Great Expectations: "The Ghost of a Man's Own Father"
Author(s): Lawrence Jay Dessner

LAWRENCE JAY DESSNER
GreatE xpectations":t he ghost of a man's own father"
T HIS ESSAY attempts to provide a useful
account of Dickens' Great Expectations. It
makes use of some principles of Freudian
theory and of reports of contemporary psychoanalytic
medical practice. Psychoanalytically oriented
criticism of literature is, often, still an
enthusiast's cause. Pompous jargon, theorems
masquerading as axioms, repel us. Who has not
recoiled from a ludicrously farfetched Freudian
explication of a familiar text or from a speculative
psychological biography which reduces an author's
life to a sordid case history'? Forceful, even
convincing psychoanalytic explications feel different
from other forms of criticism: they do not
seem to spring from the conscious experience of
the reader-critic. They are not "proved upon our
pulses," nor do they correspond to the "Heart's
affections." And even the more circumspect
Freudians of literature are troubled by-and
trouble us with-the deterministic assumptions
of their theory. Proponents of human freedom
and dignity live uncomfortably with procedures
that imply conclusions such as this from Freud
himself: "The moment a man questions the
meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively
neither has any existence."' Few of us envy
the role of patient, fewer that of guinea pig. Autopsy
without scientific or legal justification is
abhorrent. It may help, however, not to overstate
the parallel between the psychoanalyst and the
literary critic. The physician does not hope or
expect to enjoy his patient's narrative. Nor does
he listen in order to be morally enriched by sharing
the patient's emotional life. He seeks knowledge.
not experience oi pleasure. The work itself.
the patient's recitation, is no mor-e than a necessary
evil to him. an apparatus to be used and discarded.
Nor is the patient welcomed for his own
sake; the patient is somleone to be changed.
Great Expectations does not seem an especially
recalcitrant text, one with severe problems of
interpretation which might force us to take the
risks of the psychoanalytic approach. Traditional
criticism has prodalced a wealth of useful material.
We have been shown. for example. that the
novecl is "an extra chapter to IThe Book' o 'Snohs'"
an indictment of the social "condition of' England."
an allegory of the loss of Eden, and a
moral fable. "the story of a young man's development
fi'om the moment of his fiirst self-awareness.
to that of his mature acceptance of the human
condition."2 That such interpretations have generated
argument and denial need not impair their
partial usefulness. but none of the valuable lines
of approach we have is likel!I to prepare the
student, or the instructor, lori a passage like this
one:
The sun was striking in at the great windows of the
court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the
glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the
two-and-thirtya nd the Judge, linking both together,
and perhapsr emindings ome amongt he audience,h ow
both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the
greater Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot
err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this
way of light, the prisoner [Magwitch] said. "My Lord,
I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty,
but I bow to yours," and sat down again.3
If Pip's struggles have brought him moral and
emotional maturity. if Dickens himself writes
fiom the vantage of such achieved maturity. this
passage (and it is not the novel's sole example) is
an anomaly. It is not simply that Magwitch and
his diction have leaped out of character. The narrator.
with his barrage of rhetorical maneuvers
and the contrivances of the visual scene, and by
his tacit endorsement of Magwitch's instant
transcendence of his own character. displays an
emotional sensitivity out of proportion to the
facts he is presenting to us.
We may recall. and will be dealing with. other
cases of emotional response that seem outside the
range of expected behavior -Pip's earlier aversion
to Magwitch. for instance. And there is no
inidication that Dickens creates these anomalies
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Lawrence Jay Dessner
within a critical or ironic distancing framework.4
We may shrink from the scene's sentimentality,
but there is nothing in the text to imply that
Dickens does so. Indeed, we may recall a scene,
in the second chapter of Hard Timnes, in which
Sissy Jupe is similarly spotlighted by a ray of
sunshine through windows, and suspect that Pip,
here particularly, is speaking with Dickens' voice.
If the meaning of Great Expectations is moral. or
social, or political, if Pip's saga is, in these ways,
Everyman's saga, is it not crucial that his personality
be within those parameters that strike us,
without hesitation, as "normal," that Pip be one
whose private life does not unduly distort his
vision of general moral and social experience? Is
it not crucial that Dickens, our guide to the generalized
meanings of Pip's life. appear himself
free of personal and private interest in the specifics
of the particular, illustrative case'? Historical,
biographical, economic, cultural, even political
explanations of this problem are available,
but to rely on any of them is to reduce one's
claims for the masterwork or to disregard our
theories of literary value. And even then, are we
convinced that any public, general idea can be
the prime cause of such emotional intensities'?
There are other critical and pedagogical difficulties
with the novel and its critical heritage. It
seems a realistic work, but its plot depends on
contrivance and coincidence. Its moral and
political basis, to the extent that its intent is seen
as moral or political, will not enforce consensus
or always stand scrutiny.5 Problems of this sort
have long since suggested psychological criticism,
investigations of Pip's motivation. It has been
said that Pip indulges in feelings of guilt out of
proportion 'to their proximate cause and that
Dickens uncritically, it seems unwittingly, endorses
this anomaly.6 When young Pip steals for
Magwitch. for instance. the bov acts under the
threat of death and is therefore innocent. The
theft should not initiate years of guilt and the
abiding fear of criminal taint. The incident, however.
is more complex in its embodiment:
"You young dog," said the man, licking his lips,
"what fat cheeks you ha' got."
I believe they were fat, though I was at that time
undersizedf, or my years,a nd not strong.
"Darn Me if I couldn't eat 'em," said the man,
with a threatening shake of his head, "and if I han't
half a mind to't!" (p. 2; Ch. i)
Pip's presentation of the scene. years after the
event, gives us a gruff but playful and teasing
Magwitch. winking at Pip, inviting him and us to
see how comically he is overdoing his threat.7 If
Pip, at that time. saw the "threat" the way he
presents it in his narrative, the boy's thefts from
the Gargery kitchen and forge were iiot committed
under duress. and he then is guilty. a party to a
conspiracy. Surely this reading, is not the one
enforced by the text. Magwitch is in no position
to indulge his sense of humor. Nor does Pip
exhibit anything but fear. On the other hand. as
Pip grows into adulthood, as he re-creates the
scene for us, he should recall and correct his first
impressions of Magwitch and that early sense of
guilt. Yet this is not an adequate summation of
the ways the boy and the plot develop. Pip's sense
of his own guilt does not leave him as he learns
that he is not legally or morally guilty. His guilt
feelings survive their cause, a logical absurdity
that suggests that the cause of Pip's sense of guilt
has been wrongly identified. On the assumption
that Magwitch's threat is what psychoanalysts
would call a "screen memory," a false lead, I will
examine the question of Pip's guilt, with what
help depth psychology can provide, in the hope of
discovering the core of the novel's appeal. what
sort of novel it is, what it is "about."
Complexities lurk in this endeavor. Whose
"screen memory" is misleading the reader as to
the cause of Pip's feelings of guilt'? Pip surely is
responsible, but does Dickens provide us with
materials in the text with which we can fairly be
expected to see through the screen? Or does he
conspire with Pip to disguise something'? And
why is the disguise a relatively poor one? It
prompts, rather than precludes, a closer look.
