Great Expectations & Great Adaptation
A Study of the Classic Novel's Notions of Identity
as they Pertain to the Concept of Adaptation
Part One
By Dustin Gorden
Great
Expectations can be seen as a reinterpretation of Dickens’ earlier work
Oliver Twist, the Parish Boy’s Progress. Pip’s movement from near
achievement to complete failure and finally to a contented homeostasis can be
viewed as a reversal of the progressive plot of Oliver Twist; where Oliver
begins his narrative a poor parish orphan and ends the novel with his long lost
family and everything he has ever hoped for. Oliver’s story becomes a
bildungsroman that only has a view of good and evil. To delve deeper into the
notion of ones progress to becoming a Gentleman, Dickens makes Pip’s narrative a
movement between the temptations of light and dark.
The most important difference between Dickens two most famous tales of Victorian social progress is the vast departures in the perception of said progress. This is where Dickens critiques and changes his earlier Oliver narrative and answers it with a story about the struggle of progress and the very real corruption that comes with it. Within Great Expectations, the contemporary reader can plainly see that an individual must make his own way in the world, but while doing so must struggle against the corruption that the road to change in social and financial station brings. In the struggle of social progress, Dickens says one must not forget the mental and emotional growth that is essential to the contentment of being a human being while questing for financial and social success. Great Expectation’s presentation of the merit of one’s social progress to that of one’s character development on an emotional and personal level can be seen clearly when the effect of specific characters, such as Magwitch, Havisham, Uncle Joe, Brownlow and the Maylies, and the influence of key events from both novels is looked at comparatively and analytically. Through this analysis, Dicken’s intentions for reforming his previous notion of Progress to better suite the importance of becoming a “Gentle-Man” can be made evident.
Oliver Twist
is immune to corruption. He is born inherently good and remains the wide-eyed
innocent for the entire novel. Oliver’s world is filled with characters that he
fears, such as Fagin and Bill Sikes, the Beadle to some extent, and characters
that he can revere such as Brownlow or the Maylies, but, interestingly enough,
Oliver never uses the words or actions of these characters to form his own
opinions of the world or to learn through experience. In Oliver Twist’s
second section, Oliver, while spending time with the Maylies in a peaceful rural
setting, can only observe the beauty of what is around him and reflect on the
kindness that has been shown to him wishing that “he had been more zealous and
more earnest”. (272) Oliver can fancy himself achieving a Gentlemanly status and
becoming a part of the world of the Maylies and the Brownlows, but is inhibited
by his one-dimensional nature of his passive, inexperienced character. Toward
the close of chapter nine, Fagin, the covetous Jew, asks Oliver if he’d like to
“be able to make pocket-handkerchiefs as easy as Charlie Bates” to which
Oliver’s unreasonably naïve answer leads young Master Bates to exclaim Oliver as
being “so jolly green”. (70) Even in the presence of criminals and being faced
with obvious criminal activity, Oliver’s adolescent innocence preserves. He is
never even able to comprehend the evil within the criminals until a full chapter
later when he is forced into a robbery.
Theses characters may act upon Oliver and his life, but do nothing to shape the person that he is. Pip, in contrast, is moldable, corruptible. It is this corruptibility that allows Pip to learn from the characters he comes in contact with, discerning his own opinions on individual identity and his place in the world. All of this, of course, leads Pip through the destruction of his desires to a final state of well being at the novel’s close.
The first hints of Pip’s corruption by the higher classes can be seen before Pip even leaves the forge. In the first few pages of chapter nineteen of Great Expectations, Pip, having only just been given news of his education to come, and only just starting to formulate the fantastic notion of Miss Havisham’s plan for his progress, berates Biddy for doing nothing more that defending the simple lifestyle that Joe Gargery finds himself content with. Pip becomes defensive and accuses Biddy of being “envious” and “grudging” claiming, “You are dissatisfied on account of my rise in fortune, and you can’t help showing it.”(149) Pip fires of this unfounded accusation because he perceives Biddy’s remarks about Joe as something that discredits his want of social progress and attack’s his expectations. The distance which grows between Pip and his humble origins is made all the more clear when Uncle Joe comes to visit the city in chapter twenty-seven.
Joe begins the meeting as the outsider. He is obviously
uncomfortable in the clothes he is wearing and terrified by a class he doesn’t
understand, constantly fumbling with his hat and speaking to Pip with an
unnecessary amount of “Sir’s”. It is this timid approach of Joe’s that evokes
the snobbery Pip has learned from characters such as Pocket and Jaggers, as well
as London itself. Pip describes his feelings during the encounter with Joe as
“impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he heaped coals
of fire on my head.” (222) Pip’s learned arrogance makes all the actions of his
former friend and father figure embarrassments that remind Pip of his futile
youth in the Forge. Whatever “larks” Joe may have envisioned he and Pip having
in the city are rendered impossible now that the Victorian class system has
perverted the boy he knew so long ago; Pip has chosen to eliminate his past in
order to secure his progress.
Pip, unlike the unimpressionable Oliver, eventually acknowledges his cruelty to Joe and Biddy and learns to regret it. At the end of chapter thirty-nine, Pip meets Magwitch, his long mysterious benefactor. This is the moment where Pip’s dreams of Miss Havisham’s patronage and lofty expectations of marring Estella come crashing down. It is in this realization that Pip’s heart breaks and he laments for the Forge family he can never return to stating, “No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort that I should have derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but I could never, never, never, undo what I had done”. (323) Pip has learned from his mistake and this event in the narrative becomes the beginning of Pip’s understanding of what it means to truly be a gentle man, finally seeing the virtue that the common Joe and Biddy present over those of the powerful.
The character that ends up teaching Pip the lesson about the balance between the world of a person’s home and family life and that of the world business and progress is Wemmick. Wemmick sets a great example for Pip in the second part of the novel because he has found a way to almost completely separate his life at work and his life in Walworth, where he allows himself to return to his individual origins; playing out a fantastic childhood fascination with Medieval castles as well as taking loving care of an aged parent. Pip notes, on the walk back from Walworth on the last page of chapter twenty-five, how Wemmick “got dryer and harder as we went along,”. (210) As soon as Wemmick enters Little Briton, he leaves behind the “gentle-man” that he was at home. This view of Wemmick is harkened to when Pip awakes in the Gargery household with the realization that he is “home” and finally “safe”.
Pip’s relationship with Magwitch can also be seen as an
important teacher. Pip is immediately disgusted by the thought of a convict
being his mysterious benefactor, but eventually feels a sense of duty to this
man he sees as below his station in life for helping him achieve the progress
that he has attained. It is this commitment to duty that allows Pip to truly see
the virtue in Magwitch’s, even alluding to Luke 18:10 in chapter fifty-six.
(460)
Dickens uses
Great Expectations to reinterpret that famous novel about a parish boy
and his progress in order to introduce a few new themes. Dickens shows a
realistic portrayal of a man’s progress; wrought with the corruption of wealth,
pompousness, and the complete disrespect for the place that you came from.
What’s more, Great Expectations shows that what is more important during
the course a person’s life is progress toward being a gentle-man.
Work Cited:
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.
London: Penguin Group, 2003.
---Back to the Essay Main Page---
--Home-- --Annotated Bibliography-- --External Links--