Hey Guys,
Can someone please help me with my essay for Great Expectations, its about the form of the book and its importance. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
How does Dickens use the novel form to explore ideas of the individual transformation and societal expectations?
Charles Dicken’s use of Great Expectations form demonstrates the life of Pip throughout the bildungsroman. Pip character focuses on the lifelong journey of moral development for the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Pip. His employment allows to explore the values, the expectations and the social class within the Victorian Era. Pip’s position portrayed the newly allowable social mobility within the era and demonstrated the rigid class systems. The
Dickens utilises the novel structure to isolate that stages within Pip’s life, the retrospective narration portrays the maturation from a young boy, the form follows his self-development and morality building. Pip’s opening statement where he stated, “I called myself Pip” demonstrates his formed Identity. However, Pip’s luring towards the metaphorical ‘star’, Estella demonstrates the desire for his own self-growth and establishment as a gentleman within Victorian Society. Through the use of Estella, Dickens can demonstrate the moral figure in which Pip is supposed to be versus who he desires to be. Pip’s rejection of his current life-path on the ‘glowing road to manhood’ away from the forge, demonstrate a denial of the character humility and purity that would’ve come from contentment of himself and hard work. In contrast between parts, it highlighted the irony where older pip reflects on his poorer life and uses it as a moral comparative however maintains the condemning nature of what he once was, the ‘self-swindler’ whose dissatisfaction prevented him the ‘angel wing’ of Joe’s protection and forced him into a person who might return to his home to confer a ‘dinner of roast beef . . . and a gallon of condescension’ on everyone. Ultimately, Pip’s life choice and individual values bring him to a state of realisation whereas the ‘candles’ for hope regarding Estella have died out and the fire of the forge ‘was dead’ and in a moment of rock bottom he realises that was he has done can ‘never never undo’.
Through Pips low point of self-realisation and personal descent, Dickens utilises this part of the novel as mean of social criticism, utilising satire of the societal expectations and dominant values that were justified injustices within Victorian England and the institutions that enforced these attitudes. The expectations illuminated through Pips behaviour to reach a state of prosperity and success within the higher social class. The role of Satis house and London portray an alternative view of reaching ultimate success, with it being a ‘dry rot’ and ‘wet rot’, it undercuts the class pretension and moral superiority thus evident in the foreshadowing of metaphorical stairs to class superiority that’ collapsing into sawdust’ speak of the moral bankruptcy of Pip’s vision and inevitable disintegration. Meanwhile, Pip also comes to terms with his future of the archetypal ‘young knight of romance’ who would ‘do all the shining deeds’ of past heroes and then ‘marry the princess’. While also Dickens impairs both the social assumptions of the connection between social rank and heroism and Victorian gender expectations in Pip’s fall and then in Estella’s own strength and individual intervention. Neither are Victorian institutions spared from Dickens’ satire, with the comedic depiction of Pip’s ‘evening school’ run by Wopsle’s Great Aunt, a ‘ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity’ and then a dark indictment of the justice system in Magwitch’s account of his trial, where Compeyson ‘gets seven year’ because of his education and gentlemanly appearance and Magwitch is sentenced to fourteen, despite his lesser guilt.
But it is the transformation of Pip that forms the moral and spiritual heart of the novel, the necessary processes of guilt and suffering that lead to liberation. Pip’s journey causes a inevitable revelation where Pip endures from his guilt and realisation of Estella, Magwitch, and his fortune before he returns to Joe and Biddy and asks for their forgiveness. . His earlier rejection of the purifying fires of the forge is ironically inverted as he burns his hands while trying to save Miss Havisham, a symbol of his own suffering and ultimately the forgiveness that both he and Havisham find. Foreshadowed even at the beginning when Magwitch turns Pip ‘upside down’, his road to redemption is thus the same as that convict, a reality that Pip acknowledges when he calls him the ‘creature who had made me’. The aftermath of Pip’s mistreatment leads him onto moral fulfillment.
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Topic: Great Expectations (Read 1689 times)