The Neurosis Of Passion
Breaking Patterns of Sterility and Breaking Patterns of Abuse.
Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations, attempts to delve into the Victorian gender construction. Incorporated within this persona is the struggle to break away from the cycles of generations of abuse and patterns of sterility. Through the eyes of his young protagonist, Dickens arranges an immediate gender conflict through absent mothers and deficient mother substitutes as the pivotal female characters in the beginning of the novel; Pip’s dead mother, and his caretaker and sister, Mrs. Joe. Later in Pip’s adolescence he stumbles into a relationship with miss Havisham, Dickens’ woman in white, the ...
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in Great Expectations is Pip’s deceased mother. Having never seen his parents he imagines his mother as "freckled and sickly" (Dickens, 3). The novel thus begins with a negative image of women and motherhood. Later Pip introduces his sister and mother substitute, Mrs. Joe Gargery describing her as harsh and unapproachable, far from the mother of Victorian fantasy. In Mrs. Joe’s marriage to Joe the typical male and female roles are reversed. This reversal is pointed out to the reader through her very name to which Dickens affixes the title Mrs. while Joe remains ever casual Joe. Pip’s sister is aggressive, domineering, physically and mentally abusive. Pip states, "She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two hoops, and having a small impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles." (Dickens, 8). Here Dickens takes an article of clothing associated with domesticity and nurture and ...
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said my sister most emphatically. (Dickens, 27)
This conversation not only records Mr. Wopsle and Mr. Hubble’s judgements that Pip is an ungrateful boy tempted by gluttony, but that there is not a female presence in the house to speak of. Mrs. Joe then details each of the illnesses that Pip had "been guilty of", the nights he had kept her awake, and the injuries he had "done himself" with the implication that all of these sufferings had really been her own (Dickens, 27-28). In this scene, Dickens takes pains to ensure that Mrs. Joe acts as the antithesis of the Victorian maternal ideal. Because of this, Pip must look elsewhere for maternal nurturing, which he finds in his ...
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"The Neurosis Of Passion." Essayworld.com. February 14, 2006. Accessed April 16, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Neurosis-Of-Passion/41214.
"The Neurosis Of Passion." Essayworld.com. February 14, 2006. Accessed April 16, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Neurosis-Of-Passion/41214.
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