Doubles In Great Expectations

Anna Catherine Chapman
Mrs. White
H English 10
September 7, 2014

Pip’s Benefactors

Thesis: Through Charles Dickens’s use of doubles in Great Expectations, Dickens illustrates that it is possible to control future happiness and that it is not based on past experiences.

Great Expectations’ main character, Pip, meets both his pseudo benefactor and his true benefactor in very interesting ways. As Pip is in the graveyard visiting his deceased mother and father, he stumbles across an escaped convict and his unknown at the time benefactor Magwitch. Magwitch is in prison for several crimes and abetting and being fooled by his partner Compeyson. Pip brings the ravenous Magwitch some rations and a file in which Magwitch can remove the bothersome
shackles around his ankles. His pseudo benefactor, Miss Havisham, requests a boy from the village to come to the Satis House and play cards, but really wants the boy so she can train her pawn and adopted daughter Estella how to break a boy’s heart. Miss Havisham was jilted at the alter by none other than Compeyson who has broken her heart and caused her to turn bitter. Of course Dickens has to make the connection that both benefactors have a connection to Compeyson. Compeyson has had a negative effect on both benefactors’ lives, which adds just a little bit more irony to the already ironic plot. *Closing sentence* Both of Pip’s benefactors take their situations and let their lives be affected by them in two different directions.
After Magwitch meets Pip, he is inspired and decides that he wants to change Pip’s life by providing him with the coveted high society, luxurious life. Magwitch travels to Australia to earn money “by the sweat of his brow…not by criminal activity” and saves every penny and lives a hard life so that Pip can live a luxurious one(Novels for Students). Magwitch is truly touched when Pip helps him and never forgets that. On the flip side of that, Miss Havisham’s life comes to a complete halt when Compeyson jilts her at the alter. Miss Havisham’s life is ruined by this and “her clocks stay stopped on the hour, she has never since seen the light of day, she sits in her ruined wedding dress” and the food from the reception in the great room across the hallway is “now eerily covered with spiders and dusty cobwebs”(Prickel 159)(Novels for Students 95). Along with this, she adopts Estella and is training her that the male race is appalling; Miss Havisham slowly over time hardens Estella’s cold heart until she eventually has lost the capability to love. Although Magwitch and Miss Havisham have had their hiccups in life and bumps in the road, they handle their situations completely different. Magwitch takes his betrayal by Compeyson and Pip’s help and makes that the fuel and drive for his mission to make Pip’ s life better. Miss Havisham takes her rejection by Compeyson
and lets it eat away at her soul until she is just bitter and angry and wants to wreak havoc on the male race. Dickens illustrates that a persons past does not shape who they are in the present and future, *opening sentence* When Pip discovers that “the man who has turned him into a gentleman is none other than [the] uneducated criminal” from the graveyard, Magwitch and is not Miss Havisham, he is appalled (Markley, 105). Pip does not want to be associated with Magwitch because neither Magwitch, nor his money fits in with Pip’s new life. He feels as if the money he has been using is spoiled money or that is from a crime and he wishes Magwitch was not his benefactor. Eventually, Pip sees that Magwitch cares for him as a son and comes to love him; he actually helps him attempt to escape from Compeyson and is sad when Magwitch dies. As for Miss Havisham, Pip sees that she was just using him “to play with Estella to act out her love-turned-hatred on the man who jilted her on their wedding day”, but he eventually forgives her for her transgressions(Novels for Students, 94). Miss Havisham realizes that she has made Estella into a woman who has a heart as cold as the bottom of the ocean floor. Miss Havisham is very regretful that “her whole life has been sacrificed to memorializing the frustration of her own hopes, in commemorating the moment when the man who was supposed to marry her failed to show up for the wedding” (Prickel 159). She is really the one suffering because she has wasted her whole life on vengeance and bitterness and only comes to realize her foolishness right before death.