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Great Expectations: "The Ghost of a Man's Own Father" Author(s): Lawrence Jay Dessner Source: PMLA, Vol. 91, No. 3 (May, 1976), pp. 436-449 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461693 . Accessed: 28/04/2011 01:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher'publisherCode=mla. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org LAWRENCE JAY DESSNER Great "the Expectations: ghost of a man's own father" T HIS ESSAY attempts to provide a useful account of Dickens' Great Expectations. It makes use of some principles of Freudian theory and of reports of contemporary psychoanalytic medical practice. Psychoanalytically oriented criticism of literature is, often, still an enthusiast's cause. Pompous jargon, theorems masquerading as axioms, repel us. Who has not recoiled from a ludicrously farfetched Freudian explication of a familiar text or from a speculative psychological biography which reduces an author's life to a sordid case history''Forceful, even convincing psychoanalytic explications feel different from other forms of criticism: they do not seem to spring from the conscious experience of the reader-critic. They are not "proved upon our pulses," nor do they correspond to the "Heart's affections." And even the more circumspect Freudians of literature are troubled by-and trouble us with-the deterministic assumptions of their theory. Proponents of human freedom and dignity live uncomfortably with procedures that imply conclusions such as this from Freud himself: "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence."' Few of us envy the role of patient, fewer that of guinea pig. Autopsy without scientific or legal justification is abhorrent. It may help, however, not to overstate the parallel between the psychoanalyst and the literary critic. The physician does not hope or expect to enjoy his patient's narrative. Nor does he listen in order to be morally enriched by sharing the patient's emotional life. He seeks knowledge. not experience oi pleasure. The work itself. the patient's recitation, is no mor-ethan a necessary evil to him. an apparatus to be used and discarded. Nor is the patient welcomed for his own sake; the patient is somleone to be changed. Great Expectations does not seem an especially recalcitrant text, one with severe problems of interpretation which might force us to take the risks of the psychoanalytic approach. Traditional criticism has prodalced a wealth of useful material. We have been shown. for example. that the noveclis "an extra chapter to IThe Book' o 'Snohs'" an indictment of the social "condition of' England." an allegory of the loss of Eden, and a moral fable. "the story of a young man's development fi'om the moment of his fiirstself-awareness. to that of his mature acceptance of the human condition."2 That such interpretations have generated argument and denial need not impair their partial usefulness. but none of the valuable lines of approach we have is likel!I to prepare the student, or the instructor, lori a passage like this one: The sun was strikingin at the great windows of the court, through the glitteringdrops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light betweenthe and the Judge, linking both together, two-and-thirty and perhaps someamongthe audience,how reminding both were passing on, with absolute equality,to the greaterJudgmentthat knowethall thingsand cannot err.Risingfor a moment,a distinctspeckof facein this said. "My Lord, way of light,the prisoner[Magwitch] I have receivedmy sentenceof Death from the Almighty,but I bow to yours,"and sat down again.3 If Pip's struggles have brought him moral and emotional maturity. if Dickens himself writes fiom the vantage of such achieved maturity. this passage (and it is not the novel's sole example) is an anomaly. It is not simply that Magwitch and his diction have leaped out of character. The narrator. with his barrage of rhetorical maneuvers and the contrivances of the visual scene, and by his tacit endorsement of Magwitch's instant transcendence of his own character. displays an emotional sensitivity out of proportion to the facts he is presenting to us. We may recall. and will be dealing with. other cases of emotional response that seem outside the range of expected behavior -Pip's earlier aversion to Magwitch. for instance. And there is no inidication that Dickens creates these anomalies 436 Lawrence Jay Dessner within a critical or ironic distancing framework.4 We may shrink from the scene's sentimentality, but there is nothing in the text to imply that Dickens does so. Indeed, we may recall a scene, in the second chapter of Hard Timnes, which in Sissy Jupe is similarly spotlighted by a ray of sunshine through windows, and suspect that Pip, here particularly, is speaking with Dickens' voice. If the meaning of Great Expectations is moral. or social, or political, if Pip's saga is, in these ways, Everyman's saga, is it not crucial that his personality be within those parameters that strike us, without hesitation, as "normal," that Pip be one whose private life does not unduly distort his vision of general moral and social experience' Is it not crucial that Dickens, our guide to the generalized meanings of Pip's life. appear himself free of personal and private interest in the specifics of the particular, illustrative case'' Historical, biographical, economic, cultural, even political explanations of this problem are available, but to rely on any of them is to reduce one's claims for the masterwork or to disregard our theories of literary value. And even then, are we convinced that any public, general idea can be the prime cause of such emotional intensities'' There are other critical and pedagogical difficulties with the novel and its critical heritage. It seems a realistic work, but its plot depends on contrivance and coincidence. Its moral and political basis, to the extent that its intent is seen as moral or political, will not enforce consensus or always stand scrutiny.5 Problems of this sort have long since suggested psychological criticism, investigations of Pip's motivation. It has been said that Pip indulges in feelings of guilt out of proportion 'to their proximate cause and that Dickens uncritically, it seems unwittingly, endorses this anomaly.6 When young Pip steals for Magwitch. for instance. the bov acts under the threat of death and is