Class Blog

Of Great Expectations’ numerous Gothic haunts, Wemmick’s castle interests me the most. Unlike its spookier cousins, the castle is a light, almost carefree alternate reality that turns its gothic tropes into parody, and in doing so creates a kind of reverse haunting. 

Every aspect of the house which seems to point towards a spooky gothic setting, instead accomplishes the opposite effect. The title of castle is adorable in the context of Pip’s description of it as “a little wooden cottage…the smallest house [He] ever saw” (Dickens, XXV). Other gothic ornaments like the windows are described as queer and sham, and the gothic door is said to be “almost too small to get in at.” The moat is so small that Pip could leap across it, and the battery on top of the cottage is much more a treat for the aged P. than it is any kind of threat to intruders. 

All of these features, and Wemmick’s pride in them, make the man and his home precious to the reader, but that is not the only purpose they serve. As pip moves away from his home and from Joe, the castle is set up as a new positive and wholesome location which promotes manual labor and independence in opposition to the gentility and stasis of statis house. It Haunts Pip in the reverse, rather than reminding him of some trauma or mistake in his past, it provides and suggests to him an alternate, anti industrial and marxist path which, while reminiscent of the forge, is compatible with his new life and station. 

By turning his home into a castle, defended from the outside world and supplied by its own gardens and its lone pig, Wemmick subverts the capitalist industrial expectations placed on him by his work. Although he gives himself up to Mr. Jaggers’ business everyday, personality and all, he firmly defends his right to a private life and to control the means of production on his land, despite his bourgeois career. Pip feels the influence of these values and in fact some of the few times we see Pip not idle and engaging in real production, not pointless rowing or banking, are when he toasts sausage and bread in the castle. As small acts as these are, they are still meaningful foils to the complete inaction of Mrs. Havisham and the emptiness of the finches, the grange and the life of the gentleman. 

In Avery Gordon’s article titled, “Ghostly Metters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination” they argue, “In haunting, organized forces and systematic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life.” Though there are literal ghosts in Great Expectations, there are also remnants of English poetics that haunt Dickens’ novel. 

The relationship between Pip and Estella very closely resembles the Petrarchan casting of Phillip Sidney’s characters in his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella,“star-lover” and “star.” Sidney’s male narrator is infatuated with the lady beloved, praising her graces, and fixating particularly on her heart and eyes. Unfortunately, the beloved is cold, distant and unattainable. This same relationship exists between Pip and Estella, influenced by Miss Havisham. By her insistence, Pip focuses entirely on Estella, praising her beauty aloud to a completely unreceptive audience. Contemplating in silence, he is often completely convinced that they are destined. In his obsessive thoughts, Pip too is a Petrarchan solitary wanderer, “Of all [his] thoughts hath neither stop nor start / But only [Es]Stella’s eyes and [Es]Stella’s heart” (Sidney 350). 

In Great Expectations, there are many examples of Pip’s growing infatuation, but what is most interesting is that Estella herself informs Pip of her heart’s condition. She says, “‘You must know’…condescending to me as a brilliant and beautiful woman might, ‘that I have no heart – if that has anything to do with memory…I have no softness there” (Dickens 237). While Estella tries to inform Pip that her heart is unavailable, Pip is once again distracted by her beauty. His interjection, “brilliant and beautiful,” once again recalls the same praise present in Sidney’s lovers: Estella’s beauty shines brilliantly star-like at the center of his attention.  

The mention of memory and the heart is also interesting. Petrarch, who is the model for Sidney’s sonnets, is particularly concerned with the heart because during his age, scientific literature conflated the heart with the brain’s functions. If Estella is convinced that her heart holds no capacity for softness and memory, then she casts herself as the distant beloved. Pip, on the other hand, as the lover, does remember and remains obsessively warm towards her. In another of Sidney’s sonnets, his speaker ponders, “But she, most fair, most cold, made him therein take his flight / To my close heart, where while come firebrands he did lay, / He burnt unawares his wings, and cannot fly away” (Sidney 350). Despite the beloved’s rejection of love, he flies to the lover’s heart and memory to be kept safe.  