In the path of the psychoanalytically oriented
study of Great E.pectations is Edmund Wilson's
pioneering psychological essay, "Dickens: The
Two Scrooges."' Wilson is very much an amateur
psychoanalyst. He muddles medical terminology,
speaking here of "trauma," of "obviously neurotic
symptoms" (p. 7). there of "the burningout
of his [Dickens'] nerves" (p. 60). He insists
on biography: "It is necessary to see him as a man
in order to appreciate him as an artist" (p. 9),
and indulges in unscientific. even irresponsible,
psychobiographical speculations. While Freud
pointed investigators of behavior to its preconscious
roots in the first few years of life. Wilson
437
Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father"
points to the twelve-year-old Dickens' relegation
to the blacking warehouse, calls it "trauma"
(p. 7), and asks us to see "the work of Dickens's
whole career" as "an attempt to digest these early
shocks" (p. 8). It is bad psychoanalysis and not
so much bad literary criticism as not literary
criticism at all. It silently defies Freudian ideas of
the formation of personality in infancy, and it
loses the novels in its search for their author.
Orthodox Freudians would say that whatever
traumatic events shaped Dickens' feelings had
occurred long before the shocks of the blacking
warehouse. Few Freudians would say that personality
is fixed forever in infancy. that significant
change and growth do not occur in later life. Most
would agree that the unconscious is exactly that,
un-conscious. It exists, most malleably, before
consciousness. Before Dickens was aware.
through his command of language, of his own
existence, the shape and tendencies of his personality
had largely been developed.
Psychoanalysis is, of course, not possible without
the living patient who bears the tale of his
preconscious emotional life embedded in his
psyche. But psychoanalytic concepts are of use to
literary criticism with the aid of the bridge provided
by Freud and ably treated at length by
Taylor Stoehr and Norman N. Holland: "invented
dreams can be interpreted in the same way
as real ones."9 We may treat Great Expectations
as if it were a dream and expect it to be, like
dreams, coherent in terms of the special logic of
the unconscious. Such an analysis, guided by the
formulations and case histories of psychoanalytic
practice," generates the following thesis: Great
Expectations is about a child's feelings of deprivation
and about his attempts to live at peace with
his special emotional history. We are here assuming
that Pip, a character, not a person, is
nevertheless created so that Freudian principles
apply to his motivation. But Pip is not an autonomous
being; his relationship to Dickens is
close and complex, and, where narrative distance
is indeterminate, ambiguous. The shifting and
complex relationship between author and character,
dreamer and dream, a commonplace of psychoanalytic
practice, has also been described, in
literary terms, in J. Hillis Miller's discussion of
the "intersubjectivity" of Victorian fiction: "A
novel is a temporal rhythm made up of the movement
of the minds of the narrator and his characters
in their dance of approach and withdrawal,
love and hate, convergence and divergence, merger
and division."''
The novel is Dickens' dream; its revelations of
feeling spring from him. Indeed, our analysis of
Pip parallels a psychoanalyst's interpretation of
a real dream Dickens had and described to
John Forster. Dr. Klingerman's summation of his
analysis stresses this basic motif: "The loss of
siblings in early childhood frequently exerts a
profound impact in terms of unresolved guilt and
mourning and the development of restitutive
tendencies."'2 But the narrative, the dream, may
also be seen as Pip's. We are asked to see him as
shaper and teller of his own storv. His dream is
contained within that of Dickens'. It is a (Iream
within a dream, although the abstract statement
of the structure may not suggest that blending and
metamorphosis of scenes and persons, of dream
and dreamer, that common memories of real
dreams remind us of. Perhaps the youth's lines
in Arnold's "The Strayed Reveller" may help
clarify an aspect of this complex relationship between
dreamer and dream, artist and his creation:
"... -such a price / The Gods exact for song: /
To become what we sing." 3
The instance before us. to return to our thesis
that Great Expectations is about feelings of deprivation,
is that of a child who, prior to reaching
the stage of verbalized self-consciousness, lost
parents and siblings. It is as common a pattern as
any in clinical practice. The infant, like Auden's
adult with a "normal heart," "Craves what it
cannot have,/ Not universal love/ But to be
loved alone." He competes for love with uncanny
determination, for he believes that his very existence
depends upon it. Competitors for love he
wishes out of the way, his equivalent for death.
The death or disappearance of parent or sibling in
early childhood fills the infant with fear and guilt.
He believes that his wishes are magical, that they
caused death, and that others know this. The remaining
family members will not love him, a
murderer, so he seeks absolution. He wants punishment
now as much as he wants love.
The loss of both parents and all male siblings,
Pip's case, intensifies the deprivation: there is no
source of love, no agent from whom to receive
punishment. An objection might be raised at
this point: Pip's parents and brothers were dead
before Pip's own birth or, at least, before his
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Lawrence Jay Dessner
earliest feelings and fantasies. This logical difficulty
would not faze a psychoanalyst. He sees a
pattern of emotional behavior focused. as we shall
see. on the motif of unresolved guilt. and a history.
provided by his patient, that identifies a
traumatic genesis which is denied by the facts.
The pattern of behavior is still there. Its genesis is.
as yet. unknown, but the search for it will be
facilitated by identification of the pattern and by
the useful fact that the history the patient has
offered is a rather subtle piece of subterfuge. The
analyst knows he is on the right track. He knows
how common it is for people, whose parents are
living, to imagine themselves, in their dreams and
daydreams, to be or to have been. young orphans.
The ubiquity of such fantasies is suggested by
many games children play. by thematic analyses
of myths and folklore, and by the number of
novels and romances that incorporate the motif.
A recent student of Charlotte Bronte's novels, all
four of which have an orphan as protagonist,
was moved to make the pattern universal:
"Every reader is an orphan whose family is not
truly his family and who wishes to punish it.
along with other authority figures, for saying no
to him and curbing his desires.""4
Of course. the psychoanalyst. when he learns
that his "patient" is a character in a work of fiction,
would simply assume that the story is a
vehicle for expression of feelings of its creator,
that Pip's history is an emotional correlative of
the unknown psychic history of his creator. This
assumption, questionable or distasteful as it may
strike some. is often made by literary critics and
may be defended or explained by such precepts
as these put forth by J. Hillis Miller: "The writing
of a novel is also a gesture, and this is its primary
reality. It brings into visibility what its author is.
A man is what he does, and this is as true for the
writing of a novel as for any other action" (The
PFor'n7 of' Victorian F'iction, p. 1). What is crucial
for literary criticism is what the author does, his
work's pattern of feeling: diagnosis of its genesis,
why he does it, unless the work encourages our
search for it, is not our goal.
The possible ramifications of feelings of guilt
and deprivation are wondrously complex, but
among the more common reactions is that pattern
in which deprivation comes to be felt as justified:
the loss of love is accepted as a balance to the
guilt, as deserved, even desired, punishment. Related
to this syndrome is behavior that is overtly a
reaching toward love, covertly a mode of selfpreserving
self-abasement. A good deal of Pip's
behavior, particularly with Estella. exhibits this
pattern rather obviously. A child with Pip's psychological
history. and with. perhaps. a theoretical
predisposition to neurosis, will tend to carry
his unfulfilled emotional needs into his adult life.
The intensity with which he pursues psychic
gratifications is tempered only by the necessity to
observe the conventions of adult society. To the
degree that Pip's love of Estella. and the feelings
and behavior it produces. conform to social conventions.
the psychic transaction that it incorporates
is successfully masked or assimilated. To
the degree that Dickens' novel conforms to conventions
of characterization in fiction. he is successful.
To the degree that Pip and Dickens "fail,"
fail to achieve convincing congruity between private
and public acts, this essay is necessary.
Our analysis of Gcreat E.xpectations will show
that Pip's search for love and punishment is
directed primarily toward a father figure who will
love him with constancy and intensity, but who
also will redeem the boy's burden of guilt by
punishing him. Yet the father is the prime competitor
for the love of the life-sustaining mother
and is. therefore, wished out of the way. When he
disappears. the child strives to find him. If he can
be found. the murder is repealed, or did not even
happen. Pip's mother is gone too. Who wished
her away'? The father. The child hates him, strives
to punish him. These motives are obviously,
even in this simplified sketch, self-contradictory.
