Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham appearance is very ghostly and skeleton like but in another way very elegant with the rich materials and fine fabrics she wears but she also has certain scruffiness to her with the messy bridal flowers in her hair and one shoe on a one shoe off kind of thing. The old woman looked pretty much skin and bone and that’s why in the extract pip describes her as a ‘skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress’. At first in the extract pip describes her in a very elegant and wealthy matter not mentioning the death in her eye, he explains that she is wearing very affluent clothing and accessories but it is until he goes further on that the image of Miss Havisham becomes more clear. When he explains further he mentions that her dress is faded and yellow and that she looks as if she is dying along with her house her dress and the flowers in her hair.

Another thing in the extract is that different objects in the description resemble something the wedding veil, dress and bridal flowers represent the time she was left at the altar and wasn’t strong enough to move on, the clocked had stopped and I think that represents the time a man broke her heart so therefore the moment her heart was broken time stopped and she will never be healed unless she breaks a mans heart.

Although Miss Havisham may seem very mournful and you feel sorry but as you read on you realise that she is actually very resentful sour and bitter. Further more this is because it may seem as though she is inviting him round to play with her niece as a diversion but in fact she is luring him into a trap to fall in love with estella and therefore can break his heart in exchange for Miss Havishams’s broken one, a heart for a heart. And once she is sissified she may live in peace.

Estella seems to follow in Miss Havishams’s footsteps, very snooty, snobby and stuck up or as pip says ‘proud’. She does not seem to show a morsel of compassion for pip and neither does Miss Havisham. This is because she has almost been brought as if to have no heart to show no affection and not to shed a tear, she has been taught keep a face on to show that she feels nothing and this covers it all up so therefore her heart can not be broken Miss Havisham has taught her this because in the future no man will never hurt her she will just hurt them this in return will repair Miss Havishams’s broken heart. A theme seems to continue when pip meets Miss Havisham, one of which is gloomy and decaying but however wealthy and intriguing, dickens uses a great deal of straight forward language relating to the death and decay which is especially used in this description of Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham seems very open to talking about her past and having her heart broken and I think that pip notices that it is almost like she has stopped living and her life as she knew it ended at once when she was heart broken, like she is stuck in the past and will not and cannot move on. Dickens presents an impression of Miss Havisham through the words and the style in which he writes about her. "Her chest had dropped...under the weight of a crushing blow." Dickens uses repetition of the word 'dropped' and this shows that she has lost everything and also creates an image of a women who is very slumped and broken. Dickens describes her as dark and gloomy for instance he writes that she is withered like her dress and flowers and there is no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.