However, in love’s flight to the heart, he burns his wings on the lover’s infatuation with the beloved and is imprisoned. The same is true for Pip: his obsession with Estella despite her repeated rejections is dangerous to him emotionally but only makes his love stronger. Because injured love cannot leave Pip’s heart, he too, is untraditionally haunted. Dickens’ novel is concerned with types of literacy, so it is only appropriate that his Gothic fiction should be haunted by his literary predecessor’s legacy. 

Sibling relationships in Victorian novels are complicated, to say the least. Both Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations show different aspects of those complex relationships. Wuthering Heights is more explicit about the relationship between adoptive siblings with the infatuation between Catherine and Heathcliff and the mutual hate between Heathcliff and Hindley. However, when it comes to the relationship between Catherine and Hindley, who are siblings by blood, there are not much to it. Or to put it more precisely, the relationship is not explicitly shown to the readers. We can only pick up pieces of information from here and there from Nelly’s narrations, but it is not the focus of the story. One example of this is the fact that Hindley is invited to Catherine’s funeral, but he never comes or gives any excuse to not come (170, end of vol.2 ch.2).

Like Wuthering Heights, sibling relationships are not so great in Great Expectations. However, relationships between blood-related siblings are shown more clearly. Pip is raised “by hand” by his blood sister. Despite its abrupt end right before the start of his expectations, the abuse by his sister still traumatizes deep down. This trauma, and arguably his affection to her as his only known living blood relative, leads to his visions of his sister’s haunting spirit after her death (278, Ch. 35). Interestingly, there is another brother-sister pair where the sister haunts the brother: Miss Havisham and her brother, Arthur. Arthur is Miss Havisham’s half-brother that comes from an affair by their father. He also holds “a deep and mortal grudge against her” because he believes that she influences their father, even when most of the faults of his downfall and debts are his (180, Ch. 22). This is the grudge that leads him to work with Compeyson to defraud Miss Havisham. Yet, when all is said and done, on his deathbed, Arthur hallucinates his half-sister coming to him for revenge and taking him to his death (348-349, Ch. 42). He is haunted by Miss Havisham, even though that she is still alive. Thus, like Pip, Arthur is not haunted by his sister’s actual ghost, but by the idea of her mixing with his own emotions. While Mrs. Joe haunts Pip with the trauma of abuse from the past and their blood relation, Miss Havisham haunts Arthur with the grudge and possible guilt he has after deceiving her. On the opposite side, while they are not sibling by blood, Pip’s relationship with Joe, his brother in-law, can also be applied here. Pip’s upbringing is influenced by Joe’s personalities. Even after separated from Joe to live in London and being cruel to him, Pip is still “haunted” by Joe, his characters, and what he stands for.

Thus, essentially, it is the sibling relationships, whether blood-related, adoptive, or in-laws, that seems to drive the plot and story of Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations. In the former, the whole story begins because Catherine and Heathcliff love each other. In the latter, it is Joe’s affection and compassion that allows Pip to be kind and considerate to the convict, which then leads to his great expectations. Furthermore, it is the hate that Arthur has for Miss Havisham that kicks start the chain of events leading to Estella’s adoption and the convict’s meeting with Pip.

While reading Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, I was intrigued by how quickly Pip changes once he realizes he is inheriting a fortune and going to London.  In particular, I focused on the whole of page 147, which includes the notable passage “No more low wet grounds, no more dykes and sluices, no more of these grazing cattle…farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood, henceforth I was for London and greatness,” as well as Pip calling churchgoers minding their own business “poor creatures,” promising to “do something for them one of these days” with his newfound wealth.  Almost immediately after Pip is aware he is going to become a “gentleman,” he separates himself from the people around him, who, until that point, are exactly the same as him (class wise, education wise, etc).  Although he promises to share his good fortune with them in some way, after reading to the end of the novel, it is apparent he does not remember this promise.  