But. as Leonard F. Manheim formulates the
Freudian dogma, "there is no such thing as logical
incompatibility in the Unconscious."'5 The end
of Pip's search will be the discovery of a father
who will love and punish him, and whom the boy
can love and punish. The intensity of these
strivings pushes them to their logical, if grotesquely
amoral and seemingly self-defeating
limits: the logical extension, the ideal case. of love
is self-sacrifice. suicide: the logical extension of
punishment is murder. Through metaphor and by
analogy, Pip achieves both.
We are rather obviously directed toward this
psychic portrait by the novel's first few pages. It is
as if Dickens were the busy psychoanalyst's ideal
patient. He lays out, in the first session, a barely
disguised self-diagnosis.'" The novel begins, not
439
Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father"
with Pip's birth or with his genealogy, but with
his birth into consciousness and literacy. Its first
episode is the earliest available to the narrator's
memory. Its first words are a reference to "my
father." Its first complex of feelings include the
pathos of the orphan who "never saw my father
or mother." and that pathos is complemented by
the setting among tombstones "on a memorable
raw afternoon towards evening." It is accentuated
by the five "lozenges" which mark Pip's five
dead brothers. and by the archness of tone. bordering
on self-pity, the mock innocence of the
narrator's language, itself mocked by ironic wit:
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
indebtedf or a belief I religiouslye ntertainedt hat they
had all been born on their back with their hands in their
trousers-pocketsa,n d had nevert akent hem out in this
state of existence. (p. 1; Ch. i)
The wit mitigates the paragraph's sentimentality
and saves Pip from the full measure of pain his
memories prompt. (It also introduces a dominant
metaphor of the novel's public, political, level of
meaning: survival of personality is figured as
economic survival.) But Pip's world is harsh and
torbidding, and the child, as he sees the earliest
landscape he can remember. as he re-creates his
earliest intimations of his own distinct identity,
discovers himself to be "beginning to cry" (p. 1;
Ch. i).
The mode of presentation of Pip's story changes
here on the verge of his tears. The child, alone
with his private thoughts, in a realistically rendered
world, is immediately enmeshed in a society
of other people. including mythic or fairytale
people, and a world worked by the conventions
of melodrama and romance. The deprivations
of the orphan and sole surviving son to
which the first page points and which is. in this
reading. the core of the novel, propel no further
confessional self-diagnosis. What follows is a
drastically edited confession. almost a translation
into modes of discourse which disguise and yet
hint at the novel's private impetus.
From this point on. our procedure is simply to
test our psychological reading of the private
impetus of Great E.xpecitattions against the evidence
which is, theoretically, the entire text. Such
testing would require an impossibly long article.
The alternative is to take samplings which could
have been taken at random with a theoretically
perfect case--and a perfect analyst. One may
begin with Pip and his toying with a central question
of child-rearing. He loves the joke about
being brought up "by hand." It ironically implies
that especially loving care had been expended on
his behalf; it implies, without irony. that a good
deal of physical punishment went with it. But
beneath the joke-are all Pip's jokes defensive
masks'?--is the pain of infantile deprivation. To
bring up "by hand" also means: "to feed by
bottle or spoon rather than at the breast.""7 Oh
that "square impregnable bib in front, . . . stuck
full of pins and needles" which covers the only
maternal breasts Pip has known. And then how
sadly touching is the mock innocence, the comic
and pathetic archness of Pip's bewildered complaint
on his sister's bib: "Though I really see no
reason why she should have worn it at all; or
why. if she did wear it at all, she should not have
taken it off every day of her life" (p. 6; Ch. ii).
Or one can go to the peripheral domestic
comedy of the Pocket family. The rearing of the
seven (p. 176; Ch. xxii) little Pockets, an echo of
the seven little Pirrips, is chaotic enough to
prompt their father's outcry: "Are infants to be
nutcrackered into their tombs. and is nobody to
save them ?" (p. 183; Ch. xxiii). The youngest child
is heard "wailing dolefully" and then "by degrees
... was hushed and stopped, as if it were a
young ventriloquist with something in its mouth"
(p. 176; Ch. xxii). Does not this comic description
elucidate Pip's fear of his own extinction'?
Like the youngest surviving Pirrip. baby Pocket
gets not milk from his mother but needles. a
needle-case being supplied as a pacifier: "And
more needles were missing than it could be regarded
as quite wholesome for a patient of such
tender years either to apply externally or to take
as a tonic" (p. 257; Ch. xxxiii).
This branch of the Pocket family is but one of
the novel's subsidiary families through whom
Pip's psychic history is recalled and obliquely expressed.
The pattern of childhood deprivation
and familial conflict is widely apparent although
sometimes indirectly presented. Joe Gargery's
father "went off in a purple leptic fit." but not before
terrorizing his wife and child so thoroughly
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Lawrence Jay Dessner
that they, "several times," ran away from him
(p. 42; Ch. vii). Miss Havisham "was a spoilt
child. Her mother died when she was a baby"
(p. 169; Ch. xxii). Her own half-brother plotted
against her, and was crazed with remorse for it as
he died (p. 331; Ch. xlii). Biddy "was an orphan
like myself; like me, too, had been brought up by
hand" (p. 40; Ch. vii). Magwitch: "I've no more
notion where I was born. than you have-if so
much" (p. 328; Ch. xlii). Estella, of course, was
abandoned by her parents, but her laughter at the
machinations of the grasping Pocket relations
strikes Pip as being "too much for the occasion."
Yes, she explains, her bitterness masks remembered
pain: "For you were not brought up in that
strange house from a mere baby.-I was. You
had not your little wits sharpened by the intriguing
against you, suppressed and defenceless, under
the mask of sympathy and pity and what not,
that is soft and soothing" (p. 253; Ch. xxxiii). (It
is ironic that she is so sure Pip's childhood was
different from her own, for as she describes her
childhood it reminds us of Pip's.) Clara Barley's
surviving parent, her father, is a ferocious and
utterly self-centered bully and drunkard. She
tends him with resignation and love. It is understood
that her marriage cannot take place as long
as her father lives: her engagement cannot even
be mentioned to him (p. 355; Ch. xlvi). She submits
without any trace of antagonism. Herbert
Pocket is pleased "to love a girl who has no relations"
(p. 355; Ch. xlvi), his own being a burden
to him, and he wonders whether "the children of
not exactly suitable marriages [like himself and
his "poor sister Charlotte who was next me and
died before she was fourteen"] are always most
particularly anxious to be married" (p. 237; Ch.
xxx).
Like the dome of many-colored glass, Pip's
emotional plight colors all within his range. As in
any work of art, or any dream, the theme is pervasive,
reduplicated in many contexts, unifying.
That the Oedipal motifs in Great ELpectations.
had a deeply personal resonance t'or himself
Dickens would have denied. He said, although
with a suggestive ambiguity. that he could never
dream of his characters since "it would be like a
man dreaming of himself, which is clearly an impossibility.