therefore innocent. The theft should not initiate years of guilt and the abiding fear of criminal taint. The incident, however. is more complex in its embodiment: "You young dog," said the man, licking his lips, "whatfat cheeksyou ha' got." I believe they were fat, though I was at that time for undersized, my years,and not strong. "Darn Me if I couldn't eat 'em," said the man, with a threatening shake of his head, "and if I han't half a mind to't!" (p. 2; Ch. i) 437 Pip's presentation of the scene. years after the event, gives us a gruff but playful and teasing Magwitch. winking at Pip, inviting him and us to see how comically he is overdoing his threat.7 If Pip, at that time. saw the "threat" the way he presents it in his narrative, the boy's thefts from the Gargery kitchen and forge were iiot committed under duress. and he then is guilty. a party to a conspiracy. Surely this reading, is not the one enforced by the text. Magwitch is in no position to indulge his sense of humor. Nor does Pip exhibit anything but fear. On the other hand. as Pip grows into adulthood, as he re-creates the scene for us, he should recall and correct his first impressions of Magwitch and that early sense of guilt. Yet this is not an adequate summation of the ways the boy and the plot develop. Pip's sense of his own guilt does not leave him as he learns that he is not legally or morally guilty. His guilt feelings survive their cause, a logical absurdity that suggests that the cause of Pip's sense of guilt has been wrongly identified. On the assumption that Magwitch's threat is what psychoanalysts would call a "screen memory," a false lead, I will examine the question of Pip's guilt, with what help depth psychology can provide, in the hope of discovering the core of the novel's appeal. what sort of novel it is, what it is "about." Complexities lurk in this endeavor. Whose "screen memory" is misleading the reader as to the cause of Pip's feelings of guilt'' Pip surely is responsible, but does Dickens provide us with materials in the text with which we can fairly be expected to see through the screen' Or does he conspire with Pip to disguise something'' And why is the disguise a relatively poor one' It prompts, rather than precludes, a closer look. In the path of the psychoanalytically oriented study of Great E.pectations is Edmund Wilson's pioneering psychological essay, "Dickens: The Two Scrooges."' Wilson is very much an amateur psychoanalyst. He muddles medical terminology, speaking here of "trauma," of "obviously neurotic symptoms" (p. 7). there of "the burningout of his [Dickens'] nerves" (p. 60). He insists on biography: "It is necessary to see him as a man in order to appreciate him as an artist" (p. 9), and indulges in unscientific. even irresponsible, psychobiographical speculations. While Freud pointed investigators of behavior to its preconscious roots in the first few years of life. Wilson 438 Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father" ters in their dance of approach and withdrawal, love and hate, convergence and divergence, merger and division."'' The novel is Dickens' dream; its revelations of feeling spring from him. Indeed, our analysis of Pip parallels a psychoanalyst's interpretation of a real dream Dickens had and described to John Forster. Dr. Klingerman's summation of his analysis stresses this basic motif: "The loss of siblings in early childhood frequently exerts a profound impact in terms of unresolved guilt and mourning and the development of restitutive tendencies."'2 But the narrative, the dream, may also be seen as Pip's. We are asked to see him as shaper and teller of his own storv. His dream is contained within that of Dickens'. It is a (Iream within a dream, although the abstract statement of the structure may not suggest that blending and metamorphosis of scenes and persons, of dream and dreamer, that common memories of real dreams remind us of. Perhaps the youth's lines in Arnold's "The Strayed Reveller" may help clarify an aspect of this complex relationship between dreamer and dream, artist and his creation: "... -such points to the twelve-year-old Dickens' relegation to the blacking warehouse, calls it "trauma" (p. 7), and asks us to see "the work of Dickens's whole career" as "an attempt to digest these early shocks" (p. 8). It is bad psychoanalysis and not so much bad literary criticism as not literary criticism at all. It silently defies Freudian ideas of the formation of personality in infancy, and it loses the novels in its search for their author. Orthodox Freudians would say that whatever traumatic events shaped Dickens' feelings had occurred long before the shocks of the blacking warehouse. Few Freudians would say that personality is fixed forever in infancy. that significant change and growth do not occur in later life. Most would agree that the unconscious is exactly that, un-conscious. It exists, most malleably, before consciousness. Before Dickens was aware. through his command of language, of his own existence, the shape and tendencies of his personality had largely been developed. Psychoanalysis is, of course, not possible without the living patient who bears the tale of his preconscious emotional life embedded in his psyche. But psychoanalytic concepts are of use to literary criticism with the aid of the bridge provided by Freud and ably treated at length by Taylor Stoehr and Norman N. Holland: "invented dreams can be interpreted in the same way as real ones."9 We may treat Great Expectations as if it were a dream and expect it to be, like dreams, coherent in terms of the special logic of the unconscious. Such an analysis, guided by the formulations and case histories of psychoanalytic practice," generates the following thesis: Great Expectations is about a child's feelings of deprivation and about his attempts to live at peace with his special emotional history. We are here assuming that Pip, a character, not a person, is nevertheless created so that Freudian principles apply to his motivation. But Pip is not an autonomous being; his relationship to Dickens is close and complex, and, where narrative distance is indeterminate, ambiguous. The shifting and complex relationship between author and character, dreamer and dream, a commonplace of psychoanalytic practice, has also been described, in literary terms, in J. Hillis Miller's discussion of the "intersubjectivity" of Victorian fiction: "A novel