I was reminded of my first blog post pertaining to Mary Barton, specifically the scene in which servants working for a high class household do not feed their lower class guest, Wilson, because they forget hunger is an issue for some people.  Like Pip and the churchgoers (or other people around him of the same class), the servants of the Carson family are closer in class to Wilson than the Carsons.  Both the servants and Wilson are working class, however, there is a clear degree of separation between them due to the servants’ access to wealth, just like how Pip’s access to wealth separates him from his peers.  Although Pip initially feels pity for those attending church, he soon forgets his vision of future generosity and the problems these lower class people face, just as the Carson servants forget that hunger may be a problem for poorer people like Wilson.  In the world of Mary Barton, Pip is like one of the Carson servants, forgetting the struggles of the people he was once a part of because he no longer suffers from a lack of money.  In both Mary Barton and Great Expectations, this ignorance is clearly negative.  In the former, the revolutionary change that poorer characters are trying to enact cannot happen under it, and in the latter, Pip becomes a distinctly less compassionate person because of it, hurting the feelings of his friends and family in the process.  Both novels push the idea that money can make someone blind to the obstacles others have to overcome, and it does not matter how considerate someone is, wealth can and will make them ignorant.

Miss Havisham certainly strikes a figure- an eerie spectre of what once could have been (and in her mind, what should have been). But as she molders, so too does the house around her. The name of the house is mentioned by Estella- it has two. One, the name the people of town know it by, simply “Manor House”, and an older, forgotten name “Satis”, Latin for ‘Enough’. As Estella mentions, “It meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else.” (vol. 1, ch. 8, pg. 56)

But now it seems to be the opposite: Miss Havisham certainly has everything she could ever need, but not the thing she wants- her marriage, successful. The name ‘Enough’ is now inverted, as if enough has become too much and begun to rot. The house has even become a prison- a decaying garden of Eden turned cage. The gate and outer wall keep the place separated from the rest of the world: “There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred”. Through Pip’s description, we also learn that the inside is just as locked away. “Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. . . (vol. 1, ch. 8, pg. 55). The entire complex is severed from reality to the point that Estella uses a side door to get in and out of the house, since “the great front entrance had two chains across it outside.” As a cage, the house serves to keep people out, but also keep Miss Havisham within.

The interior of the house is far worse for wear, with rooms and passages and stairs all dark but for carried candlelight. The grounds of the estate seem to at least contain a brewery and a garden, both places meant to be used for leisure and celebration now fallen far into disrepair. The grounds too, grow little- life in Enough House always seems to be one cobweb away from suffocating completely.

“It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.” (Dickens 56) 

 

This passage from Great Expectations describes the first time Pip encounters Miss Havisham, a rich elderly woman who invites him over to ‘play’. At first, Pip sees nothing but white in her room, as it is filled with all of the items that would be needed for a wedding. Then, in this passage, he realizes that all of the items are old and rotting, much like Miss Havisham herself, and this is where some interesting implications of the description can be drawn out. The fact that Pip did not notice the state of everything in the room ‘in the first few moments’ may speak to the sheer volume of items in the room, or the degree to which everything in the room was organized, as if for a wedding in the near future (Dickens 56). Then he realizes that all of it is old, including the would-be bride. This serves to introduce both Pip and the reader to Miss Havisham, a lady who was left at the altar and has been waiting for decades for her fiancé to come back, and has refused to move forward with her life. Her life paused at this point, and so did her room, but time still has affected her, despite her refusal to acknowledge its passage. 

Miss Havisham’s position in her room and surrounded by the preparations for her wedding, as if she is still anticipating it, put her in an interesting liminal position in several ways. Firstly, she is forever stuck between a state of married and single, two positions which in Victorian times both held distinct roles and characteristics. By being forever stuck between the two, Miss Havisham has removed herself from the expectations of both positions, and placed herself outside of the social norms of marriage. She is not expected to look for a husband, as she would be if she were single, and she also does not have to do housework, as a consequence of her class but also the fact that she does not have a husband or family to care for. Secondly, the description of her as “withered” and her eyes as “sunken” serve to characterize her as a deathly figure, or someone who is stuck between the states of life and death, similar to a vampire or zombie. This is also an example of another way in which Miss Havisham occupies a liminal space in her life. Her occupation of this liminal space speaks to the fascination of Victorian readers and writers with the ideas of the Gothic, and its obsession with death, life after death, and life intertwined with death. Similar ideas can be found in Whuthering Heights, with Catherine’s promise to haunt Heathcliff as a ghost, and Heathcliff’s climbing into Catherine’s coffin. 