Things exterior to one's self must always
be the basis of dreams." Manheim. after
quoting Dickens here. counters with a restatement
of a broadly accepted Freudian principle: "It is
impossible for one to dream of anything hitt one's
self."18 Perhaps Hopkins' line, and the poem from
which it comes. has a useful pertinence here:
. . . What I do is me. . . 11 9
We know little of Wopsle's past. but he does
say grace in a style "something like a religious
cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the
Third" (p. 22; Ch. iv). His interest in these violent
tragedies of family life is presented as grandly
comic, but his performance as Hamlet depresses
Pip, who thereupon "dreamed that my expectations
were all cancelled, and that I had to give my
hand in marriage to Herbert's Clara, or play Hamlet
to Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty
thousand people, without knowing twenty words
of it," a nightmare of terror and panic as Pip identifies
himself with Shakespeare's troubled Prince
(p. 244; Ch. xxxi). Wemmick's idyllic relationship
with his "Aged Parent" is the other side ot the
coin, a father-son relationship from which all
traces of competitiveness have been repressed.20
Dolge Orlick, Pip's nemesis and alter ego.21
"slouches" in and out of the forge "like Cain" the
fratricide (p. 105; Ch. xv). Trabb's boy. despite
his antic satire of Pip's pretensions, is an epitome
of the disenfranchised child. He lacks a logical
target for his revenge; he lacks even the dignity of
a name.
No doubt these and most other soundings of
the text can be assimilated to other sorts of interpretation.
but none comprehend nearly so
much of the text, or do so with as much consistency.
Nor do they account for the power of
Great Expectations, the hold the book has had on
its broad readership. That derives from the personal
obsession at its center. And this obsession,
disguised by public themes and by the excitements
of the suspense plot. is remarkably obvious and
pervasive. It is a question not of depth analysis
but of a particular sort of alertness to the surface
of the text. Pip, who gives no more than a sketch
of his early childhood, assumes, from time to
time, that we know much more about it than we
do. How often and how frankly does he allude to a
feeling of "dread ... the revival for a few minutes
of the terror of childhood" (p. 217; Ch. xxviii).
It is hardly daring to suggest that the genesis ot
art is personal and private, emotional rather than
rational. In fact, all writing is, in some sense,
automatic writing. My pen moves only in the
441
Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father"
interstices between periods of thought. I think,
ergo I am-but in that instant the pen stops. I
write-and where is that self-conscious "I" of
which I am so fond'? Some works of art baffle attempts
to locate their personal impetus; the dream
carries the emotive charge while obscuring its
private basis. Many other works, some call them
"confessional," seem to deal exclusively and
courageously with their personal impetus, although
one may. remembering the saw that no
one can psychoanalyze himself, doubt their sincerity
or their claim to sophistication. What is remarkable
is the way Dickens covers his private
traces while letting many of the cats out of the
bag. It is as if the critical problems with the novel,
its failures as it were, were deliberate, the infant's
cry piercing the artist's manly reserve. It is as if
Dickens wants us to see through the disguise, as if
he wants, himself, to deal directly with private
and taboo subjects but will not quite acknowledge
this desire. He winks at us: "Yes, yes, Pip is Me"-
but only winks. If we wink back, as if to join the
conspiracy, he looks away. He wants to get caught
but he lacks that extra measure of courage that
would enable him to turn himself in. Jay Leyda,
writing of Melville's stories, has described a
similar drama: "We are compelled to regard
these stories as an artist's resolution of that constant
contradiction--between the desperate need
to communicate and the fear of revealing too
much."22
Pip not only feels guilty, he tells us that he feels
guilty. Often he tells us that he cannot understand
why his feelings of guilt occur or why they are so
strong. Often he tries to discover why, or announces
that the discovery is either impossible or
inconsequential. It is as if Pip's telling of his story
and Dickens' writing of the novel are acts that incorporate
psychological probing, discovery, and
obfuscation. One thinks of Philip Roth's Portnov's
Complaint and his even more obviously
relevant Ml Lif/ as a Man. Roth's protagonists
recount their histories, the one to his psychoanalyst,
the other to readers of fiction and autobiography,
the recounting being clearly seen by
both author and reader as forms of self-defense,
discovery, and therapy. Roth's distance from his
protagonists and his awareness of their psychological
maneuverings are clear and constant.
Dickens' awareness is ambiguous and wavering.
Pip himself is fascinated by the recurring "inexplicable
feeling" associated with the "poor
labyrinth" of his secret life (pp. 259, 219; Chs.
xxxiii, xxix). "What I wanted, who can say'? How
can I say, when I never knew'?" (p. 101; Ch. xiv).
"I consumed the whole time in thinking how
strange it was that I should be encompassed by all
this taint of prison and crime" (p. 249; Ch. xxxii).
"I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew
why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of
the week I made the reflection, or even who I was
that made it" (p. 311; Ch. xl). "Yet Estella was so
inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet
of mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the
limits of my own part in its production" (p. 258;
Ch. xxxiv). From time to time this sort of probing
into the forbidden center of Pip's psyche is expressed
by a pun: "I may here remark that I suppose
myself to be better acquainted than any living
authority, with the ridgy effect of a weddingring,
passing unsympathetically over the human
countenance" (p. 48; Ch. vii). Or even by a sexual
double entendre: "Conscience is a dreadful thing
when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case
of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another
secret burden down the leg of his trousers,
it is (as I can testify) a great punishment" (p. 10;
Ch. ii). Sometimes a character other than Pip has
the innocent-sounding but reverberating line. As
does Camilla Pocket: "I am determined not to
make a display of my feelings, but it's very hard to
be told one wants to feast on one's relations" (p.
82; Ch. xi). Or as does Joe Gargery: "Which I
meantersay, if the ghost of a man's own father
cannot be allowed to claim his attention, what
can, Sir'?" (pp. 208-09; Ch. xxvii). I do not believe
such quotations can justly be said to be out
of context. The entire novel, all its characters and
incidents, springs from one center; each part is an
appropriate context for any other part.23
It is in the plot, however, that the Oedipal
drama, so often alluded to by various characters,
may be glimpsed. Pip needs to find a parent figure
whom he can love, and fear, and kill, and who will
in turn terrorize, and succumb to, and lovingly
pardon him. Magwitch is the perfection of that
figure. The plot traces Pip's experience of discovering
this. But the psyche takes what nourishment
it can, makes do, along the way. It does not
put off immediate though partial satisfactions in
anticipation of larger rewards. Psychic transactions
are entered into with all comers. Mrs. Joe,
442
Lawrence Jay Dessner
to be sure, has much the test of the bargain with
Pip. She claims and disclaims, at her own pleasure,
the rewards due Pip's parents: "If it warn't
for me you'd have been to the churchyard long
ago, and stayed there..... It's bad enough to be a
blacksmith's wife (and him a Gargery) without
being your mother" (p. 7; Ch. ii). Sibling and
maternal antagonisms merge in the threat of
murder/abandonment. Dickens steps in to redress
the balance by having Orlick mortally attack
her. And the forgiveness she both gives and
asks at her death is ambiguous enough to include
Pip: "And so she presently said 'Joe' again, and
once 'Pardon,' and once 'Pip'
"
(p. 269; Ch.
xxxv).
Miss Hlavisham permits herself, while assuming
the role of Pip's benefactor, to torment him.
Because of her wealth, her age, and her pitiful
condition, and because of her approximation to a
parental figure, Pip's aggressiveness toward her
can only be admitted through his hallucinated
visions of her death by hanging (pp. 58-59, 380;
Chs. viii, xlix). The intensity of his emotional reaction
to her can also be seen in his ludicrous narration
to his family circle of his first encounter
with her: "She was sitting ... in a black velvet
coach.... And Miss Estella... handed her in
cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold
plate.... Four dogs... fought for veal-cutlets
out of a silver basket" (pp. 62-63; Ch. ix). Pip
tries, without success, to explain why he so grotesquely
and seemingly gratuitously embellished
his tale: "'f a dread of not being understood be
hidden in the breasts of other young people to
anything like the extent to which it used to be
hidden in mine--which I consider probable, as I
have no particular reason to suspect myself of
having been a monstrosity-it is the key to many
reservations" (p. 61; Ch. ix). And after Miss
Havisham is known not to be Pip's patron-parent,
Pip saves her from death by fire, saves her, but in
this language: "We were on the ground struggling
like desperate enemies, and . . . the closer I
covered her. the more wildly she shrieked and
tried to free herself" (p. 380; Ch. xlxi). The violence
and sexual ambiguity of this strikes Pip, as
well as us, as excessive and he tries to discover its
genesis. He refers it to unconscious, irrational,
and, to his relief, inaccessible motives: "That this
occurred I knew through the result, but not
through anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did.