is a temporal rhythm made up of the movement of the minds of the narrator and his charac- To become what we sing." 3 The instance before us. to return to our thesis that Great Expectations is about feelings of deprivation, is that of a child who, prior to reaching the stage of verbalized self-consciousness, lost parents and siblings. It is as common a pattern as any in clinical practice. The infant, like Auden's adult with a "normal heart," "Craves what it cannot have,/ Not universal love/ But to be loved alone." He competes for love with uncanny determination, for he believes that his very existence depends upon it. Competitors for love he wishes out of the way, his equivalent for death. The death or disappearance of parent or sibling in early childhood fills the infant with fear and guilt. He believes that his wishes are magical, that they caused death, and that others know this. The remaining family members will not love him, a murderer, so he seeks absolution. He wants punishment now as much as he wants love. The loss of both parents and all male siblings, Pip's case, intensifies the deprivation: there is no source of love, no agent from whom to receive punishment. An objection might be raised at this point: Pip's parents and brothers were dead before Pip's own birth or, at least, before his a price / The Gods exact for song: / Lawrence Jay Dessner earliest feelings and fantasies. This logical difficulty would not faze a psychoanalyst. He sees a pattern of emotional behavior focused. as we shall see. on the motif of unresolved guilt. and a history. provided by his patient, that identifies a traumatic genesis which is denied by the facts. The pattern of behavior is still there. Its genesis is. as yet. unknown, but the search for it will be facilitated by identification of the pattern and by the useful fact that the history the patient has offered is a rather subtle piece of subterfuge. The analyst knows he is on the right track. He knows how common it is for people, whose parents are living, to imagine themselves, in their dreams and daydreams, to be or to have been. young orphans. The ubiquity of such fantasies is suggested by many games children play. by thematic analyses of myths and folklore, and by the number of novels and romances that incorporate the motif. A recent student of Charlotte Bronte's novels, all four of which have an orphan as protagonist, was moved to make the pattern universal: "Every reader is an orphan whose family is not truly his family and who wishes to punish it. along with other authority figures, for saying no to him and curbing his desires.""4 Of course. the psychoanalyst. when he learns that his "patient" is a character in a work of fiction, would simply assume that the story is a vehicle for expression of feelings of its creator, that Pip's history is an emotional correlative of the unknown psychic history of his creator. This assumption, questionable or distasteful as it may strike some. is often made by literary critics and may be defended or explained by such precepts as these put forth by J. Hillis Miller: "The writing of a novel is also a gesture, and this is its primary reality. It brings into visibility what its author is. A man is what he does, and this is as true for the writing of a novel as for any other action" (The of' PFor'n7 Victorian F'iction, p. 1). What is crucial 439 for literary criticism is what the author does, his work's pattern of feeling: diagnosis of its genesis, why he does it, unless the work encourages our search for it, is not our goal. The possible ramifications of feelings of guilt and deprivation are wondrously complex, but among the more common reactions is that pattern in which deprivation comes to be felt as justified: the loss of love is accepted as a balance to the guilt, as deserved, even desired, punishment. Re- lated to this syndrome is behavior that is overtly a reaching toward love, covertly a mode of selfpreserving self-abasement. A good deal of Pip's behavior, particularly with Estella. exhibits this pattern rather obviously. A child with Pip's psychological history. and with. perhaps. a theoretical predisposition to neurosis, will tend to carry his unfulfilled emotional needs into his adult life. The intensity with which he pursues psychic gratifications is tempered only by the necessity to observe the conventions of adult society. To the degree that Pip's love of Estella. and the feelings and behavior it produces. conform to social conventions. the psychic transaction that it incorporates is successfully masked or assimilated. To the degree that Dickens' novel conforms to conventions of characterization in fiction. he is successful. To the degree that Pip and Dickens "fail," fail to achieve convincing congruity between private and public acts, this essay is necessary. Our analysis of GcreatE.xpectationswill show that Pip's search for love and punishment is directed primarily toward a father figure who will love him with constancy and intensity, but who also will redeem the boy's burden of guilt by punishing him. Yet the father is the prime competitor for the love of the life-sustaining mother and is. therefore, wished out of the way. When he disappears. the child strives to find him. If he can be found. the murder is repealed, or did not even happen. Pip's mother is gone too. Who wished her away''The father. The child hates him, strives to punish him. These motives are obviously, even in this simplified sketch, self-contradictory. But. as Leonard F. Manheim formulates the Freudian dogma, "there is no such thing as logical incompatibility in the Unconscious."'5 The end of Pip's search will be the discovery of a father who will love and punish him, and whom the boy can love and punish. The intensity of these strivings pushes them to their logical, if grotesquely amoral and seemingly self-defeating limits: the logical extension, the ideal case. of love is self-sacrifice. suicide: the logical extension of punishment is murder. Through metaphor and by analogy, Pip achieves both. We are rather obviously directed toward this psychic portrait by the novel's first few pages. It is as if Dickens were the busy psychoanalyst's ideal patient. He lays out, in the first session, a barely disguised self-diagnosis.'" The novel begins, not 440 Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father" dence which is, theoretically, the entire text. Such testing would