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mclenan/13.html

By the end of chapter 8, the poor, “low-lived” boy can finally process the strange situation his sister has thrown him into at Miss Havisham’s (65). This passage concludes Pip’s visit to Miss Havisham’s, a strange woman who he had never met, but was demanded to meet by his sister and uncle. The reprimands Pip receives throughout the chapter, from Mr. Pumblechook, Miss Havisham, and Estella are instilled in his mind by the time he leaves the property. The internal monologue of Pip’s thoughts reveals the impressionability of a young mind to constant verbal reprimands and insults. The novel characterizes a realistic representation of the mindset of a kid. 

This passage illuminates the characterization of the novel’s narrator, a young, eight-year-old boy. The chapter to which this passage follows tells of Pip being given vague orders by his sister and uncle to “play” with a woman whom he had never met before. Pip spends the night at his uncle’s, where he is forced to perform math problems on the spot one after the other and reprimanded for his struggle with multiplication. He was given no further instruction other than a single word. He was then brought to the home, where his uncle was turned away from entering, leaving Pip to enter the unknown place alone. The boy was greeted by a rude girl, Estella, who calls him a “common labouring-boy” and begrudgingly brings him to the subject of his visit (60). Miss Havisham is stern with Pip, calling the boy “sullen and obstinate” when he is hesitant to follow her orders out of confusion, but begs her to not complain in fear of getting in trouble with his sister (58-59). Upon his exit from the home, he is once again insulted during his escort out of the courtyard by Estella, who laughs as he begins to tear up on his walk back to his uncle’s. 

The novel is told through the eyes of the young Pip, and this passage exemplifies the thoughts and reactions of a young boy to such an intense and hostile situation. As he walks from the house, he does not dwell on the confusing events that transpired that day. His inner thoughts do not recount the strangeness of his encounters, but rather focus on the hurtful comments the adults and the girl make about his character and appearance. As he walks back home, Pip repeats to himself the insults to his clothes, his intelligence, and even the texture of his hands which take a distinct blow to his confidence, and feels “much more ignorant than [he] had considered [him]self” (65). 

The insulting comments hurled at him by adults and other older characters are met without backtalk from him, but he dwells on them later discontentedly. Pip’s fixation on the comments made to him highlights the abuse inflicted on him throughout the novel that he is desensitized to. This passage is an explicit point of view of the young narrator’s reaction to his surroundings, shaping the events at the beginning of the novel in the eyes of an eight-year-old in a constant environment of abuse.

 

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel rife with intensely lunatic characters, driven mad perhaps by their cloistered existences on the moors or their degrading need for vengeance–the latter pertaining mainly to Heathcliff. While many of Heathcliff’s actions and reactions can be perceived as depicting his manic personality, Alexandra Lewis’ text “Memory Possessed: Trauma and Pathologies of Remembrance in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights” offers a different perspective. Catherine’s death brings about a particularly manic episode from Heathcliff, which could be perceived as demonstrating his sheer madness and abnormal attachment to Cathy, but when informed by Lewis’ text actually depicts an understanding of traumatic processing.

Heathcliff is barred from being present during Catherine’s death yet can predict it when Nelly comes to inform him (Brontë 168). He acts insensibly towards Nelly, chastising her for grief, “’Put your handkerchief away–don’t snivel before me. Damn you all! She wants none of your tears!’” (Brontë 168), suggesting a possible reserve of emotion for his loss. However, this is immediately and violently contradicted, “He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled not like a man, but like a savage beast…several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained…” (Brontë 169). In this scene, a typical reading would perceive Brontë’s invocation of the Gothic (describing Heathcliff as bloody and “savage”) as demonstrating Heathcliff’s otherworldly madness and desperation when his “soul” (Brontë 169) dies.

