Able Magwitch And Miss Havisham
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Submitted by taybabe4138 on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
- Category: Psychology
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Able Magwitch And Miss Havisham
In the work Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, two characters live their lives through someone else. Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch are both elderly and though someone else are able to obtain their goals that they are not able to complete themselves. Abel Magwitch lives his life through the protagonist Pip while Miss Havisham lives her life through the character Estella. Miss Havisham is an aged, mysterious lady who has much anger. This anger derives from her fiancée leaving the day of the wedding. This is the moment when she "stopped living" and decides to turn to a life of making other men miserable, just as her ex-fiancée had made her unhappy. However, Miss Havisham is too old to be able to hurt other men, so she decides to raise a child. Miss Havisham put Estella in such an environment where all Estella's compassionate feelings were erased and made very dull. Miss Havisham's influence also made Estella feel no remorse for those she hurt. Estella tells Miss Havisham, "If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?" (307). When Estella refers to the light and the dark she is referring to the light as love and compassion and the dark as the cruelty and the sense of a "stone heart." Estella, even as a young woman, cannot see or feel love because Miss Havisham has manipulated her to be just as she wanted, relentless and cold. Moreover, this personality allows Estella to seek revenge on the male sex, just as Miss Havisham wanted. Herbert tries to explain to Pip that Estella is "haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on the male sex" (175). Pip is unable to comprehend that Miss Havisham is desperate to destroy men's lives and Estella cannot change the...
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