require an impossibly long article. The alternative is to take samplings which could have been taken at random with a theoretically perfect case--and a perfect analyst. One may begin with Pip and his toying with a central question of child-rearing. He loves the joke about being brought up "by hand." It ironically implies that especially loving care had been expended on his behalf; it implies, without irony. that a good deal of physical punishment went with it. But beneath the joke-are all Pip's jokes defensive masks''--is the pain of infantile deprivation. To bring up "by hand" also means: "to feed by bottle or spoon rather than at the breast.""7 Oh that "square impregnable bib in front, . . . stuck full of pins and needles" which covers the only maternal breasts Pip has known. And then how sadly touching is the mock innocence, the comic and pathetic archness of Pip's bewildered complaint on his sister's bib: "Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all; or why. if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off every day of her life" (p. 6; Ch. ii). Or one can go to the peripheral domestic comedy of the Pocket family. The rearing of the seven (p. 176; Ch. xxii) little Pockets, an echo of the seven little Pirrips, is chaotic enough to prompt their father's outcry: "Are infants to be nutcrackered into their tombs. and is nobody to save them '" (p. 183; Ch. xxiii). The youngest child is heard "wailing dolefully" and then "by degrees ... was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth" (p. 176; Ch. xxii). Does not this comic description elucidate Pip's fear of his own extinction'' Like the youngest surviving Pirrip. baby Pocket gets not milk from his mother but needles. a needle-case being supplied as a pacifier: "And more needles were missing than it could be regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply externally or to take as a tonic" (p. 257; Ch. xxxiii). This branch of the Pocket family is but one of the novel's subsidiary families through whom Pip's psychic history is recalled and obliquely expressed. The pattern of childhood deprivation and familial conflict is widely apparent although sometimes indirectly presented. Joe Gargery's father "went off in a purple leptic fit." but not before terrorizing his wife and child so thoroughly with Pip's birth or with his genealogy, but with his birth into consciousness and literacy. Its first episode is the earliest available to the narrator's memory. Its first words are a reference to "my father." Its first complex of feelings include the pathos of the orphan who "never saw my father or mother." and that pathos is complemented by the setting among tombstones "on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening." It is accentuated by the five "lozenges" which mark Pip's five dead brothers. and by the archness of tone. bordering on self-pity, the mock innocence of the narrator's language, itself mocked by ironic wit: To fivelittlestonelozenges,eachabouta foot anda half long, which were arrangedin a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothersof mine who gave up tryingto get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle-I am indebtedfor a belief I religiously entertained that they hadall beenbornon theirbackwiththeirhandsin their and trousers-pockets, had nevertakenthemout in this state of existence.(p. 1; Ch. i) The wit mitigates the paragraph's sentimentality and saves Pip from the full measure of pain his memories prompt. (It also introduces a dominant metaphor of the novel's public, political, level of meaning: survival of personality is figured as economic survival.) But Pip's world is harsh and torbidding, and the child, as he sees the earliest landscape he can remember. as he re-creates his earliest intimations of his own distinct identity, discovers himself to be "beginning to cry" (p. 1; Ch. i). The mode of presentation of Pip's story changes here on the verge of his tears. The child, alone with his private thoughts, in a realistically rendered world, is immediately enmeshed in a society of other people. including mythic or fairytale people, and a world worked by the conventions of melodrama and romance. The deprivations of the orphan and sole surviving son to which the first page points and which is. in this reading. the core of the novel, propel no further confessional self-diagnosis. What follows is a drastically edited confession. almost a translation into modes of discourse which disguise and yet hint at the novel's private impetus. From this point on. our procedure is simply to test our psychological reading of the private impetus of Great E.xpecitattions against the evi- Lawrence Jay Dessner that they, "several times," ran away from him (p. 42; Ch. vii). Miss Havisham "was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby" (p. 169; Ch. xxii). Her own half-brother plotted against her, and was crazed with remorse for it as he died (p. 331; Ch. xlii). Biddy "was an orphan like myself; like me, too, had been brought up by hand" (p. 40; Ch. vii). Magwitch: "I've no more notion where I was born. than you have-if so much" (p. 328; Ch. xlii). Estella, of course, was abandoned by her parents, but her laughter at the machinations of the grasping Pocket relations strikes Pip as being "too much for the occasion." Yes, she explains, her bitterness masks remembered pain: "For you were not brought up in that strange house from a mere baby.-I was. You had not your little wits sharpened by the intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not, that is soft and soothing" (p. 253; Ch. xxxiii). (It is ironic that she is so sure Pip's childhood was different from her own, for as she describes her childhood it reminds us of Pip's.) Clara Barley's surviving parent, her father, is a ferocious and utterly self-centered bully and drunkard. She tends him with resignation and love. It is understood that her marriage cannot take place as long as her father lives: her engagement cannot even be mentioned to him (p. 355; Ch. xlvi). She submits without any trace of antagonism. Herbert Pocket is pleased "to love a girl who has no relations" (p. 355; Ch. xlvi), his own being a burden to him, and he wonders whether "the children of not exactly suitable marriages [like himself and his "poor sister Charlotte who was next me and died before she was fourteen"] are always most particularly anxious to be married" (p. 237; Ch. xxx). 