So in one way Great Expectations has a very specific historical setting, a very specific
geographical setting in the marshes of Kent and then in London. But it’s one that’s
constantly filtered through the prism of Pip’s consciousness and what you see there is a
very strange, often uncanny set of forces at work, full of strange repetitions and hauntings and doublings.
So Great Expectations has a very complex relationship
to time and to the past. If you think of Miss Havisham for example, she’s somebody who
wants to control time, she wants to arrest everything at a particular moment. All the
clocks have been stopped at the moment that she is abandoned, and she wants never to have
to progress forward and that creates this weird, uncanny space, deeply kind of Gothic
space that erupts within the book so that suddenly Pip, you know, who’s progressing
onwards in his childhood is suddenly pulled back to this strange archaic, traumatic past
that’s Miss Havisham’s. In the course of the book you see Pip constantly returning
to Satis House, constantly going back there and that’s a double repetition, it’s both
that Miss Havisham can’t move on but somehow Pip can never move on. And so he constantly
returns there and returns there in order he hopes to move on, to move on to some sexual
fulfilment with Estella. But as far as we know there is no sexual fulfilment in this
book, it’s full of unconsummated relationships and the symbol of that above all is Miss Havisham’s
house and Pip’s compulsive repetitions in his coming back to it.
So repetition is everywhere in Great Expectations. Because all the events of the book we see
through Pip’s consciousness it means that we get a pattern in the book of Pip constantly
seeking to break out or move forward in his life and failing, constantly failing. He seems
to find himself again and again in remarkably similar scenes. And so you find that too in
the way that the novel is narrated, so that often there are moments when Pip, for example
the moment he sees Miss Havisham for the first time, there’s an incantatory, repetitious
quality to the way that he represents that to us. And it’s as if the most new thing,
he’s never seen anything like Miss Havisham, is the most shocking, strange thing for a
boy from a forge to see, somehow needs to be caught and reprised within this kind of
writing that takes you back to something that’s already existing. And so her presence reminds
him of things he’s seen before, it reminds him of seeing a corpse at the church or a
waxwork at the fair. And that can stand as a kind of symbol for a much deeper pattern
in the book of narrative repetition, so it’s both a repetition in language but also deeper
repetition within plot and narration.
So one more thing that the Gothic allows Dickens to do in Great Expectations is to explore a deep violence that often seems to saturate
or fill the erotic relationships in the book. So Miss Havisham we know has been violently
betrayed, but like so many of the victims of the book she in her turn becomes an oppressor.
That’s also the case about Pip who’s a victim, we feel sorry for him early on, but
he also can be very cruel to others like Joe, it’s also true about Magwitch, it’s also
true about Estella, and you see that in almost all the erotic and sexual and romantic relationships
of the book. People often think of it as a romantic novel and many adaptations in film
and elsewhere tend to stress the relationship of Pip and Estella. But in many ways the relationship
of Estella and Miss Havisham is equally interesting, so same sex desire can be as important as
that between two people of different sexes. And that clearly in a way Miss Havisham is
in love with Estella, and that that is one of many kind of very unexpected things to
find in a Victorian novel. We find out at the end of the book for example that Estella
is the daughter of Magwitch. Pip is a kind of adopted son of Magwitch, so there’s a
way in which not only is that a perverse relationship in which Estella seems to take pleasure in
causing pain to Pip, and Pip maybe enjoys the pain that she causes him. It’s also,
we find out quite late, almost like an incestuous relationship too. And that’s quite a deep
pattern in the book, one in which eroticism and violence are blended together. So many
of those threads come together in Miss Havisham and that strange, weird Gothic mansion that
she lives in and that releases all this gothic energy around perversity and violence and
sexual desire that is one of the structuring devices of the whole book.
There are several moments of enormous psychological stress for Pip. The moment when he first goes
to Satis House, the moment later when Miss Havisham sets herself on fire and Pip has
to wrestle with her, again, it’s almost like a scene of sexual violence, almost like
a rape scene. And then again climatically the moment that he’s captured by Orlick
who’s his great rival and somehow a strange double of his, and imprisoned at the limekiln,
and his whole life is at stake at that moment. And at that moment it’s like his whole identity
seems to – to disappear or to be vulnerable and Orlick seem – blames him for all the
things that Orlick himself has done. So there you see at moments of the greatest psychological
stress both that Gothic motif of imprisonment, but also the Gothic motif of doubling, both
of them deployed to explore the most extreme kinds of psychological dislocation and suffering.
The high point of the Gothic novel, or the first high point is in the late 18th, early
19th century, and then the mid Victorians feel that this is slightly archaic, old fashioned
kind of form so there’s a way in which the Gothic goes underground as it were. You then
get a big revival of it later in the century. But at the same time it’s constantly present
in novels like Jane Eyre, in Oliver Twist, in Great Expectations, in Barnaby Rudge, in
many of the major Victorian novels. And it’s like the possibility is that at any moment
within a realistic normal everyday world, any door might suddenly open into a Gothic
nightmare. So the Gothic becomes a key prism by which the sheer strangeness of the Victorian
city is viewed.