Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is a melting pot of many themes and types of plots. Class structures and social status are continually in question throughout the novel, most obviously during Pip’s rise to gentle-manhood. He becomes comfortable in his higher station, indulging in privileges reserved for higher society but punished in the lower classes, notably his reckless spending and lack of money sense. Pip benefits due to social stratification in London at the time, and those such privileges afforded to the rich. However, his comfort in this structure is shaken when he learns the source of his wealth: an ex-con, appearing like a ghost from Pip’s childhood. During Magwitch’s revelation scene, Dickens represents him in a haunting manner to emphasize the base fear Pip feels during his process of recognition and understanding; he realizes his expectations no longer coincide with those acceptable in society (and never did).
Dickens structures Pip’s discovery like a typical haunting scene. Pip is describing the awful wind, rain, and darkness striking his home, when suddenly, “I heard a footstep on the stair” (Dickens 334). The “sudden” nature of the initial realization that he is not alone is comparable to a jump scare towards Pip. Pip’s comprehension of the situation dawns on him slowly, first recognizing Magwitch as the convict from his past, then understanding the true nature of his circumstances. Dickens describes his bodily reactions to this new reality as comparable to the fear of being haunted, “I could not have spoken one word…I seemed to be suffocating…I shuddered…he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my blood ran cold within me” (Dickens 339-341). These somatic symptoms point to the reality that Pip is experiencing terror in this scene, despite nothing truly frightening occurring. Avery Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, offers an explanation for this phenomenon, “…haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively…into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.” (Gordon 8). Thus, Dickens represents Pip’s recognition of his reality as a physical experience. He is confronted with information which prompts him to reframe his entire mindset towards his identity–past, present, and future. Rather than explicitly stating that his current life is essentially over, Dickens creates a haunting scene to demonstrate the transformation Pip undergoes once realizing he no longer has (and never should have had) a place in society. The over gloomy weather and Magwitch’s sudden apparition allow for a covert undercurrent of social status and class structure.
Hi, I like your analysis of the gothic elements in Pip’s discovery of Magwitch. Interestingly, looking back, it seems that many of Pip’s life-changing events contain gothic elements. Pip first meets the convict in a traumatizing encounter in a graveyard, which then leads to his great expectations. When Pip first meets Estella and becomes aware of the social class difference, he is at Miss Havisham’s house, which is undoubted gothic and haunting in so many way. As you points out, Pip meets Magwitch again on a stormy night. Lastly, at the end of the novel, Pip meets Estella again in the ruin of Miss Havisham’s house, as the night is approaching. Thus, it seems that Dickens uses the gothics to emphasize the major events in Pip’s life, making it more unforgettable to Pip and the readers.
I really enjoyed your post and thought that it would be a wonderful idea for you to possibly use in a paper later down the line. If you so choose to use this post as the foundation for a paper in the future you could also focus on how Dickens is using these gothic and horror like traits in his writing. For instance, is he using these aspects to invoke fear in Pip and the reader because the scene would be more artistic and beautiful when written that way or is Dickens making a commentary on the way that society would view Magwitch and his relationship with Pip. Stuff like that could add the nice depth and twists that you might be looking for if you were to make this post into a paper. It would also might be helpful if you looked at how these traits are used in other scenes to either add a needed tone to the scene or to give it a type of undertone of social or political commentary on the part of Dickens.