I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the
floor.... Assistance was sent for, and I heid her
until it came, as if I unreasonably fancied (I think
I did) that if I let her go, the fire would break out
again and consume her" (pp. 380-81; Ch. xlix).
Pumblechook is a parody of the surrogate
father, linked, by the motif of handshaking, with
Magwitch. His various claims to be Pip's benefactor
and his actual negligence of the boy come
to us, through Pip's reportage, as farce, their pain
distanced into triumphant comedy, and this despite,
rather than because of, Pumblechook's long
and close relationship with him. He is "Joe's
uncle, but Mrs. Joe appropriated him" (p. 21;
Ch. iv). He is by this metaphor, and metaphor is
as good as fact for the psyche, a blood relative.
His cruelty is not forgotten. Orlick, an agent of
Pip's repressed aggression, punishes and humiliates
him: "They took his till, and they took his
cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they
partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face,
and they pulled his nose, and they tied him up to
his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they
stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals" (p.
442; Ch. lvii). That is Joe's narrative. Its cadence
has the pulse of ritual utterance, an exultant folk
exorcism.
Jaggers is an interesting variation on the
theme. He has personal force and authority and
the identification with the law that Manheim has
written about as symbolic of Oedipal relationships.
24 He is, in legal fact, a surrogate for both
Magwitch and Miss Havisham and the immediate
provider of the mysterious largesse. But he is
unwilling to engage in any psychological transactions
with Pip. His interest is professional.
without affect. He washes his hands of personal
involvement. And since he will not play the games
most people play, Pip's relationship with him is a
dead end. He will neither love Pip nor hate him
(either one would do), and so Pip is rarely engaged
by him more intimately than as an object of
curiosity. At an early interview with Jaggers, Pip
"felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of
that old time when I had been put upon a tombstone"
(p. 272; Ch. xxxvi). Pip is probing, trying
to assimilate Jaggers into his psychic life. He is
made "intensely melancholy" by the encounter,
he says, but Jaggers' potential to provoke feelings
of guilt is insubstantial, and Pip steps aside and
transfers him to Herbert Pocket. Pip sees Herbert,
443
Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father"
as he sees everyone, as a version of his own emotional
position, and he derives some slight gratification
when Herbert "thought he must have
committed a felony and forgotten the details of it,
he felt so dejected and guilty" (p. 278; Ch. xxxvi).
Pip's search for the special kind of father figure
his psyche requires extends into many other
nooks and crannies of the novel, but the most
decisive encounters are those with Joe Gargery
and with Magwitch. Gargery. as the husband of
Pip's acting imother, is the most obvious Iather
figure, and he is in some respects what Pip craves.
Submissiveness, humility, loving-kindness, Joe is
their perfection. "I always treated him as a larger
species of child" (p. 7; Ch. ii), says Pip. He is the
least threatening, least competitive, most selfsacrificing
of men: and despite the brawn of his
blacksmith's arm, the least masculine.25 There is
not the least hint, until the novel's close, of his
having a sexual nature. He is more like Pip's child
than Pip's father, a reversal of roles similar to that
of Wemmick and Aged Parent, a not uncommon
motif in Dickens.26 But Pip needs more than this.
He needs a father whom he can hurt and who will
hurt him, before whom he can feel guilt and suffer
punishment. Joe Gargery is incapable of anger,
but Pip can only learn this by attempting to provoke
his anger. Failing that, he punishes him for
his "refusal" to play the stern father part to Pip's
satisfaction. Both stances taken toward Gargery
can exist at the same time, in the same act, without
respect to the logic of cause and effect that reason
requires. "Past, present and future are threaded,"
says Freud, "on the string of the wish that runs
through them all."27 The psyche never gives up,
never admits that any defeat is final, never is disloyal,
as it were, to the demands that propel it.
The text shows us Pip probing Joe's character,
seeking not knowledge but reaction, reaction
specifically in the form of retributive anger, the
exhibition of pain and vindictive, guilt-provoking,
guilt-satisfying, response. Joe's pardon is not
enough, for Joe will not be hurt; his love for Pip
is not offered in spite of the pain Pip causes him,
nor even with awareness of any cruelty on Pip's
part. His acceptance does not have the force of
forgiveness. Pip's assault on Joe takes the forms
of condescension and direct attack, both masked
by a sentimentalized affection. As Pip paints him,
Joe's stupidity is only matched by his grotesque
appearance and his unexampled lack of social
confidence: "I never knew Joe to remember anything
from one Sunday to another, or to acquire,
under my tuition, any piece of information whatever.
Yet he would smoke his pipe at the Battery
with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else
-even with a learned air-as if he considered
himself to be advancing immensely" (p. 102; Ch.
xv). "He pulled up his shirt-collar so very high behind,
that it made the hair on the crown of his
head stand up like a tuft of feathers. ... Joe took
his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in
both his hands: as if he had some urgent reason in
his mind for being particular to half a quarter of
an ounce" (p. 93; Ch. xiii). Joe does not take
offense at such ridicule. No provocation or punishment
hurts him. Pip's only recourse, the only
use he can make of the man who will not blame
him, is to blame himself, on Joe's behalf, for
imagined treachery and disloyalty to Joe. This
permits Pip to castigate himself and to profit by
encounters with the oblivious Joe.
The sentimentality of the procedure's enactment
signals Pip's strained frustration: "Heaven
knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for
they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth,
overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had
cried, than before-more sorry, more aware of
my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried
before, I should have had Joe with me then" (p.
151; Ch. xix). The charge Pip brings against himself
here we all know to be patent nonsense, although
Dickens does not let Pip, or himself, see
clearly through the tears. "But, sharpest and
deepest pain of all-it was for the convict, guilty
of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken
out of those rooms where I sat thinking, and
hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted
Joe.... In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I
heard pursuers" (pp. 307-08; Ch. xxxix). Do we
not hear a note, in this, of what a recent survey of
Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy of Masochism
calls The Joy of Su/ffring?28 It serves, as does
Pip's hopeless pursuit of Estella, to lacerate a
psyche which in its "innermost life of my life"
(p. 223; Ch. xxix) desires to be scourged. Pip's
"condition of unreason" (p. 245; Ch. xxxii), to
use another of his descriptions of his emotional
plight, has demanded it. He makes what capital
he can of Joe, but Joe is found wanting and Pip
takes it out on him. His intended proposal to
Biddy is his revenge on Joe for being Joe. Only
444
La'wreniCe Ja i' Dessner
after Magwitch's death are Joe and Biddy allowed
their fair measure of respect. Only after
Pip's devils have been assuaged by, most importantly,
the catastrophe of the Magwitch relationship
can Biddy and Joe be given, be seen as having,
adult sexuality.
The assertion that Pip harbors patricidal tendencies.
that in some ways he accomplishes acts
of patricide on Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and
Magwitch, may still seem a shockingly askew
judgment. Pip is gentle, sober, nonviolent, not
that sort of fellow at all. The theory that Oedipal
aggressions color all personalities may evaporate
before the novel's display of Pip's growing into
various forms of loving-kindness toward those
whose lives cross his. On the other hand, the text
presents a number of untimely and violent deaths.
and is not the amalgam of Pip and Dickens, who
makes it all up, responsible for all of it? Freud
said the patient is responsible for his own dreams
-surely the analyst isn't! In the world of fiction
the narrator-author is the first cause of all events.
