Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations Chapter 8:Pip and his beginner’s mind!

If ‘home’ is often a place of comforting repetition and ritual, Pip’s home with the ‘rampaging’ Mrs Joe in Dickens’ Great Expectations is a place of imaginative improvisation and daily anxiety. When the offer of ‘play’ at a  rich lady’s home is bestowed on Pip, his apprehension is somewhat counterbalanced by the prospect of more time spent away from the hypocritical bully, Uncle Pumblechook. Ironically Pip sees the visit as a release from Pumblechook’s relentless questions about arithmetic and from the all too familiar ways of an abusive ‘home’.

Thus, he senses  gladness  at the doors of the ‘dismal’ home of  Miss Havisham, as he feels liberated from the claustrophia of violence and unkindness. Here he notices the absence of beauty and even life in the house. Satis House is walled up, its brewery defunct, bars everywhere.  Yet in the novel, he fails to trust these  ’beginner’s impressions’ . In fact, his observations are very revealing about the metaphorical and psychological implications for  the ‘dead’ inhabitants of the house. Dangerously he fails to realise his own contamination by  their deadly disease.

This is a place of thanatos to use the Freudian idea. Eros has long been  encrypted  here. All who dwell in this place-even if just naively hopeful  young visitors like Pip, are doomed to endure its ennervating effects.

The derision with which Estella, the cold ‘star’ in Pip’s life, treats Pumblechook is mistakenly here experienced as a hopeful beginning for Pip’s new life, a sign of liberation and escape from the cruelty of home at the forge. She will ‘save’ him. A star will show him a new way home. Yet Estella’s treatment of Pumblechook is a very clear indication of Estella’s derisory nature and will soon be inflicted  upon Pip too. Pip however is  used to derision and becomes ensnared, despite his overwhelming sense of humiliation, by Estella’s perceived grandeur and hauteur. Indeed it is as if his hurt binds him to Estella as he becomes romantically enslaved.

In fact the dismal, overgrown, spectral world of Satis House is as it appears, a place incapable of sustaining life. It ironises hope, celebrating only cynicism and paranoia. ‘You did this to me’ is the recurring refrain of Satis House. Mrs Joe’s entrenched belief in her own victimisation by ‘life’ is displaced by Miss Havisham’s similar outlook. Hardly surpisingly, Pip fails to make the connection between one home and another,  as both are  profoundly distinctive  in their  ’unhomely’ atmospheres and are separated primarily  by class, though we find them  not as differentiated as Pip would hope.

Satis House, thrives on the hopeful imagination and fears of the evolving young boy Pip, who tries to heal the fallen world he sees through a better story, a new beginning through his imaginative ‘seed’. IThe world and words of Satis House are like  some  vampiric succubae, a world  where enough is never enough!

Or to think about it in another way, Pip ignores his natural intuitive grasp of this bizarre place,the intelligence of his  ’beginner’s mind’ ,   and believes he can rescue its inhabitants and take them out of their fallen world and into a better place, even to return innocence to such a  dismal Eden.

But he cannot save Miss Havisham or Estella. They are pathologically attached to cruelty, cynicism and carelessness. All the potential of Pip is percieved as a psychical food upon which their corrupted minds and Hearts can feed. Pip believes he has been asked to play. He fails to realise that they are playing with him like predatory cats with a small mouse, until they are bored with the game or find another ‘victim’ to play with and to drain emotionally and spiritually.

In fact this is the first of many catastrophic interviews with a couple of female vampires! Unhealthy, pathologically proud and ever victims of their own ‘tragic’ life stories from which there can be no escape, because they want and know, nothing else.  It is their life story and their death story.

Pip thinks Satis House is a beginning but in fact it is already an end.

For such reasons I was very glad when ten o’clock came and we started for Miss Havisham’s; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the manner in which I should acquit myself under that lady’s roof. Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havis- ham’s house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a court-yard in front, and that was barred; so, we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until some one should come to open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr Pumblechook said, `And fourteen?’ but I pretended not to hear him), and saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long time.

A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded `What name?’ To which my conductor replied, `Pumblechook.’ The voice returned, `Quite right,’ and the window was shut again, and a young lady came across the court-yard, with keys in her hand.

`This,’ said Mr Pumblechook, `is Pip.’

`This is Pip, is it?’ returned the young lady, who was very pretty and seemed very proud; `come in, Pip.’

Mr Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.

`Oh!’ she said. `Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?’

`If Miss Havisham wished to see me,’ returned Mr Pumblechook discomfited.

`Ah!’ said the girl; `but you see she don’t.’

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