It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.
So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing then, of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked as if the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust.
`He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella with disdain, before our first game was out. `And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!’
I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for a stupid, clumsy labouring-boy.
`You say nothing of her,’ remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked on. `She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What do you think of her?’
`I don’t like to say,’ I stammered.
`Tell me in my ear,’ said Miss Havisham, bending down.
`I think she is very proud,’ I replied, in a whisper.
`Anything else?’
`I think she is very pretty.’
`Anything else?’
`I think she is very insulting.’ (She was looking at me then with a look of supreme aversion.)
`Anything else?’
`I think I should like to go home.’
`And never see her again, though she is so pretty?’
`I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should like to go home now.’
`You shall go soon,’ said Miss Havisham, aloud. `Play the game, out.
Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost sure that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a watchful and brooding expression — most likely when all the things about her had become transfixed — and it looked as if nothing could ever lift it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her; altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped, body and soul, within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.
I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she despised them for having been won of me.
`When shall I have you here again?’ said Miss Havisham. `Let me think.’
I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her right hand.
`There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear? ‘
`Yes, ma’am.’
`Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.’
I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room many hours.
`You are to wait here, you boy,’ said Estella; and disappeared and closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard, to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not fuvourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages. I deter- mined to ask Joe why he had ever taught me to call those picture- cards, Jacks, which ought to be called knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.
She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry — I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart — God knows what its name was — that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a contemptuous toss — but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure that I was so wounded — and left me.
But, when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my aleeve against the wall there, and leaned my fore- head on it and cried. As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that needed counteraction.
I am not sure any reader would welcome an invitation for tea at Miss Havisham’s. Indeed it probably ranks as unappealing as Kingsley’s Amis’s famous quip about the need to decline tea with Fanny and Edmund Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Some invitations are fated to be refused!
Yet poor Pip in Great Expectations has no power to refuse the bizarre and ultimately malignant invitation to ‘play’ at Miss Havisham’s. Adults at home command him to attend to the rich lady’s request. His sister Mrs Joe and his pernicious Uncle Pumblechook see the invitation as flattering to their own position in the village.The boy is a mere tool to further their status and standing, through his ‘friendship’ with the women of Satis House. Pip’s only friend at home Joe, is unable to protect Pip from the frequent, violent rages of his wife, and his voice is ignored when he expresses anything resembling doubt about Miss Havisham.
With such a context and background, Pip is ill prepared( in all senses) to deal with the contaminating eccentricties of Miss Havisham and Estella. For Pip’s experience of domestic cruelty does not equip him with the emotional resources to guard himself from the predatory, heartless manipulations of both females at the ironically named, Satis House. ‘Enough house’ is indeed a place where ‘nothing’ is ever enough.; particularly when this nothing relates to feeling.
The strange liberation Pip feels when he crosses the threshold of Satis House, emanates from his sense of temporary release from the controlling machinations of Uncle Pumblechook’s mathematical questions, and surely the pleasure he enjoys seeing Pumblechook reprimanded( and diminished) at the gate by the haughty Estella. Unfortunately one form of victimisation is usurped by another, as Pip’s ‘growth’ in the novel is challenged by adults preoccupied by their own perceived hurts and desire for revenge.
Pip’s retrospective narration in Great Expectations recreates the initial wonder he experienced as he first encountered Miss Havisham, a woman who belives she can hold back the march of time. Rereading this event again today, images from Tim Burton’s Corpses’ Bride film leap into my head, along with Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Imagine sitting down to play cards with a corpse! This is precisely what Dickens does to his hero Pip. He plants him in a place whee any growth he enjoys will be contaminated. The vocabularly Pip hears in this place is also the langauge of death, for it is the language of shame. Everything Pip has taken as being normal, inate to his identity starts to become corroded by Estella’s disdainful re-labelling. Pip fails to recognise that the acidity and cruelty of Estella ‘s opinions, are clear indications of her own diseased upbringing.
Estella humiliates Pip because she is herself a victim and only feels powerful when she makes Pip feel powerless. Estella’s repeated use of the scornful term, ‘boy’ reveals her attempt to inflict distance between Pip’s naive hopefulness and her own inner hopelessness. Shame and pride become uneasy and profoundly unhealthy co-workers in the creation of the destructive ‘magic’ of the novel’s great expectations. Miss Havisham in this extract resembles some terrible spider, releasing her Iagoesque posion into the ear of a young child, too disepmowered to contest her behaviour or motivation.
Pip’s goodness that fed Magwitch on the marshes is here preyed upon by the distorting energies of Miss Havisham’s unrelenting fury at her ‘shameful’ public rejection years before at the wedding altar. Hurt has become a food that feeds her vampiric need for power over men, even when the men are in fact small boys, already lost, abused and vulnerable themselves.
For this heartless prize of Pip’s equilibrium, Miss Havisham encourages Pip to focus upon Estella’s outer beauy, eagerly manipulating Pip into a promise to return to the house, a promise he is too honourable to renege upon, despite the shame and pain he suffers there. When he asks to go ‘home’ it is surely an indication of the instinctive unease Pip feels for Satis House? For his home at the forge is hardly benevolent, yet is has more warmth through Joe, than Satis House can ever provide.
One circle of hell will be replaced by another and Pip is too powerless and compassionately imaginative to say no.