However, Lewis’ text complicates this more straightforward reading. Lewis argues that Heathcliff’s inability to witness Catherine’s death affects him as would a direct trauma, contributing to the way he processes his loss. She asserts, citing work from Geoffrey Hartman, “…while the traumatic event is not directly experienced…there is nevertheless ‘a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche’” (Lewis 413-414). Heathcliff does not see Catherine die, and his reaction to her peaceful death is anything but. Rather than comprehending his reaction as a representation of his crazed, savage nature, Lewis allows insight into how this trauma in particular would affect Heathcliff’s mind. For example, rather than grouping it in with the Gothic trope of Heathcliff’s “otherness”, she asserts that Heathcliff’s repetitive head bashing is indicative of his dissociation with the episode (Lewis 414). Through Lewis’ lens, in contrast with a Gothic reading and understanding of the scene, Heathcliff is processing a trauma in this specific way because he didn’t experience it firsthand.

‘It is a poor conclusion, is it not?” [Heathcliff] observed, having brooded a while on the scene he had just witnessed: “an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! … I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction…

“Five minutes ago Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being; I felt to him in such a variety of ways, that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! Well, Hareton’s aspect was the ghost of my immortal love; of my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish—

-Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, pg. 236

In Wuthering Heights, the characters seem defined by their capacity for hate and cruelty. The novel features a nonstop barrage of abuse and death of one generation, and then starting the same with the next. But yet, from one perspective, the book ends relatively happily for the surviving characters. Catherine Linton and Hareton overcome their differences and abuse, Ellen sees her two surrogate children reunite, and Lockwood ultimately stays far, far away from the troubles up north. Finally, Heathcliff, the sole remaining member of the older generation, finally dies. As discussed in class, the ending seems very abrupt, one that Heathcliff even seems to acknowledge above. However, arguably, Heathcliff’s monologue after seeing Catherine Linton and Hareton together represents the culmination of the novel’s themes, and in some ways the true endpoint of the novel.

As Alexandra Lewis’ “Memory Possessed: Trauma and Pathologies” explains, “[Wuthering Heights questions] the way external traumas quickly become incorporated into the mind, lodging thorn- like beyond the grasp of conscious control.” (Lewis 417). In this quote, however, Heathcliff finally admits his “loss.” On one level, this refers to his loss of Catherine Earnshaw. Objects, people, and everything in nature are “memoranda” of Catherine’s loss. Hareton is naught but a shadow of Heathcliff’s past with Catherine, Hindley, and Heathcliff himself. Living people do not exist anymore- only as memories. Effectively, Heathcliff lives in a world of stasis and death. In this paragraph, Heathcliff admits the truth that has been shaping his actions.

Yet, it also serves as a reminder that Heathcliff has lost his plot of revenge. Using “mattocks,” “demolish,” and “levers” all have associations with machinery. Implicitly, this reminds the reader that Heathcliff has had to be incredibly patient and methodical to effectively kidnap all of the new “representatives” to enact revenge upon, like a machine. Yet, this machinery also reflects a lack of life. Life no longer exists since his first “loss”, and remaining life serves as a game against his “old enemies.” However, his enemies are long dead. Only phantasms remain to actually “play” against. Only a man living in this ghost world would continue to believe this long game has any meaning. Incidentally, the final argument between Catherine Linton and Heathcliff comes from her desire to plant flowers- something new and beautiful (Bronte 232). From this argument springs forth Heathcliff’s monologue. The words in his initial realization all speak to loss of ability, though phrases like “I can’t take the trouble…,” “I have lost…,” and “I don’t care…” (Bronte 236). If Catherine and Hareton together want to create something new outside of all the tragedies that has surrounded their lives, than Heathcliff has lost. When considering Lewis’ article on the effects of trauma, the destruction Heathcliff speaks of can refer to spiritual as well as physical, as he has been so “destroyed” that he essentially cannot function as a living person. But when Catherine and Hareton find a way to heal and live despite the dead’s influence, Heathcliff is finally undone.

 

Works Cited:

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992.

Lewis, Alexandra. “Memory Possessed: Trauma and Pathologies of Remembrance in Emly Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.” Pp. 406-423.