Pip often suspects himself of being a murderer, or
meditates, in various degrees of seriousness, on
the possibility. Mr. Wopsle involves Pip in a
reading, in Pumblechook's parlor, of "the affecting
tragedy of George Barnwell." The hero of
Lillo's very popular play, parodied by Thackeray
in Punch in 1847, robs his master and murders his
uncle. Pip plays the murderer: "At once ferocious
and maudlin, I was made to murder my uncle
with no extenuating circumstances whatever" (p.
110). Pumblechook glares at him "saying 'Take
warning, boy, take warning!' as if it were a wellknown
fact that I contemplated murdering a near
relation, provided I could only induce one to have
the weakness to become my benefactor" (p. 110;
Ch. xv). How recklessly does Pip express the inexpressible,
a murderer tempting fate, inviting
capture, by returning to the scene of his crime. It
is, in this case, not the first such return. Earlier,
when Pumblechook, expecting brandy, choked
on the tar-water, young Pip was terrified: "I
didn't know how I had done it, but I had no doubt
I had murdered him somehow" (p. 25; Ch. iv).
The Barnwell play is followed directly by news
of the assault on Mrs. Joe. Pip takes it this way:
"With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at
first disposed to believe that I must have had some
hand in the attack upon my sister, or at all events
that as her near relation, popularly known to be
under obligations to her, I was a more legitimate
object of suspicion than any one else" (p. 113;
Ch. xvi). Pip immediately reconsiders, taking a
"view of the case, which was more reasonable."
But years later, hearing footsteps on his stairsthey
are Magwitch's-Pip reverts to the earlier,
unreasonable idea: "What nervous folly made me
start, and awfully connect it with the footsteps of
my dead sister, matters not" (p. 299; Ch. xxxix).
"Matters not"! Of course it matters, and Pip
senses that it does. What he implies by the phrase
is something like this: "Reader, you and I both
know a good deal more than we admit about
these psychological strategies of mine. They are,
in fact, so obvious and so distasteful, and I can do
nothing about them. I'm sorry to have been tactless
again and to have made explicit reterence to
them. Please excuse me and forget it ever happened."
Pip's nonchalance here is itself strategic,
defensive. Herbert warns Pip that Magwitch
might turn himself in to the police if he feels Pip
has forsaken him. Pip has not thought of abandoning
Magwitch at all, but Herbert's speculation
opens the old wound: "1 was so struck by the
horror of this idea, which had weighed upon me
from the first, and the working out of which
would make me regard myself, in some sort, as his
murderer, that I could not rest in my chair, but
began pacing to and fro" (p. 325; Ch. xli).
Pip's relationship to Magwitch is the fulcrum
of the novel's movement. It begins with Magwitch's
comic ferocity: "Keep still, you little
devil, or I'll cut your throat!" (p. 2: Ch. i). Pip
misreads his man's immediate motive, but responds
with sensitivity to him: "As I saw him go,
picking his way among the nettles, and among the
brambles that bound the green mounds [The intensity
with which this is felt forces the prose into
verse], he looked in my young eyes as if he were
eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching
up cautiously out of their graves. to get a twist
upon his ankle and pull him in" (p. 4; Ch. i). The
living man, through imagery, is linked with the
dead Pirrips. Pip keeps from Joe any knowledge
of his pilfering for Magwitch. His reasons for doing
so are obviously strained: "I mistrusted that
if I did, he would think me worse than I was" (p.
37; Ch. vi). Pip knows this rationale is falsely
based, he calls it "morbid." But the convict is recaptured
and the subject drops. Pip transfers his
suffering over "the smart without a name" (p. 57;
445
Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father"
Ch. viii) to the immediately available person,
Estella. That movement reaches its emotional
climax when she tells Pip of her engagement to
Drummle. Pip's response is to restate his love for
her, and, more oddly, his praise and thanksgiving
for her goodness to him: "In this separation I associate
you only with the good.... Oh, God
bless you, God forgive you!" In an "ecstasy of
unhappiness," Pip abases himself before Estella,
praises her, accepts for himself a lifetime of painfully
unrequited love, and forgives her for it all.
"The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood
from an inward wound, and gushed out" (p. 345;
Ch. xliv). Conventions of Victorian romantic love
serve to disguise the intensity of Pip's reactions
here just as the canons of respectability provide a
"cover" for Pip's morbid fear of criminal taint.
We have already noticed some of Pip's early,
intensely felt reactions to Magwitch. As the hint
is given that the returned convict is, as he soon
says, Pip's "second father," Pip's heart beats
"like a heavy hammer of disordered action." He
"had to struggle for every breath." He "seemed
to be suffocating.... The abhorrence in which I
held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance
with which 1 shrank from him, could not
have been exceeded if he had been some terrible
beast.... I recoiled from his touch as if he had
been a snake ... while my blood ran cold within
me" (pp. 303-05; Ch. xxxix). To ascribe such intensity
to Pip's sense of class distinctions is to
take the complaint for the diagnosis.
Pip meditates on his case, and on his symptoms,
admitting his inability to verbalize his feelings, yet
fascinated by them: "Words cannot tell what a
sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful
mystery that he was to me" (p. 319; Ch. xl). "The
imaginary student pursued by the misshapen
creature he had impiously made, was not more
wretched than J, pursued by the creature who had
made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger
repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder
he was of me" (p. 320; Ch. xl). How accurate is
this description of the minuet of the heart's affections!
And how courageous not to repress the
hint, in the allusion to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
that the monster is a creation of the suffering
psyche, a creation that punishes its creator.
Pip is haunted by the idea of being "in some
sort... [Magwitch's] murderer" (p. 352; Ch.
xli). His dreams are of this, he says. He wakes,
"unrefreshed," and "waking.. never lost that
fear" (p. 326; Ch. xli). In the sense that the narrator
invents the novel, he is the murderer. But he
also invents Compeyson. the actual murderer and
his secret surrogate. This link between Pip and
Compeyson is hidden in the plot's complexities,
and yet, like so many hidden connections in
Great Expectations, it is indirectly revealed.
Wopsle, seeing the two of them in his audience
"had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you,
Mr. Pip, till I saw that you were quite unconscious
of him, sitting behind you there like a ghost" (p.
364; Ch. xlvii). Wopsle, whose foolishness disguises
his insight here, "had from the first vaguely
associated him with me, and known him as somehow
belonging to me in the old village time" (p.
366; Ch. xlvii). "Somehow" and "vaguely," passwords
of sentimental diffuseness, are as explicit
as Pip is able to be.
By the time Magwitch is mortally injured and
apprehended, Pip's "repugnance to him had all
melted away." He sees him as "only ... a man
who had meant to be my benefactor. and who had
felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously,
towards me with great constancy through a series
of years" (p. a23: Ch. liv). With Magwitch's
death doubly assured, Pip can turn to him with
love and for love. Pip's guilt is not utterly "melted
away," but it is assuaged in part by his earlier refusal
to consider taking possession of the wealth
Magwitch had amassed for him. Jaggers "was
querulous and angry with me for having 'let it slip
through my fingers,'" although he admits the
difficulty of Pip's claim. Pip resolves not to try.
