Great Expectations

Great Expectations Lecture One

Dr Mandy Treagus

Lecture Plan
• Realism and the rise of the novel
• More on the Bildungsroman
• Indicators of adult looking back at childhood
• Narrator and narrative voice
• What drives the narrative?

Great Expectations and Realism
• Realism a reading as well as a writing practice
• Realism strongly connected with philosophy
• The individual in relation to society
• ‘Modern philosophical realism … begins from the position that Truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses; it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century’ (Ian Watt 11-12).

Great Expectations and Realism
• ‘novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation’ (Watt)
• Ian Watt says it reflects the culture of the last few centuries which ‘has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel’
• Novel established in eighteenth century, with writers such as Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Fielding

• ‘Locke had defined personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time; the individual was in touch with his own continuing identity through memory of his past thoughts and actions.’ (Watt)
• ‘the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of its characters in the course of time’ (Watt)
• Realism sometimes refers to specific group of writers from late-nineteenth century who were committed to writing the mundane aspects of everyday life, but we are using it more broadly.

Nineteenth-Century Realism
• Victorian era – novel well established
• Male and female writers
• Material drawn from everyday life
• Sense of objective reality that can be represented
• Though language could not provide ‘a transparent “objective” verisimilitude, novelists as realists still believed that language could represent the world beyond the text and convey a meaning outside of language, a nonverbal truth’ (Sussman)
• Detail serves overall narrative
• Teleological – moving toward the end
• Offers intimate view of consciousness

Bildungsroman
• German term, coming from descriptions of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
• Individual leaves provincial origins to receive education and take his place in the world
• the Victorian novel shared an ‘intimate connection … with the desires, aspirations, and anxieties of its readers’ (Sussman).
• Finds his place in the world, especially his vocation and his marriage partner

Narrator
• 1st person narration
• Adult looking back on childhood
The novel begins December 24, 1812 – Pip seven years old
Pip leaves for London in 1823, age 17
Sees Estella in grounds of Satis House before he leaves for Egypt in 1829. He’s 23.
Finally, when he’s 34 or 35, and Estella 34, he meets her December 1840, in grounds of now demolished Satis House.

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair.

From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. Ch.1 (3)

Narration
• What are the indicators that this is an adult trying to make sense of his childhood?
Indicators of adult looking back at childhood
• the use of the past tense;
• certain references to time (eg. ‘for their days were long before the days of photographs’);
• shifts in the register of the language in certain slightly mocking adult adjectival qualifications (eg. ‘infant tongue’ in the first paragraph; ‘unreasonably derived’ in the second paragraph; ‘childish conclusions,’ ‘religiously entertained’);
• certain quite clearly adult comments (eg. ‘who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle’ – towards the end of the second paragraph) and
• a number of sentences with quite elaborate syntax.

Narrative voice
• Adult and childlike – double tone
• Shifts between
• ‘Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and some people do the same by their religion.’ (Ch. 4)
• All these things I saw then without knowing that I saw them, for I was in an agony of apprehension. But beginning to perceive that the handcuffs were not for me … I collected a little more of my scattered wits. (Ch. 5)

Narrative voice
• How honest is the narrator about Pip?
• ‘I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear fellow… I know I was ashamed of him.’ (Ch. 13)
• Adult Pip shows us unappealing qualities of younger Pip

Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I beheld Trabb’s boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag. Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb’s boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace, ‘Hold me! I’m so frightened!’ feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him, his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust… (Ch. 30)

I had not got as much further down the street as the post-office, when I again beheld Trabb’s boy shooting round by a back way. This time, he was entirely changed. He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat, and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, ‘Don’t know yah!’ Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon me by Trabb’s boy, when, passing abreast of me, he pulled up his shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his attendants, ‘Don’t know yah, don't know yah, pon my soul don’t know yah!’

The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith, culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to speak, ejected by it into the open country. (Ch.30 188-89)

Narrative voice
• Double voice guides reader’s response
• Emphasis on child becoming an adult – Bildungsroman form
• Irony – gap between what’s said and what’s meant
• ironic gap between illusions (or expectations) and reality
• Ironic gap between necessity of growth and awareness of corruption and sadness growth brings
• Do child and adult voices come together at the end?

What is it in Pip that really drives the plot?

Guilt and Shame
• Not the same thing
• Guilt and shame dominate Pip’s sense of self and hence the novel
• Guilt initially connected by connection with Magwitch but inflicted on Pip principally by his sister
• Accused by sister and Pumblechook of ingratitude to those who ‘brought him up by hand’
• Not deserved guilt

Shame
• Evoked by contact with Satis House, Miss Havisham and Estella
• Ashamed of Magwitch when he returns
• Based on class values, rather than character values
• Shown to be a false emotion
• But Pip’s shame drives the plot
What happens to Pip’s guilt and shame?
• Pip’s maturity:
• abandons false shame that has driven him to want to change his class
• comes to see character as more important than class
• must acknowledge instances of real guilt about Joe and Magwitch