441 of a broadly accepted Freudian principle: "It is impossible for one to dream of anything hitt one's self."18 Perhaps Hopkins' line, and the poem from which it comes. has a useful pertinence here: . . . What I do is me. . . 1 19 Like the dome of many-colored glass, Pip's emotional plight colors all within his range. As in any work of art, or any dream, the theme is pervasive, reduplicated in many contexts, unifying. That the Oedipal motifs in Great ELpectations. had a deeply personal resonance t'or himself Dickens would have denied. He said, although with a suggestive ambiguity. that he could never dream of his characters since "it would be like a man dreaming of himself, which is clearly an impossibility. Things exterior to one's self must always be the basis of dreams." Manheim. after quoting Dickens here. counters with a restatement We know little of Wopsle's past. but he does say grace in a style "something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third" (p. 22; Ch. iv). His interest in these violent tragedies of family life is presented as grandly comic, but his performance as Hamlet depresses Pip, who thereupon "dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert's Clara, or play Hamlet to Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it," a nightmare of terror and panic as Pip identifies himself with Shakespeare's troubled Prince (p. 244; Ch. xxxi). Wemmick's idyllic relationship with his "Aged Parent" is the other side ot the coin, a father-son relationship from which all traces of competitiveness have been repressed.20 Dolge Orlick, Pip's nemesis and alter ego.21 "slouches" in and out of the forge "like Cain" the fratricide (p. 105; Ch. xv). Trabb's boy. despite his antic satire of Pip's pretensions, is an epitome of the disenfranchised child. He lacks a logical target for his revenge; he lacks even the dignity of a name. No doubt these and most other soundings of the text can be assimilated to other sorts of interpretation. but none comprehend nearly so much of the text, or do so with as much consistency. Nor do they account for the power of Great Expectations, the hold the book has had on its broad readership. That derives from the personal obsession at its center. And this obsession, disguised by public themes and by the excitements of the suspense plot. is remarkably obvious and pervasive. It is a question not of depth analysis but of a particular sort of alertness to the surface of the text. Pip, who gives no more than a sketch of his early childhood, assumes, from time to time, that we know much more about it than we do. How often and how frankly does he allude to a feeling of "dread ... the revival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood" (p. 217; Ch. xxviii). It is hardly daring to suggest that the genesis ot art is personal and private, emotional rather than rational. In fact, all writing is, in some sense, automatic writing. My pen moves only in the 442 Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father" explicable feeling" associated with the "poor labyrinth" of his secret life (pp. 259, 219; Chs. xxxiii, xxix). "What I wanted, who can say''How can I say, when I never knew''"(p. 101; Ch. xiv). "I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime" (p. 249; Ch. xxxii). "I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it" (p. 311; Ch. xl). "Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part in its production" (p. 258; Ch. xxxiv). From time to time this sort of probing into the forbidden center of Pip's psyche is expressed by a pun: "I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a weddingring, passing unsympathetically over the human countenance" (p. 48; Ch. vii). Or even by a sexual double entendre: "Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment" (p. 10; Ch. ii). Sometimes a character other than Pip has the innocent-sounding but reverberating line. As does Camilla Pocket: "I am determined not to make a display of my feelings, but it's very hard to be told one wants to feast on one's relations" (p. 82; Ch. xi). Or as does Joe Gargery: "Which I meantersay, if the ghost of a man's own father cannot be allowed to claim his attention, what can, Sir''"(pp. 208-09; Ch. xxvii). I do not believe such quotations can justly be said to be out of context. The entire novel, all its characters and incidents, springs from one center; each part is an appropriate context for any other part.23 It is in the plot, however, that the Oedipal drama, so often alluded to by various characters, may be glimpsed. Pip needs to find a parent figure whom he can love, and fear, and kill, and who will in turn terrorize, and succumb to, and lovingly pardon him. Magwitch is the perfection of that figure. The plot traces Pip's experience of discovering this. But the psyche takes what nourishment it can, makes do, along the way. It does not put off immediate though partial satisfactions in anticipation of larger rewards. Psychic transactions are entered into with all comers. Mrs. Joe, interstices between periods of thought. I think, ergo I am-but in that instant the pen stops. I write-and where is that self-conscious "I" of which I am so fond'' Some works of art baffle attempts to locate their personal impetus; the dream carries the emotive charge while obscuring its private basis. Many other works, some call them "confessional," seem to deal exclusively and courageously with their personal impetus, although one may. remembering the saw that no one can psychoanalyze himself, doubt their sincerity or their claim to sophistication. What is remarkable is the way Dickens covers his private traces while letting many of the cats out of the bag. It is as if the critical problems with the novel, its failures as it were, were deliberate, the infant's cry piercing the artist's manly reserve. It is as if Dickens wants us to see through the disguise, as if he wants, himself, to deal directly with private and taboo subjects but will not quite acknowledge this desire. He winks at us: "Yes, yes, Pip is Me"but only winks. If we wink back, as if to join the conspiracy, he looks away. He wants to get caught but he lacks that extra measure of courage that would enable him to turn himself in. Jay Leyda, writing of Melville's stories, has described a similar drama: "We are compelled to regard these stories as an artist's resolution of that constant contradiction--between the desperate