghostly personification of woman’s destruction by man, but behind the fading victim lies a steely manipulator.
We first meet her at home, in Satis House, where time stopped the moment she was cast aside on her wedding day. Her desolate, cobwebbed setting becomes an extension of her phantom-like figure. She is ‘yellow skin and bone’, a mere silhouette against the vulgar social climbers of Dickens’s 19th century England.
The young Pip is entrusted as a playmate for Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella, upon whom the wallowing guardian has placed the responsibility of causing male heartbreak in revenge for her own. But her plans are disturbed when she finds a soft spot for Pip, and her internal conflict of love and hate, pride and humility, becomes more destructive to those around her, most notably Pip and Estella. The former is ordered to ‘love her, love her, love her!’; the latter directed to ‘break his heart’.
Like Pip, the reader can just about see a flicker of the remains of a heart within this broken woman. It is this acknowledgement of humanity from another, coupled with her own timely acceptance of the damaging effects of her teachings upon Estella, that causes Havisham’s fiery end.
Somewhere between villainess and antiheroine, shrouded in wilting bridal lace, Miss Havisham continues to haunt and fascinate.
We first meet her at home, in Satis House, where time stopped the moment she was cast aside on her wedding day. Her desolate, cobwebbed setting becomes an extension of her phantom-like figure. She is ‘yellow skin and bone’, a mere silhouette against the vulgar social climbers of Dickens’s 19th century England.
The young Pip is entrusted as a playmate for Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella, upon whom the wallowing guardian has placed the responsibility of causing male heartbreak in revenge for her own. But her plans are disturbed when she finds a soft spot for Pip, and her internal conflict of love and hate, pride and humility, becomes more destructive to those around her, most notably Pip and Estella. The former is ordered to ‘love her, love her, love her!’; the latter directed to ‘break his heart’.
Like Pip, the reader can just about see a flicker of the remains of a heart within this broken woman. It is this acknowledgement of humanity from another, coupled with her own timely acceptance of the damaging effects of her teachings upon Estella, that causes Havisham’s fiery end.
Somewhere between villainess and antiheroine, shrouded in wilting bridal lace, Miss Havisham continues to haunt and fascinate.