Charles Dickens's Great Expectations; New Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

196 Pages·2010·1.74 MB·English

by  H Bloom (ed.)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Great Expectations—New Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Charles Dickens’s Great expectations / edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-819-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870. Great expectations. I. Bloom, Harold.
PR4560.G688 2010
823'.8—dc22 2009049230
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Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY
Date printed: April 2010
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Estella’s Parentage and Pip’s Persistence:
The Outcome of Great Expectations 3
Stanley Friedman
“Pip” and “Property”:
The (Re)Production of the Self in Great Expectations 15
Gail Turley Houston
Christian Allusion, Comedic Structure, and the
Metaphor of Baptism in Great Expectations 29
John Cunningham
Listening to Estella 45
Margaret Flanders Darby
The Good and the Unruly in
Great Expectations—and Estella 61
Robert R. Garnett
The Burning of Miss Havisham:
Dickens, Fire and the “Fire-Baptism” 79
Sara Thornton
vi Contents
Realism as Self-Forgetfulness:
Gender, Ethics, and Great Expectations 99
Caroline Levine
The Prince of the Marshes:
Hamlet and Great Expectations 115
Wendy S. Jacobson
Great Expectations: “Absolute Equality” 131
Stewart Justman
Great Expectations 157
Andrew Sanders
Chronology 169
Contributors 173
Bibliography 175
Acknowledgments 179
Index 181
Editor’s Note
My introduction explores some aspects of Pip’s inwardness and speculates
on Shakespeare’s possible influence on Pip’s capacity for change as he listens
to his own narrative voice.
Stanley Friedman asserts that the novel’s conclusion only deepens Pip’s
belief in providential design, after which Gail Turley Houston finds in the
book an ambivalent account of Victorian consumer society.
The role of Christian allusion and, in particular, the rite of baptism are
noted by John Cunningham, while Margaret Flanders Darby strives to rescue
Estella from her one-dimensionality.
Robert R. Garnett also takes up the figure of Estella, placing her on the
dividing line between the work’s moderate and impassioned characters. The
notion of baptism then returns, this time by fire, in Sara Thornton’s appraisal
of Miss Havisham.
The ethical implications of the suspense plot are explored by Caroline
Levine, after which Wendy S. Jacobson considers the influences of Hamlet on
Dickens’s novel.
For Stewart Justman, the antiromantic nature of the narrative relegates
the characters to a shared democracy of ignorance. The volume then con-
cludes with Andrew Sanders’s assessment of the novel’s ambiguous comedy.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
P
ip is the most inward of all Dickens’s major characters, and except for
Esther Summerson in Bleak House, he also appears to be the Dickens pro-
tagonist most overtly affected by his own pathos. In particular, he has a
tendency to feel excessively guilty, almost in the Kafkan mode. An anguish
of contamination seems to have reached out from Magwitch and Miss
Havisham and invaded Pip’s sensibility; this is profoundly irrational and yet
seems demonstrable. Himself not at all criminal, Pip carries an aura that we
might associate with the hero-villain Hamlet. “Hero-villain” sounds odd
for Hamlet, but pragmatically the prince of Denmark is quite deadly. At
play’s end, Horatio and Fortinbras are the only survivors of any importance
whatsoever. Pip, a far gentler person than Hamlet, is bad luck for his sister
and for Magwitch, for Miss Havisham and Estella, even for the wretched
Pumblechook and the malevolent Orlick. After all the disasters, Pip suffers
his brain fever and returns to an improved infancy with the Gargerys and
their child, his godson, little Pip. Absorbing as all this is, it remains a puzzle
why Pip should have tormented himself into a guilt-consciousness he simply
did not deserve.
Dickens, unlike Jane Austen or Stendhal or Dostoevsky, is not a par-
ticularly Shakespearean novelist. He has more affinities with Ben Jonson
than with Shakespeare, but if you go in search of inwardness, then you must
go to school with Shakespeare. David Copperfield, despite its autobiographi-
cal elements, would not refute Henry James’s judgment that Dickens “has
added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Great Expectations,
because it enters the abyss of Pip’s inner self, does refute James. Something in
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