Had he tried earlier, the chances would have been
better. Oddly enough, his case would have been
best made had he been related to Magwitch by a
"recognizable tie"-as an adopted son, for instance,
or even as Estella's husband, and so, sonin-
law (pp. 425--26; Ch. lv). Magwitch, in returning
to England, had, in effect, sacrificed himself
for Pip. Pip sacrifices economic security. Magwitch's
money, honestly earned, should be at least
as acceptable as Miss Havisham's inherited
brewery fortune, but neither Pip nor Dickens is
as interested in the evils of snobbery as the surface
of the novel has prompted some of its critics to be.
By refusing to consider laying hold of Magwitch's
wealth before it is too late, Pip frustrates
his benefactor's love and life work. Since he keeps
this fact from Magwitch, the argument that Pip
446
Lawlrence Jay Dessner
deliberately frustrates his patron is solipsistic,
but that is the way of the ego. Pip's realization
that he is "in debt" with "scarcely any money"
brings on acute anxiety: "Then there came one
night which appeared of great duration, and
which teemed with anxiety and horror; and when
in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and
think of it, I found I could not do so" (p. 437; Ch.
lvii). Pip recovers from his sudden and severe illness
and goes off, chastened but cheerful, to accept
his punishment: eleven years of exile, celibacy,
and only moderately rewarding toil for
Clarriker and Co.
The exchange of loving sacrifice is unequal; the
bargain, at last, in Pip's favor. He has found his
stern, dread-provoking father, and, with Dickens'
help, engineered a socially acceptable patricide,
his victim's forgiveness, and the opportunity to
say over his deathbed: "It was dreadful to think
that I could not be sorry at heart for his being
badly hurt, since it was unquestionably best that
he should die" (p. 423; Ch. liv). Parallel to this acceptance
of patricide is Herbert's situation. He
cannot marry Clara Barley until her father's
death. Pip felt "that Herbert's way was clearing
fast, and that old Bill Barley had but to stick to
his pepper and rum, and his daughter would soon
be happily provided for" (p. 395; Ch. lii). Old
Barley is, eight pages before Magwitch's death,
fading. "Not to say an unfeeling thing," says
Pip, "he cannot do better than go" (p. 427; Ch.
Iv).
Magwitch dies blessing Pip: "You've never deserted
me, dear boy" (p. 435; Ch. Ivi). This, of
course, ignores Pip's initial repulsion, but it reverberates
with echoes of Pip's supposed desertion
of Joe, with Wemmick's treatment of his
aged parent, with, indeed, a large part of the
novel's content. At Magwitch's end, Pip tells him
that Estella, the daughter he deserted, lives. Magwitch
kisses Pip's hand and dies. Pip prays over
the body in the equivocal words of the Pharisee
(Luke xviii.10-13). The equivocation, about
which critics have argued,29 marks an epoch in
this equivocal relationship.
Magwitch dies, but there is a sequel in which
Pip's muted, residual guilt finds expression. With
Magwitch gone, he turns to Joe Gargery: "Oh
Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe.
Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. Don't
be so good to me!" (p. 439; Ch. lvii). The absurdity
of imploring Joe to strike him! As David
Goldknopf says: "If the novel can be said to have
a generic moral it is: the heart has its reasons, and
those reasons will fight reason, experience, and
fact, to man's dying breath" ( The Lilf of the Notel,
p. 5).
The working out of Pip's psychological distress
involves a good deal more than those few episodes
discussed here. The exorcism of his feelings of
guilt requires symbolic, purifying deaths by fire
and by water, and, through Orlick's attempt on
his life, the threat of obliteration in the limekiln.
With the novel's end comes the resolution of Pip's
search for parental surrogates. He receives forgiveness
and utterly superfluous promises never
to blame him again from Joe and Biddy (p. 455;
Ch. lviii), and then, after the passage of years, Pip
is reborn as their child. It is told as a dream, a
hallucination: "I touched [the latch] so softly that
I was not heard, and I looked in unseen. There,
smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen
firelight, as hale and as strong as ever. though a
little grey, sat Joe; and there. fenced into the
corner with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own little
stool looking at the fire, was-I again!" (p. 457;
Ch. lix). Pip exists again, as a young boy. with
loving and living parents, without the psychological
complications of his first incarnation. The
two Pips--one could as well refer to them in the
singular--return to the graves of their original
parents and the comic play of the novel's first page
is reprised. Pip finds peace, but scars remain. He
will not marry, he says; the last chapter, either
version, is window dressing. He will be sober and
sad, and loyal, another emasculated Joe. He will
meditate on his life and then explain it to us and
to himself, as well as he can. Grelt Expectations
is that explanation.
The explanation tells us how it has felt, how it
feels "now" to remember it and tell it. It does not,
explicitly, tell us why things happened as they did,
although it often is on the verge of discovering a
more adequate rationale than its surface projects.
The secret of Pip's "innermost life of my life"
(p. 223; Ch. xxix) is embedded in the fiction. After
all the novel's secrets have been solved, as Chesterton
said about Dickens' works in general, wc
have the sense "that even the author was unaware
of what was really going on, and when [the plot's
secrets are unraveled,] we simply do not believe."
It is as if those characters "were keeping some-
447
Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father"
thing back from the author as well as from the
reader."30 Beneath the Oedipal secret that we
have all felt as we have felt the novel's power,
there are other secrets for which language and
comprehension are not yet. At Miss Havisham's
death she begs forgiveness, and then: "She said
innumerable times in a low solemn voice. 'What
have I done!' And then, 'When she first came, I
meant to save her from misery like mine.' And
then, 'Take the pencil and write under my name,
"I forgive her"!' She never changed the order of
these three sentences, but she sometimes left out a
word in one or other of them; never putting in another
word, but always leaving a blank and going
on to the next word" (pp. 381--82; Ch. xlix). Perhaps
some Dickensian will accept the challenge
Pip puts to us here and find the arrangement of
those words that will reveal more about what Pip
calls "the sharpest crying of all" (p. 224; Ch. xxix).
Despite such recalcitrant material, I believe
this psychoanalytic reading provides a unified
explanation of this novel's central meaning and
of the incongruities between the novel and received
critical accounts of it. We might do well to
call Great Expectations a "personal novel" rather
than a realistic one. Pip's excessive guilt and those
excesses and anomalies it generates point to
Dickens' personal feelings incompletely assimilated
into the novel's realistic texture, the child's
heart and the child's special and amoral modes of
logic intruding into the controlled distances of
art. Contrivances of plot, inconsistencies of moral
and political thought, and discrepancies of characterization
are functional when we read the
novel aright.
When the novel's surface makes us uneasy with
its apparent intent, forces us to learn more about
the work than its creator gives evidence of knowing,
we may hesitate to award the praise reserved
for those works of supreme esthetic perfection.
Whatever loss this decision entails, it does bring
forward to our attention a compelling biographical
drama. Grealt E.xpectations makes us spectators
to the contlict waged, during its writing, in
the wounded psyche of Dickens. It is an epic,
marvelously courageous, struggle. Dickens fails
to repress, transmute, comprehend, control,
transcend the private impulses which are the
work's occasion. His great expectation, one
might say the great expectation of art generally,
is precisely this translation of private matter into
public discourse, the triumphant escape from
personality, from Yeats's "foul rag-and-bone
shop of the heart." No doubt, Vivian, in "The
Decay of Lying," is right: "The only real people
are the people who never existed.... To art's
subject-matter we should be more-or-less indifferent."
But few would give up Dickens for Wilde.
Nor need it surprise or distress us that we see and
can verbalize complexities in Great Expectations
when Dickens, who made us see, seems innocent
of our psychological sophistication. Dickens was,
as few have been, alert to and loyal to his own
feelings. We stand on Freud's shoulders. Freud
stood on Dickens'.31
Unilversityo f Toledo
Toledo, Ohio
Notes
' Quoted by Harry K. Girvetz. Beyon(d Rilht anid( Wronli. A
Sttud in Moral Theorr (New York: Free Press, 1973). p. 54.
from Letters of'Si,lutnd Freul, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York:
Basic. 1969). p. 436.