need to communicate and the fear of revealing too much."22 Pip not only feels guilty, he tells us that he feels guilty. Often he tells us that he cannot understand why his feelings of guilt occur or why they are so strong. Often he tries to discover why, or announces that the discovery is either impossible or inconsequential. It is as if Pip's telling of his story and Dickens' writing of the novel are acts that incorporate psychological probing, discovery, and obfuscation. One thinks of Philip Roth's Portnov's Complaint and his even more obviously relevant Ml Lif/ as a Man. Roth's protagonists recount their histories, the one to his psychoanalyst, the other to readers of fiction and autobiography, the recounting being clearly seen by both author and reader as forms of self-defense, discovery, and therapy. Roth's distance from his protagonists and his awareness of their psychological maneuverings are clear and constant. Dickens' awareness is ambiguous and wavering. Pip himself is fascinated by the recurring "in- Lawrence Jay Dessner to be sure, has much the test of the bargain with Pip. She claims and disclaims, at her own pleasure, the rewards due Pip's parents: "If it warn't for me you'd have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there..... It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother" (p. 7; Ch. ii). Sibling and maternal antagonisms merge in the threat of murder/abandonment. Dickens steps in to redress the balance by having Orlick mortally attack her. And the forgiveness she both gives and asks at her death is ambiguous enough to include Pip: "And so she presently said 'Joe' again, and " once 'Pardon,' and once 'Pip' (p. 269; Ch. xxxv). 443 Miss Hlavisham permits herself, while assuming the role of Pip's benefactor, to torment him. Because of her wealth, her age, and her pitiful condition, and because of her approximation to a parental figure, Pip's aggressiveness toward her can only be admitted through his hallucinated visions of her death by hanging (pp. 58-59, 380; Chs. viii, xlix). The intensity of his emotional reaction to her can also be seen in his ludicrous narration to his family circle of his first encounter with her: "She was sitting ... in a black velvet coach.... And Miss Estella... handed her in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate.... Four dogs... fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver basket" (pp. 62-63; Ch. ix). Pip tries, without success, to explain why he so grotesquely and seemingly gratuitously embellished his tale: "'f a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity-it is the key to many reservations" (p. 61; Ch. ix). And after Miss Havisham is known not to be Pip's patron-parent, Pip saves her from death by fire, saves her, but in this language: "We were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies, and . . . the closer I covered her. the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself" (p. 380; Ch. xlxi). The violence and sexual ambiguity of this strikes Pip, as well as us, as excessive and he tries to discover its genesis. He refers it to unconscious, irrational, and, to his relief, inaccessible motives: "That this occurred I knew through the result, but not through anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the floor.... Assistance was sent for, and I heid her until it came, as if I unreasonably fancied (I think I did) that if I let her go, the fire would break out again and consume her" (pp. 380-81; Ch. xlix). Pumblechook is a parody of the surrogate father, linked, by the motif of handshaking, with Magwitch. His various claims to be Pip's benefactor and his actual negligence of the boy come to us, through Pip's reportage, as farce, their pain distanced into triumphant comedy, and this despite, rather than because of, Pumblechook's long and close relationship with him. He is "Joe's uncle, but Mrs. Joe appropriated him" (p. 21; Ch. iv). He is by this metaphor, and metaphor is as good as fact for the psyche, a blood relative. His cruelty is not forgotten. Orlick, an agent of Pip's repressed aggression, punishes and humiliates him: "They took his till, and they took his cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals" (p. 442; Ch. lvii). That is Joe's narrative. Its cadence has the pulse of ritual utterance, an exultant folk exorcism. Jaggers is an interesting variation on the theme. He has personal force and authority and the identification with the law that Manheim has written about as symbolic of Oedipal relationships.24 He is, in legal fact, a surrogate for both Magwitch and Miss Havisham and the immediate provider of the mysterious largesse. But he is unwilling to engage in any psychological transactions with Pip. His interest is professional. without affect. He washes his hands of personal involvement. And since he will not play the games most people play, Pip's relationship with him is a dead end. He will neither love Pip nor hate him (either one would do), and so Pip is rarely engaged by him more intimately than as an object of curiosity. At an early interview with Jaggers, Pip "felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of that old time when I had been put upon a tombstone" (p. 272; Ch. xxxvi). Pip is probing, trying to assimilate Jaggers into his psychic life. He is made "intensely melancholy" by the encounter, he says, but Jaggers' potential to provoke feelings of guilt is insubstantial, and Pip steps aside and transfers him to Herbert Pocket. Pip sees Herbert, 444 Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's ownfather" confidence: "I never knew Joe to remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else -even with a learned air-as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely" (p. 102; Ch. xv). "He pulled up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers. ... Joe took his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands: as if he had some urgent reason in his mind for being particular to half a quarter of an ounce" (p. 93; Ch. xiii). Joe does not take offense at such ridicule. No provocation or punishment hurts him. Pip's only recourse, the only use he can make of the man who will not blame him, is to blame himself, on Joe's behalf, for imagined treachery and disloyalty to Joe. This permits Pip to castigate himself and to profit by encounters with the oblivious Joe. The sentimentality of the procedure's enactment signals