Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Symbolism)

 

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

(Symbolism) 

Symbolic Representations through Plot

Often it seems that what we call the poetic view of life- the feeling that things somehow hang together and make sense, that we can somehow relate ourselves as a whole of experience often it seems that the only argument in favour of that view of life is our profound need of it. But Dickens saw a stronger argument, and in Great Expectations he advances it as a novelist ought to advance his arguments- by the plot.

The plot of Great Expectations is a good one it holds the reader’s interest; it is full of surprises and odd turns; its complexities all come out neatly in the end. But more than that, it is a symbolic representation of Dickens’s vision of the moral universe, and the chief characteristic of that vision is that good and evil, what we most desire and what we most loathe, are inextricably intertwined and involved with one another in such a way that no human hand can sort them out.

The plot is resolved through the discovery of a series of surprising relationships, and each of these is a relationship between something loathsome and something desirable. The first of these is the discovery that Pip does not owe his great expectations to the fairy godmother, Miss Havisham but to the ogre, Magwitch. Magwitch has been transported to Australia; there he has prospered as a sheep rancher, and he has decided to use his wealth to make a gentleman of the little boy who stole the food and file for him on the marshes long ago. Pip’s rise in the world has not been an act of magic; it has actually been a reward for theft, for what he regarded as the most shameful deed of his life.

The second great discovery is that Estella, whom Pip has wasted his life in loving, is far from being a princess; she is in fact the illegitimate daughter of Magwitch by the criminal who now serves as Mr. Jagger’s servant. Miss Havisham is no fairy god mother; she is a foolish old meddler.

 

Life Represented as an Old Growth

Life is not, Dickens is showing us symbolically by the plot, a dung-heap in which one can find an occasional jewel to plunge out, as Mr. Jaggers supposes. It is an old, old growth: the fairest flower and the most noxious weed have their roots in the same ancient soil. Joe Gargery’s view of experience is right because he has grasped this fact- not intellectually, for Joe is no intellectual, but by accepting in love the complexity of the moral universe.

Pip himself represents an impure mixture of the easiest parts of both Joe’s and Mr. Jaggers’ attitudes toward experience. Actually it is not altogether fair to compare Pip with Joe and Mr. Jaggers: they are unchanging, fixed points of reference in the book– so much so that they seem never to age. But Pip changes. When first we meet him he is an innocent little boy. When last we see him, he is a man in early middle age, much chastened by experience. The book is essentially an account of Pip’s moral education, and in order to understand the nature of that education, we must see Pip’s attitude toward experience clearly- in itself, and in relation to Joe’s and Mr. Jaggers.

 

Joe and Jaggers- Moral Realists

Joe and Mr. Jaggers have this in common: they are both in some sense moral realists. To be sure, they differ as fundamentally as two men can about what should be dignified with the label of reality, but they are realists in that both accept the consequences of their own views. For Joe this means that, if to follow the demand of his heart, to love and cherish little Pip involves marrying a shrew, then he is ready to pay the price, and he never whines of it afterwards. When Joe relaizes that the larks that he and Pip were to share are never going to happen, when he realizes that there is no longer any place for him in Pip’s life after Pip has gone to London, he recognizes the situation for what it is; his love takes on a tragic cast but it remains love. Mr. Jaggers is equally steadfast in facing the worst that his own attitude toward life entails: he is a man isolated, cut off from other human being- respected and feared but unloved. But Mr. Jaggers can face the worst, unflinching, and recognize it for what it is.

 

Pip- A Fantasist

Pip differs from both men. He is not a realist; he is a fantasist. He supposes that he can have the best of both views and the unfavorable consequences of neither. He embraces isolation, as Mr.  Jaggers does, but he embraces it selectively or, in other words, he becomes a terrible snob. He cuts himself off from his own past- he neglects Joe, he does not go back to the forge, he is ashamed of his blacksmith’s arm among the languid or vicious young bloods whose society he cultivates in London. He isolates himself from those who love him, but he does not accept the natural consequence of his action, which is lovelessness. Love is as necessary to Pip as to Joe Gargery, but Pip wants it on his own terms, the terms of fantasy. He can only love the fairy-tale princess, the cold-glittering distant star, Estella.

Now Pip is not entirely to be blamed for all this. His early life was fantastic; his contacts with creatures like Magwitch and Miss Havisham could only encourage the habit of fantasy in him : and then in adolescence to have his wildest dreams realized, to be suddenly transformed from a humble village apprentice to a young Londoner with great expectations what result could all this have except to make the boy suppose that the world is indeed whatever his fancy would like it to be ? How could he avoid supposing that he was one singularly excused by the gods from facing consequences?

 

Dickens’ Own Fantasy

Dickens understood the life of the fantasists because he had lived it, and no one who is familiar with the recent scholarship dealing with Dickens’ life can doubt that Great Expectations is a kind of symbolic autobiography. David Copperfield is closer to the facts of Dicken’s life, but Great Expectations is closer to its spirit. For Dickens, as for Pip, life had “come true” to an extent that even his wild fantasy could hardly have suggested in childhood. As a boy Dickens knew poverty and limitation and social disgrace- his father in debtors’ prison, his own experience in the blacking factory. He knew what it was to be “cut off from all the luxury of the world.” But he was extraordinarily successful, extraordinarily young, and with the possible exception of Mark Twain, there has probably never been another writer to know such fame in his own life time. The world was at his feet, yet he was afflicted with a passion for a woman who almost certainly did not return his feeling and probably found him simply distasteful. It is useless to speculate how close Estella in Great Expectations is to the woman Dickens loved in the last years of his tempestuous, fame-soaked, unfulfilled life; the point is simply that in writing the novel Dickens is not “talking down”; in creating Joe Gargery and Joe Gargery’s attitude toward life, he was struggling to save something he needed as much as we do. The novel ends with Pip and Estella reunited at the gate of the ruined Satis House.

 

Pip Back to the Forge

The healing touch at the end of the novel is not the reunion of Pip and Estella, but Pip’s return to the forge. By the time he goes back, his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, has long since died, and the ageless Joe has married Biddy, the girl whom Pip might once have married had he been free of the myth of his own life. They have a child, a little boy, and they have named him Pip. “And there was I again!” the old Pip cries to himself. Another generation has come along; another branch of that ancient vine, the human race, has sprung forth. Its roots are in the tangled dark, as ours are: they will have to learn to live with that fact, as we must: but perhaps, acknowledging the dark, they will do a better job of seeking the light.

In the century since his career was at its zenith, there have been many Dickneses. There was, for instance, Dickens the defender of hearth and home. That Dickens is not very popular today, partly because of the sentimentality that marks the more domestic private life gives the role a doubtful appropriateness. Then there was Dickens the reformer, the social thinker, the radical. As recently as fifty years ago he was something of a favourite of the Marxist critics, who saw him as very nearly one of their own. Dickens certainly did take a marked interest in the social problems of his time, and he attacked injustice where he found it and as he saw it, bitterly and brilliantly. He was also profoundly conservative; he loved the old England before the railroads, and was the last great chronicler of the stagecoach, the country inn, the roast beef of Old England. As for any program of reform he might have envisioned, as George Orwell has pointed out, it hardly amounted to more than this; that we should all behave better as indeed we should.

The Dickens we have tried to sketch is a kind of symbolist poet, a man with a sweeping vision of the fundamental relatedness that underlies the surface fragmentation of human life, a man with the insight to see to the moral and psychological consequence of that vision, and a man with the power of imagination to set it forth in a vivid, wildly fantastic, yet deeply controlled narrative.