The Essence of Pip Essay -- Literature Charles Dickens Papers

The Essence of smudge The forms that stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.--Darwin, The Origin of the Species (1859) Christopher Ricks poses the question, in his essay on Dickens dandy Expectations, How does Pip the novels fictional narrator keep our sympathy? (Ricks 202). The first of his answers to this central interrogative are the fact that Pip is ill-treated by his sister Joe and by all the visitors to the house and that Pip catches his unrequited lover, Estellas, infectious contempt for his filth (Ricks 202). In answering like this, Ricks immediately assumes a dichotomous line of merchandise between the natural human and the taught (acted-upon) human. Ricks is saying that the natural Pip is beneficial and therefore holds the readers sympathy while the manipulated Pip is bad and behaves in slipway with which the reader cannot sympathize, and wants to condemn. The reader sides with the basic Pip and blames not him, but his dower and others, for his problematic conduct. The abbreviated childhood narratives that many of the novels characters provide support this steadfast nature / nurture division, in which nature is the base and nurture is the skew corruption of that base. The reader sympathizes with and is intrigued by the stories the characters tell of their childhoods because the stories easily explain why these people act as they do, and render excuses for them when they act maliciously. Children act jibe to the way they are raised so as to remedy and counterbalance out the past, and their basic good nature only re-emerges after that trade union movement has been completed. throw away Havisham, the novels schadenfreud terrorist, was a spoilt child. Her mother ... ...gled with their circumstances as to control their selves into them, the novel becomes simply a series of events. Miss Havisham asks Estella Are you stock(a) of me? and Estella replies, Only a little tired of myself (Dickens 279). Estella has no self and so all the intrigue of personal dilemma and development disappears. Even Miss Havisham is not a self, but is only the blunt response to rejection. This thoroughgoing example is representative of all the characters in Great Expectations. They are not subjects they are objects in a world of pure, artless evolution. Bibliography Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. capital of the United Kingdom Penguin, 1994. Ricks, Christopher, Great Expectations, from Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. John Gross and G. Pearson, 1966. pp. 199-211. Schad, John. The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors. New York St. Martins Press, 1992.