Pip's strained frustration: "Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before-more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then" (p. 151; Ch. xix). The charge Pip brings against himself here we all know to be patent nonsense, although Dickens does not let Pip, or himself, see clearly through the tears. "But, sharpest and deepest pain of all-it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out of those rooms where I sat thinking, and hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe.... In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers" (pp. 307-08; Ch. xxxix). Do we not hear a note, in this, of what a recent survey of Psychoanalytic Theoryand Therapyof Masochism calls The Joy of Su/ffring'28 It serves, as does Pip's hopeless pursuit of Estella, to lacerate a psyche which in its "innermost life of my life" (p. 223; Ch. xxix) desires to be scourged. Pip's "condition of unreason" (p. 245; Ch. xxxii), to use another of his descriptions of his emotional plight, has demanded it. He makes what capital he can of Joe, but Joe is found wanting and Pip takes it out on him. His intended proposal to Biddy is his revenge on Joe for being Joe. Only as he sees everyone, as a version of his own emotional position, and he derives some slight gratification when Herbert "thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty" (p. 278; Ch. xxxvi). Pip's search for the special kind of father figure his psyche requires extends into many other nooks and crannies of the novel, but the most decisive encounters are those with Joe Gargery and with Magwitch. Gargery. as the husband of Pip's acting imother, is the most obvious Iather figure, and he is in some respects what Pip craves. Submissiveness, humility, loving-kindness, Joe is their perfection. "I always treated him as a larger species of child" (p. 7; Ch. ii), says Pip. He is the least threatening, least competitive, most selfsacrificing of men: and despite the brawn of his blacksmith's arm, the least masculine.25 There is not the least hint, until the novel's close, of his having a sexual nature. He is more like Pip's child than Pip's father, a reversal of roles similar to that of Wemmick and Aged Parent, a not uncommon motif in Dickens.26 But Pip needs more than this. He needs a father whom he can hurt and who will hurt him, before whom he can feel guilt and suffer punishment. Joe Gargery is incapable of anger, but Pip can only learn this by attempting to provoke his anger. Failing that, he punishes him for his "refusal" to play the stern father part to Pip's satisfaction. Both stances taken toward Gargery can exist at the same time, in the same act, without respect to the logic of cause and effect that reason requires. "Past, present and future are threaded," says Freud, "on the string of the wish that runs through them all."27 The psyche never gives up, never admits that any defeat is final, never is disloyal, as it were, to the demands that propel it. The text shows us Pip probing Joe's character, seeking not knowledge but reaction, reaction specifically in the form of retributive anger, the exhibition of pain and vindictive, guilt-provoking, guilt-satisfying, response. Joe's pardon is not enough, for Joe will not be hurt; his love for Pip is not offered in spite of the pain Pip causes him, nor even with awareness of any cruelty on Pip's part. His acceptance does not have the force of forgiveness. Pip's assault on Joe takes the forms of condescension and direct attack, both masked by a sentimentalized affection. As Pip paints him, Joe's stupidity is only matched by his grotesque appearance and his unexampled lack of social La'wreniCe Ja i' Dessner 445 after Magwitch's death are Joe and Biddy allowed their fair measure of respect. Only after Pip's devils have been assuaged by, most importantly, the catastrophe of the Magwitch relationship can Biddy and Joe be given, be seen as having, adult sexuality. The assertion that Pip harbors patricidal tendencies. that in some ways he accomplishes acts of patricide on Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and Magwitch, may still seem a shockingly askew judgment. Pip is gentle, sober, nonviolent, not that sort of fellow at all. The theory that Oedipal aggressions color all personalities may evaporate before the novel's display of Pip's growing into various forms of loving-kindness toward those whose lives cross his. On the other hand, the text presents a number of untimely and violent deaths. and is not the amalgam of Pip and Dickens, who makes it all up, responsible for all of it' Freud said the patient is responsible for his own dreams -surely the analyst isn't! In the world of fiction the narrator-author is the first cause of all events. Pip often suspects himself of being a murderer, or meditates, in various degrees of seriousness, on the possibility. Mr. Wopsle involves Pip in a reading, in Pumblechook's parlor, of "the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell." The hero of Lillo's very popular play, parodied by Thackeray in Punch in 1847, robs his master and murders his uncle. Pip plays the murderer: "At once ferocious and maudlin, I was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever" (p. 110). Pumblechook glares at him "saying 'Take warning, boy, take warning!' as if it were a wellknown fact that I contemplated murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the weakness to become my benefactor" (p. 110; Ch. xv). How recklessly does Pip express the inexpressible, a murderer tempting fate, inviting capture, by returning to the scene of his crime. It is, in this case, not the first such return. Earlier, when Pumblechook, expecting brandy, choked on the tar-water, young Pip was terrified: "I didn't know how I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow" (p. 25; Ch. iv). The Barnwell play is followed directly by news of the assault on Mrs. Joe. Pip takes it this way: "With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at all events that as her near relation, popularly known to be under obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than any one else" (p. 113; Ch. xvi). Pip immediately reconsiders, taking a "view of the case, which was more reasonable." But years later, hearing footsteps on his stairsthey are Magwitch's-Pip reverts to the earlier, unreasonable idea: "What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the footsteps of my dead