Phil, encouraged to hit the gym again, work on their self-confidence, enjoy the finer things in life that their wealth is able to buy them, “lean in” and hang on to a career ladder-any ladder-for dear life. Modern-day Miss Havishams would be given a stern talking to on television by Dr. In our present lives, however, we might be hard-pressed to find a woman who stops all the clocks because she’s been hurt in love and betrayed by the man she trusted completely. Miss Havishams abound in a heterosexist culture. Dickens, being Dickens, was able to write a brutal yet tender representation of a scorned, damaged woman that seemed like both of an indictment of the patriarchal culture that made her that way while simultaneously indulging in the misogyny that sees her as aberrant, even abject. Heterosexual manly-men, who should like their women soft, yielding, and accommodating, must run from her or gawk from afar. No self-respecting nubile young girl would want to be her. The village gossip has made her larger than life a witch of outsized proportions who is not just mad, but mad in a particularly female way.Īll we know of Miss Havisham we see through Pip’s eyes-what hangs over her is the spectre of soured sexuality, ruined before its prime. When Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations meets Miss Havisham, she has an entire reputation to live up to. A wealthy old spinster who lives in a crumbling mansion named Satis House, jilted at the altar and still wearing her wedding dress, hell bent on revenge on all men.
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