Great Expectations

Miss Havisham is a “ghastly,” bitter old woman who lives a life of seclusion, withering away in the decaying confines of her once lavish estate, Satis House. She is one of the most significant characters in the novel as she emblematises corrupt moral values and her manipulative influence greatly affects the life of Pip throughout the narrative.

Miss Havisham’s very existence is defined by a singular tragic moment from her past; she was betrayed on her wedding day, callously left at the altar after receiving a dismissive letter which left her frozen in time. Since that moment, Miss Havisham has held onto her heartbreak and resentment, stopping her from moving forward. Instead, she remains in her once beautiful, white wedding dress as it fades into a festering yellow fabric, while her body simultaneously withers away into a “corpse-like” shadow of her former self. She also stops all of the clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the exact time that she first learned of the betrayal. This shows her stagnation, as she becomes transfixed in the moment of despair that defines her character.

Spiralling into a deranged old woman obsessed with exacting “revenge on all of the male sex,” Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her with cold-heartedness to act as a weapon to pursue her cruel and spiteful endeavours for vengeance against men. Pip soon becomes a victim of these manipulative games as he grows attached to Estella and is ultimately exploited by Miss Havisham for his desires. She repeatedly prompts Pip to fall in love with Estella, simultaneously driving her to break his heart and “have no mercy!”

Thus, in her malevolent manipulation, Miss Havisham serves as a representation of the immoral ethics and cruelty associated with the values of the bourgeoisie. Her affluence affords her the ability to ignore the realities of time and everyday concerns that bind the proletariat to the working day, and instead she spends her life indulging in the suffering and struggles of others.
 
Yet in being granted this perverse sense of autonomy, Miss Havisham’s identity as an ageing, unmarried woman in Victorian society renders her representative of the fraught and frightening female figure, seemingly helpless without beauty or a husband to provide her with value in society.

Furthermore, after inflicting so much pain and damage to the lives of those around her, at the end of the novel Miss Havisham finally realises the harm that she has caused in raising Estella to be cold and heartless and exploiting the desires of the once innocent young Pip. This allows Dickens to reinforce the novel’s main message – that moral redemption and integrity (even of one of the most prolifically antagonistic characters in the novel) can be achieved through repentance and empathy. However, by still meeting her tragic fate after her encounter with the fire, Dickens potentially suggests that the damage caused by her cruelty could not be reversed or absolved by her admissions of guilt alone but rather would have required her acting upon this pursuit of forgiveness in an attempt to remedy her relationship with Estella. Ultimately, by the time Miss Havisham realises her mistakes, it is too late to repair them despite her still achieving a moral redemption.