Great Expectations
(Charles Dickens)
"Great Expectations" represent the genre of bildungsroman, a book about the development of an individual, in which at first a character lives in a stable environment but quickly experiences some form of discontent that sets him in motion. This is what happens to Pip, the main character of the book. Pip lives in a village in Kent with his authoritarian sister and her husband Joe, the blacksmith. One day he is invited to Miss Havisham's to keep company to the elderly lady. Miss Havisham is a gothic character clad in yellowish wedding dress who keeps all the windows blinded and all the clocks stopped. She lives with Estella whom she brought up in hatred to men, in revenge for her own unhappy relationship. Pip falls in love with Estella immediately and wants to aspire to her hand. However, he becomes an apprentice to Joe but, his development having been initiated, concentrates on personal improvement and education. One day he learns there is a secret benefactor who wants him to go to London and become a gentleman. Pip hopes the benefactor to be Miss Havisham and is convinced he has been chosen to marry Estella. After numerous comic and tragic events it turns out that the secret benefactor was a convict, Magwitch, whom Pip helped when he was a child. The answer to the main question of the book if the great expectations are fulfilled, is no. Magwitch's expectations to make Pip a gentleman fail because it is impossible to buy yourself a gentleman. Pip's expectations to marry Estella also don't come out as Estella marries two other men and she and Pip finally part (in the original ending; the ending suggested by the readers of "All the Year Round" in which the book was first published in monthly installments is a happy-ending). The book is an irony on the Victorian pursuit of social status and money.
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