Pip's Character In Great Expectations

He is Magwitch’s plaything. Later, on his first visit to Miss Havisham, he becomes her ‘sick fancy’ as she points at him and commands: “play, play, play!” (51). Just two early examples of how Pip is not a free agent or an autonomous individual but must act at the behest of others. Indeed, the critic Humphrey House maintains that Pip’s helplessness is emotional as well as financial. He goes further: “He directs nothing; things happen to him; everybody except Joe and Biddy use him” (646). This essay will demonstrate to what degree Pip’s growth as an individual was shaped and curtailed by his society. It will also contend that society and circumstances may have shaped Pip the man but it was market forces and the sentimental demands of a readership that created Pip the

They both use their respective wealth to place Pip as a pawn in the perverse game or grotesque social experiment that they each create. Interestingly, they operate the threads of their manipulation from opposite ends of the world and from opposite ends of society. For Miss Havisham, Pip is one side of a coin. On the other is Estella her adopted daughter and protégé of hate. She is grooming Estella to wreak vengeance on men and she offers Pip as her first victim: “Begger him” (51). But the cruellest restraint that Estella manages to inflict on Pip is contempt for himself and shame for who and what he is: “Her contempt for me was so strong that it became infectious, and I caught it.” (52). It becomes Pip’s burden throughout the novel from then on: “It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home” (86). This shame would be compounded by the snobbery awakened by his elevation into society and would nearly lose him to Joe Gargery and

As Franco Moretti puts it: “he more than anyone else entertains ‘great expectations’ concerning his own youth” (184). But it is in striving to reach these great expectations that reveal the humanity and flaws in Pip’s developing character: In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong (37) Moretti is harsh in his judgement of where Pip’s expectations bring him in London: “Money and the metropolis, however, only succeed in turning him into an unappealing and inept snob” (184). Yet we need to concede that the ultimate force shaping Pip’s character is not just to be found in the pages of Great Expectations. It is in the genre that formed it as literature. As Moretti reminds us, the rules of the English bildungsroman decree that every last penny of a fortune found without moral merit must be taken away (187). Pip’s fortunes and destiny, therefore, had more to do with the requirements of the eight-week writing cycle that Charles Dickens required to complete an issue of the story for a weekly instalment in ‘All the Year Round’ magazine. (Interestingly, about the same time required by writers of today’s popular TV soap