Pip is a very susceptible and vulnerable young man, who reads his emotionally sabotaging companions, Miss Havisham and Estella, very hopefully indeed! I have talked in another blog post about the importance of attention in close textual analysis. I also suggested that the skills we use in reading our relationships of others, can prove very helpful when reading texts, and vice versa. Here I will briefly explore why Pip persists in such a hopeful story, with its healing ending that fails to arrrive.
In fact, Reading as an act and as an art, receives pointed attention in the novel, particularly with respect to Joe’s early illiteracy. Pip wrongly assumes that literal illiteracy signifies emotional illiteracy and vice versa. He is ashamed of Joe’s lack of formal education and indeed his own, yet fails to notice the profound emotional illiteracy of Satis House.
Emotionally of course there is much ‘illiteracy‘ elsewhere in the novel, not least from Pip himself who persists in believing in his special destiny with Estella , even when ‘every’ sign emphasises that he is not destined for this icy, sadistic soul mate at all. But this is a novel about getting things wrong and that makes it very human as well as deeply melancholy.
Reading the text again, I am struck by his pathological need to persist in his delusion. It seems masochistic and even insane. It is as if they have contaminated his mental health: Devoured his judgement, abused his trust, Satis House with its decay, inside and out, has inflicted its poison on Pip.
In his partial exoneration, I do think however, that Estella and Miss Havisham seem so much part of his identity or life story to Pip, even the very shape of his reality, that to give them up seems catastrophic and he fears subjective implosion: a collapse of the ‘I’.
Yet who would be happy with Estella? A narcissistic creature with no inner beauty or creativity at all. Even Miss Havisham finds her cruel. Neither companion subscribes in any way to the Buddhist philosophy of ‘doing no harm.‘
Harmfulness is what motivates them. Emotionally sterile, they are incapable of care. They enjoy harming others, blaming others for their own psychologically damaged states forever. Neither women are prepared to grow up, to rebuild Satis House and its influences.
The wonderful creative energies and compassion of Pip as shown in the famous opening chapter in the grave yard with Magwitch, are steadily eroded by the cynical manipulations of Estella and her ‘mother’, Miss Havisham. Critics and readers accuse Pip of snobbism, yet his greatest failing I feel is owed to himself. Initially he is a wonderful writer, hopeful, compassionate and healing. The degradation of his treatment at Miss Havisham’s and Estella’s hands, reduce his creativity to dismal delusion.
Pip’s potential is corroded by the women of Satis House who devour his sensitivity and hopefulness, punishing his creative reading of their lives with parasitic ironies and deceit. Pip does offer them a better world, with better words. They remain obstinately locked in Satis House’s fetid atmosphere, ( literally or metaphorically) too self obsessed to leave.
Here we read of Pip’s fantasy that he is a knight, come to rescue the fair maiden, Estella, and to return light and vitality to Satis House. How can anyone read the house and its inhabitants as an ‘attractive mystery’?
Pip is definitely refusing to acknowledge the Gothic signs of infertility and mental depravity. He notices the ‘sinewy arms’ of the ivy.The deadly clasp! …Ivy is parasitic and destroys buildings, sucks the life out of being at ‘home’, even and especially with oneself!
Significantly here, Pip feigns mature acceptance of Estella’s failings, yet tries through this acceptance to condone his emotional choice.
Yet, he also bursts out with the wonderfully passionate and tragic avowal that he loves Estella because she is irresistible. ‘Irresistible’ is suggestive of extreme sexual attraction, the body leading where the rational mind declines to go.
The long list of Pip’s resistances to Estella reminds me of Darcy’s first declaration of love and offer of marriage to Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Yet there Darcy is understandably refused, by a flabbergasted but hardly enamoured Elizabeth. She has too much self respect to be charmed by Darcy’s shrivelling condemnation of her family, however much a wealthy ‘catch’ he might be.
Pip by contrast knows what he knows, and he does hear and see Estella’s deliberate cruelty, yet chooses to throw himself into the love delusion because she is irresistible! As I have said before, Pip lacks the resources to resist connivance and cruelty. He is so used to being at ‘home’ with their values and behaviours , that he cannot leave.
He is hypnotised and enchanted by the ‘sirens’ of mythology, stranded in a profoundly unhappy web, clinging to untruth because he cannot bear to give up his bearings upon cold, infertile star, Estella!
She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a going and the cold hearths a blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin — in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a fixed purpose, because it is the clue by which I am to be followed into my poor labyrinth. According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection