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Great Expectations: “the ghost of a man's own father”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Critical difficulties with Great Expectations prompt a psychoanalytic approach and consideration of the literary use of Freudian concepts and of the complex relationship between Dickens and Pip, dreamer and dream. Edmund Wilson stressed biography and the trauma of the blacking warehouse. Freudian theory stresses infantile trauma of the sort the novel’s first scene hints at: the death of brothers and parents. The intensity of Pip’s ambivalence and of his guilt and self-abasement suggests that Pip’s story projects and explores feelings of his creator. Many characters in the novel exhibit or parody Oedipal antagonisms. There are many father figures, deprived children, and allusions to patricide. Magwitch is the “father” Pip craves, the best giver and receiver of both punishment and forgiveness. Joe Gargery does not punish though Pip urges him to. Jaggers insists on neutrality. Magwitch fills Pip with excessive dread; his death, loving Pip and being loved by him, satisfies Pip’s psychic needs.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976
References
Notes
1 Quoted by Harry K. Girvetz. Beyond Right and Wrong. A Study in Moral Theory (New York: Free Press, 1973). p. 54. from Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York : Basic. 1969). p. 436.
2 G. K. Chesterton. Criticisms and Appreciations of Charles Dickens (New York: Dutton. 1911). p. 197; John H. Hagan. Jr.. “The Poor Labyrinth: The Theme of Social Injustice in Dickens's Great Expectations.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 9 (Dec. 1954). 169–78; Monroe Engel. The Maturity 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 Expectations, ed. Frederick Page. The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press. 1953). p. 434: Ch. Ivi. All subsequent references to this work are from this edition and are noted by chapter and page number within the text.
4 Robert B. Partlow. Jr.. “The Moving 1: A Study of the Point of View in Great Expectations.” College English. 23 (Nov. 1961). 122 26. 131. discusses this difficult question.
5 See e.g.. Humphry House. The Dickens World. 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 Expectations.”Essays in Criticism. 10 (1960). 60–79. Barbara Hardy disagrees with vigor (“Formal Analysis and Common Sense.” Essays 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 Studies Annual. I (1970). 238 51 449 (“The all-pervasive theme of Great Expectations is not money, but guilt,” p. 238), and Harry Stone, “Fire, Hand, and Gate: Dickens' Great Expectations,” Kenvon 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 New Republic, March 1940, pp. 297–300, 339–42. I quote from the enlarged version in The Wound and The Bow: 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 Psychology. 13 (1963). 97–104. quotes and discusses this statement 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.
10 Sylvia Anthony's The Discovery of Death in Childhood (New York: Basic, 1972) is a useful summary. Most volumes of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New York : International Univs. Press) and of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry contain relevant material.
11 “ 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.
13 The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 193.
14 Charles Burkhart, Charlotte Bronte': A Psychosexual Study of Her Novels (London: Gollancz, 1973), p. 73.
15 Thanatos: The Death Instinct in Dickens' Later Novels,“ Psychoanalysis and 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. The Gay Science (London: Chapman & Hall, 1866). i. 199 (quoted by Hélène 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 Criticism,” American Imago, 9 (1952), 21–43, esp. 41 43.
17 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-Century Fiction. 20 (1966). 389–90.
18 Manheim, “Personal History of David Copperfield.” p. 42.
19 “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw llamc. ”I lie Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and ?. H. Mackenzie. 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press. 1970). p. 90.
20 See my “Great Expectations: The Tragic Comedy of John Wemmick,” Ariel: A Review of International English Liternlure. 6 (April 1975), 65–80.
21 See Moynahan, “The Hero's Guilt,” and Karl P. Wentersdorf, “Mirror Images in Great Expectations.” Nineleenlli Century Fiction. 21 (1966), 203–24.
22 Jay Leyda, ed., 77k' Complete Stories of Herman Melville (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.‘” American Imago. 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.” Sigmund Freud. Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 38.
28 Shirley Panken, The Joy of Suffering: 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 English Studies. 2 (1961), 83–85.
30 Graham Greene, “The Young Dickens,” The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. 1951 ). 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.