Gi. K. Chesterton, ('riticisms ttnAd IIpprlechoit.i onsf ('arles
Dickens (New York: Dutton, 1911), p. 197: John H. Hagan,
Jr.. "The Poor Labyrinth: The Theme of Social Injustice in
Dickens's Great E.pectations.," Nineteenth-CenturvFl iction, 9
(Dec. 1954). 169--78; Monroe Engel, The Maturtity of Dickens
(Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 156-68;
G. Robert Stange, "Expectations Well Lost: Dickens' Fable
for His Time." College English. 16 (Oct. 1954). 9.
3 Great Expectation.s, ed. Frederick Page, The New Oxford
Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press. 1953). p.
434: Ch. Ivi. All subsequent reterences to this work are fiom
this edition and are noted by chapter and page number within
the text.
' Robert B. Partlow, Jr., "The Moving 1: A Study of the
Point of View in Great Expectations," Collhege English. 23
(Nov. 1961). 122 26. 131. discusses this difficult question. 5 See e.g.. Humphry House, Ilhe lDicken.s 1orl.ld 2nd ed.
(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942).
6 An important treatment of this subject is Julian Moynahan.
"The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great E.pectations."
EssaYs in Criticism, 10 (1960), 60-79. Barbara Hardy disagrees
with vigor ("Formal Analysis and Common Sense." Essas:s
in Criticism. 11, 1961. 112--15) but Moynahan, writing in the
same issue, will not be moved ("Dickens Criticism." pp. 239
41). See also Robert Barnard, "Images and Theme in Great
Expectations..
" Dickens Stulies Annual. 1 (1970). 238-51
448
Lawlrence Jay Dessner
("The all-pervasive theme of Great Expectations is not money,
but guilt," p. 238), and Harry Stone, "Fire, Hand, and Gate:
Dickens' Great Expectations," Ken yon Review, 24 (1962),
662-91.
7 I follow David Goldknopf, The Life of the Novel (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 146-47, who quotes this
passage and refers to the "wink" in it.
8 Ne\w Republic, March 1940, pp. 297-300, 339-42. I quote
from the enlarged version in The Wound and The Bolt.: Seven
Studies in Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965),
pp. 3-85, and indicate future page references in my text.
Wilson's influence in this regard has been widespread. It
limits the often insightful Freudian reading of Albert Hutter's
"Crime and Fantasy in Great Expectations," in Psychoanalysis
and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.:
Winthrop, 1970), pp. 26-65.
9 Holland, "Romeo's Dream and the Paradox of Literary
Realism," Literature and( Psycholoq,. 13 (1963), 97-104.
quotes and discusses this statemlent of Freud's. In his essential
work on the subject, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), Holland touches on the
linkage between sentimentality in popular fiction and "oedipal
fantasy" from which "most of the greatest literature...
builds" (pp. xiii-xiv, 47); Stoehr, Dickens. The Dreamer's
Stance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1965); Stoehr's critical
method and his remarks on Great Expectations are most useful
although his conclusions about the novel's "true subject"
(p. 99) are at variance with mine.
'0 Sylvia Anthony's The Discovery of Death in Childhood
(New York: Basic, 1972) is a useful summary. Most volumes
of The Psychoanailtic Study of the Child (New York: International
Univs. Press) and of the Journal of Child Psycholoqy
andC Psychiatry contain relevant material.
l The Form of Victorian Fiction. Thackeray, Dickens,
Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame:
Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 6.
12 Charles Klingerman, "The Dream of Charles Dickens,"
Journal of the American Psychoanalysis Association, 18 (1970),
784.
3 The Poetical Works of' Matthei- Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker
and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 193.
14 Charles Burkhart, Charlotte Bronti.: A Psychosexual
Study of Her Novels (London: Gollancz, 1973), p. 73.
5 "Thanatos: The Death Instinct in Dickens' Later
Novels," Psychoanalysis anc Psychoanalytic Review, 47
(Winter 1960--61), 28.
16 Dickens was interested in the relationship between his
dreams and his fiction, as Warrington Winters has shown
("Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams," PMLA, 63, 1948,
984-1006); Dickens was not the only Victorian who believed
that "there is a mental existence within us, a secret flow, an absent
mind which haunts us like a ghost or a dream and is an
essential part of our lives." So wrote Eneas Sweetland Dallas.
7he Gay1 Sc'ince (London: Chapman & Hall. 1866). . .199
(quoted by Helene E. Roberts, "The Dream World of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti," Victorian Studies, 17, 1974, 380). On the
limits of Dickens' awareness of depth psychology, see Leonard
F. Manheim. "The Personal History of David Copperfield: A
Study in Psychoanalytic Criticism1," Allm1 ricualon1 ,1 9
(1952), 21 43, esp. 41-43.
7 R. D. McMaster, ed., Great Expectations (New York:
Odyssey, 1965), p. 6, n. See also Charles Parish. "A Boy
Brought Up 'By Hand,' " Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17
(1962), 286--88, and Robert J. Finkel, "Another Boy Brought
Up 'By Hand,'" Nineteenth-CenturyEF iction, 20 (1966),
389-90.
18 Manheim. "Personal History of David Copperfield," p.
42.
'1 "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw Ilamlc. I l
Poems of Gerard Manlei' Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and
N. H. Mackenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1970), p. 90.
20 See my "Great Expectations: The Tragic Comedy of John
Wemmick," Ariel. A Reviewl of International Enqlish Literature,
6 (April 1975), 65-80.
21 See Moynahan, "The Hero's Guilt," and Karl P. Wentersdorf,
"Mirror Images in Great E.pectations," Nineteenith-
Century Fiction, 21 (1966), 203-24.
22 Jay Leyda, ed., The Complete Stories of Herm7anM elville
(New York: Random, 1949), p. xxviii.
23 I follow J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens:. The World of.
His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958),
esp. pp. ix-xi.
24 "The Law as 'Father,'" A,merican /inuito, 12 (1955),
17 23.
25 See Manheim, "The Law as 'Father,'
"
p. 21, on Bleak
House: "There never was a kindlier, more long-suffering,
gentler father than John Jarndyce.... What better atonement
could one make to a once-despised father? [i.e., Dickens'
father]."
26 Bella Wilfer, Jenny Wren, Amy Dorrit, and their fathers,
to name a few.
27 Quoted by Roberts, p. 392, from "The Relation of the
Poet to Day-Dreaming," SigmmunFdr eud, Charaictera nd Culture,
ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 38.
28 Shirley Panken, The Joy of Sufferin.' The Psychoanalytic
Theory and Therapy of Masochism (New York: Aronson,
1973). Panken speaks of "Moral Masochism" (p. 41)
and says that "Masochistic individuals remain unaware of the
extent to which they fear and exaggerate moral failure" (p.
43).
29 The debate is summarized by K. J. Fielding, "The Critical
Autonomy of Great Expectations," Review of' EnIlish
Studies, 2 (1961), 83-85.
30 Graham Greene, "The Young Dickens," The Lost Childhood
rand Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 195 1),
p. 54, paraphrases and then quotes from G. K. Chesterton,
Charles Dickens, a Critical Study (New York: Dodd, Mead,
1906), pp. 170-71, Ch. vii.
31 I acknowledge with gratitude the helpful counsel of my
colleagues, Louis B. Fraiberg and Wallace D. Martin, at the
Univ. of Toledo, and the incisive criticism and suggestions of
George H. Ford, James R. Kincaid, and William D. Schaefer.
449