Discussion Topic
Dickens' Techniques for Eliciting Sympathy in Great Expectations
Summary:
In Great Expectations, Dickens elicits sympathy for Pip, Joe, Miss Havisham, and Magwitch through various techniques. Pip and Joe are portrayed as gentle victims of Mrs. Joe's tyranny, evoking reader empathy. Miss Havisham is depicted as a tragic, jilted figure trapped in time, generating pity despite her manipulative nature. Magwitch, initially a threatening convict, is revealed as a victim of social injustice, displaying kindness and dedication to Pip, which earns the reader's compassion. These characters' vulnerabilities and hardships foster a deep emotional connection with the audience.
In Great Expectations, how does Dickens earn sympathy for certain characters in Chapter 2?
In Chapter 2, Dickens arouses the reader's sympathies for Pip and Joe Gargery at the expense of Mrs. Joe. Mrs. Joe is rough and domineering, while the two males are passive and gentle, "fellow-sufferers" under Mrs. Joe's tyrannical hand. Mrs. Joe is described as "not a good-looking woman...(who) must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand". She wears "a coarse apron" all the time, blaming the fact that she has to wear it on Pip and Joe, because of all the work they cause her. The apron has a "square impregnable bib in front", symbolic of the suppression of her womanhood and all womanly qualities. Pip, as established in the previous chapter, is small and insignificant, and Joe is described as "a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow - a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness". Before the tempestuous nature of Mrs. Joe, the two try...
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to get by as best they can together (Chapter 2).
In Chapter 1, the narrative point of view adopted by Dickens is throught Pip's eyes. This is a little surprising, because Dickens goes out of his way to present Pip as an insignificant character. Pip is an orphan who "never saw (his) father or (his) mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them". Five of his infant siblings are dead, and he himself is portrayed as a "small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry". Pip is "undersized, for (his) years", and completely "helpless" and terror-stricken in the hands of the convict. It is a bit surprising that such a weak, completely vulnerable character would be given the important job of providing the narrative point of view of the novel (Chapter 1).
How does Dickens create sympathy for Miss Havisham in Great Expectations?
During Pip's first visit to Satis House, he describes the dark and decaying atmosphere in which the strange Miss Havisham sits. And, when the immobile Pip does not respond to her request to play, Miss Havisham asks if he is obstinate, Pip replies,
"No, ma'am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can't play....but it's so new here, and so strange, and so fine--and melancholy--
"So new to him, " she muttered, "so old to me, sto strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!"
Certainly, there is a poignancy to the words of Miss Havisham that suggest some tragic implications to her words and manners. Later in Chapter XXII as Pip becomes reacquainted with the "pale young gentleman" whom he encountered on his first visit to Satis House, Herbert Pocket relates the tragic history of the young, wealthy Miss Havisham. He explains that the naive heiress to a fortune was duped by a suitor and left at the altar on their wedding day.
Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her..... all the susceptibility she possessed, certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him.... He practised on her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery...at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all.
But, at twenty minutes to nine on her wedding day, she received a letter rejecting her. Herbert explains,
"When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day.”
Because of her terrible rejection and shame, Miss Havisham has closed herself from the world and vows revenge upon the male race, exploiting her ward, Estella, to this end. When he learns this and that Miss Havisham's brother was a part of the conspiracy, Pip begins to understand her oddities.
Certainly, Pip's sympathies as well as that of the reader's are elicited in Stage III of Great Expectations, in which the moral regeneration of Pip and Miss Havisham occur. For, having observed the misery of Pip as he learns that Estella is to marry Bentley Drummle, Miss Havisham perceives in him, the shadow of yourself. In Chapter XLIX, when Pip visits Miss Havisham, she gives Pip money to help establish Herbert at a bank; then, she hands him a little pad on which she asks him to write, "I forgive her."
...to my amazement,...she dropped on her knees at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which, when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole, they must often have been raised to Heaven from her mother's side.
I had never seen her shed a tear before, and in the hope that the relief might do her good, I bent over her without speaking.....“O!” she cried, despairingly. “What have I done? What have I done!”
Pip tells her not to worry about him, but tells her she has wronged Estella by making her so cold. Miss Havisham pitiably explains that she meant to save Estella "from misery like my own." Pip replies that it were better to have left Estella "a natural heart, even to be bruised or broken." For, so thoroughly cruel is Estella that she has no love for her benefactress: "I am what you have made me," is her response to Miss Havisham's, " But to be proud and hard to me!” in Chapter XXXVIII.
Sadly, it is a lonely woman Pip leaves sitting before a fire.
