Focusing on the Past and Letting It Consume Oneself

Focusing on the Past and Letting It Consume Oneself

  • Submitted By: limppillow
  • Date Submitted: 09/27/2009 6:21 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1012
  • Page: 5
  • Views: 747

Miss Havisham is an acute example of focusing on the past and letting it consume oneself. In the novel Great Expectations, Miss Havisham is a prosperous, peculiar woman who lives in a mansion near Pip’s village. She is eccentric and often appears insane to the reader, wandering around her house in a decayed wedding dress, keeping a rotting feast on her table, and encircling herself with clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine. As a young woman, Miss Havisham was jilted by her fiancé just minutes prior to their wedding. This caused her to seek revenge on all men through her adopted daughter, Estella. She intentionally raised Estella to be a tool of her vengeance by training the stunning girl to break men’s hearts. Although Miss Havisham is not a believable character, she is indisputably the most memorable character in the novel.
Miss Havisham’s life was defined by a single heartbreaking event: her jilting by Compeyson on what was intended to have been their wedding day. From then on, Miss Havisham was resolute never to progress beyond her heartbreak. She stopped all the clocks in Satis House, her manor, at twenty minutes to nine, the time when she discovered that Compeyson had fled, and she wore only one shoe to stay in the exact state she was in when she first heard of Compeyson’s betrayal. The events of her wedding day caused Miss Havisham to use Estella as a revenge-seeking tool. “Also, when we played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of Estella's moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like, ‘Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!’” (Dickens 95) The events of a single day in Miss Havisham’s life altered her forever and caused her to use Estella as a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men.
Miss...

Similar Essays