With regard to Miss Havisham and the setting of her house...especially the room with the wedding cake and feast still laid out on the table...one can not help feel sorry for her. She is still wearing her tattered wedding clothing, and has never put on the last stocking or shoe. She is in a perpetual state of waiting for her love to come marry her, which we all know by now is not going to happen. All the clocks are stopped at the exact time she found out that he wasn't coming. Everything in that house is as if time stopped, except for the aging process and the rot and filth. The bugs have made a feast of the food, her satins and laces are rotting and hanging in threads from her thin, wrinkled, and aging body. She is hateful (understandable, don't you think?) and she does teach Estella to be hateful to all men, but she is still a very pitiful character. Any reader who puts himself into her shoes would understand and relate to the pain and suffering she has gone through.
Miss Havisham, the lonely spinster who wants Pip's heart broken because hers was broken when she was jilted by her fiance, is portrayed both through the eyes of the child Pip and the eyes of the adult Pip. Pip the child first encounters Miss Havisham when he is invited to her home. The child Pip sees her as a strange figure from a fairytale. As he puts it:
In an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.
At first glance, all he notices are her rich clothes of white satin, silk and lace, worn with a bridal veil on her white hair. She wears jewels. But as Pip gets closer, he realizes
that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.
To the child Pip, Miss Havisham is frightening, seemingly a figure out of a grave, uncanny:
Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.
After she puts her hand on his shoulder, he describes her as "the Witch of the place."
But the adult Pip can also weigh in, saying,
It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed.
As an adult, Pip sees past the fairytale witch to a person. He sees her as living in "a vanity of sorrow" that has become a "mania." He says that "her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased." He is judgmental towards her, feeling she has been overly self-indulgent in her grief. Rather than a witch, she is depicted, through the adult Pip, as a mentally unbalanced woman.
How does Dickens elicit sympathy for Pip, Miss Havisham, and Magwitch in Great Expectations?
Dickens wants people to sympathize with Magwitch and see him as a mostly innocent victim.
From the beginning, Dickens presents Magwitch in a sympathetic light. Although the convict terrifies young Pip and threatens to kill him, it is very clear that Magwitch is cold, hungry, hurt and afraid.
When Magwitch asks Pip where his mother is and he points, Magwitch starts to run away before realizing that Pip is pointing to a tombstone. Pip tells him good night before leaving, and Magwitch wishes he were a frog or an eel. It is a peculiar thing to say to someone you are trying to make fear you. It is a moment of weakness.
At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms—clasping himself, as if to hold himself together—and limped towards the low church wall. (ch 1, p. 6)
The reader’s first impression is of pity, not fear. Even though young Pip is afraid, he clearly pities Magwitch too. When Pip returns to give Magwitch the food, he says the marshes are a bad place to lay, and cause rheumatism. Magwitch becomes almost conversational, and thanks Pip.
When Pip says he saw another man, the one he thought was Magwitch’s accomplice, Magwitch is excited. He even forgets to pretend that the man Pip saw was the imaginary “young man” who was going to eat him.
Later, when Magwitch confesses to taking the food in order to save Pip from punishment, we see that he is actually kind-hearted. He shows this side of him when he returns to visit Pip in London, to see the gentleman he has become.
Magwitch made his fortune in Australia, but he sent it home to Pip. He wanted to show his appreciation, and he thought Pip was a good person for helping him. He also wanted to show that anyone could become a gentleman, because the jury blamed him and not Compeyson at his trial. Compeyson looked and spoke like the upper classes, and Magwitch did not.
Thematically, there are several elements connected to Magwitch. First of all, there is the concept of class distinction. Magwitch is clearly a member of the lower class, but that does not make him less of a good person. He demonstrates compassion. He also shows the importance of love in all of its forms, because Magwitch loves Pip as a son. Through his relationship with Magwitch at the end, before Magwitch dies, Pip becomes a better person.
How does Dickens portray Magwitch in Great Expectations to evoke compassion from the reader?
Dickens accomplishes his goal of eliciting sympathy from his readers for Magwitch in several ways.
First, when young Pip meets Magwitch, the escaped convict is pitiful. He is hungry, exhausted, shackled, and cold. While Pip is afraid of Magwitch, something about him still inspires a normally timid boy to help him. When Pip does help Magwitch, obviously, Magwitch does not forget it, and it is difficult as a reader not to be compassionate toward someone who offers undying gratitude.
Secondly, when Pip and Magwitch meet again after so many years, Pip's snobbishness toward the ex-convict cause the reader to side with Magwitch much as they do when Pip treats Joe poorly. Readers tend to cheer for the underdog, and Magwitch is definitely one.
As Pip begins to reach his full maturation, his attitude toward Magwitch changes, and he recognizes how much he is indebted to the older man. The reader wants Magwitch to feel that his money was was invested in Pip and that somehow his daughter Estella will love her long-lost father.