sister, matters not" (p. 299; Ch. xxxix). "Matters not"! Of course it matters, and Pip senses that it does. What he implies by the phrase is something like this: "Reader, you and I both know a good deal more than we admit about these psychological strategies of mine. They are, in fact, so obvious and so distasteful, and I can do nothing about them. I'm sorry to have been tactless again and to have made explicit reterence to them. Please excuse me and forget it ever happened." Pip's nonchalance here is itself strategic, defensive. Herbert warns Pip that Magwitch might turn himself in to the police if he feels Pip has forsaken him. Pip has not thought of abandoning Magwitch at all, but Herbert's speculation opens the old wound: "1 was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had weighed upon me from the first, and the working out of which would make me regard myself, in some sort, as his murderer, that I could not rest in my chair, but began pacing to and fro" (p. 325; Ch. xli). Pip's relationship to Magwitch is the fulcrum of the novel's movement. It begins with Magwitch's comic ferocity: "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!" (p. 2: Ch. i). Pip misreads his man's immediate motive, but responds with sensitivity to him: "As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds [The intensity with which this is felt forces the prose into verse], he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves. to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in" (p. 4; Ch. i). The living man, through imagery, is linked with the dead Pirrips. Pip keeps from Joe any knowledge of his pilfering for Magwitch. His reasons for doing so are obviously strained: "I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse than I was" (p. 37; Ch. vi). Pip knows this rationale is falsely based, he calls it "morbid." But the convict is recaptured and the subject drops. Pip transfers his suffering over "the smart without a name" (p. 57; 446 Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's ownfather" "unrefreshed," and "waking.. never lost that fear" (p. 326; Ch. xli). In the sense that the narrator invents the novel, he is the murderer. But he also invents Compeyson. the actual murdererand his secret surrogate. This link between Pip and Compeyson is hidden in the plot's complexities, and yet, like so many hidden connections in Great Expectations, it is indirectly revealed. Wopsle, seeing the two of them in his audience "had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I saw that you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there like a ghost" (p. 364; Ch. xlvii). Wopsle, whose foolishness disguises his insight here, "had from the first vaguely associated him with me, and known him as somehow belonging to me in the old village time" (p. 366; Ch. xlvii). "Somehow" and "vaguely," passwords of sentimental diffuseness, are as explicit as Pip is able to be. By the time Magwitch is mortally injured and apprehended, Pip's "repugnance to him had all melted away." He sees him as "only ... a man who had meant to be my benefactor. and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a series of years" (p. a23: Ch. liv). With Magwitch's death doubly assured, Pip can turn to him with love and for love. Pip's guilt is not utterly "melted away," but it is assuaged in part by his earlier refusal to consider taking possession of the wealth Magwitch had amassed for him. Jaggers "was querulous and angry with me for having 'let it slip through my fingers,'" although he admits the difficulty of Pip's claim. Pip resolves not to try. Had he tried earlier, the chances would have been better. Oddly enough, his case would have been best made had he been related to Magwitch by a "recognizable tie"-as an adopted son, for instance, or even as Estella's husband, and so, sonin-law (pp. 425--26; Ch. lv). Magwitch, in returning to England, had, in effect, sacrificed himself for Pip. Pip sacrifices economic security. Magwitch's money, honestly earned, should be at least as acceptable as Miss Havisham's inherited brewery fortune, but neither Pip nor Dickens is as interested in the evils of snobbery as the surface of the novel has prompted some of its critics to be. By refusing to consider laying hold of Magwitch's wealth before it is too late, Pip frustrates his benefactor's love and life work. Since he keeps this fact from Magwitch, the argument that Pip Ch. viii) to the immediately available person, Estella. That movement reaches its emotional climax when she tells Pip of her engagement to Drummle. Pip's response is to restate his love for her, and, more oddly, his praise and thanksgiving for her goodness to him: "In this separation I associate you only with the good.... Oh, God bless you, God forgive you!" In an "ecstasy of unhappiness," Pip abases himself before Estella, praises her, accepts for himself a lifetime of painfully unrequited love, and forgives her for it all. "The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out" (p. 345; Ch. xliv). Conventions of Victorian romantic love serve to disguise the intensity of Pip's reactions here just as the canons of respectability provide a "cover" for Pip's morbid fear of criminal taint. We have already noticed some of Pip's early, intensely felt reactions to Magwitch. As the hint is given that the returned convict is, as he soon says, Pip's "second father," Pip's heart beats "like a heavy hammer of disordered action." He "had to struggle for every breath." He "seemed to be suffocating.... The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which 1 shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.... I recoiled from his touch as if he had been a snake ... while my blood ran cold within me" (pp. 303-05; Ch. xxxix). To ascribe such intensity to Pip's sense of class distinctions is to take the complaint for the diagnosis. Pip meditates on his case, and on his symptoms, admitting his inability to verbalize his feelings, yet fascinated by them: "Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful mystery that he was to me" (p. 319; Ch. xl). "The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than J, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me" (p. 320; Ch. xl). How accurate is this description of the minuet of the heart's affections! And how courageous not to repress the hint, in the allusion to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that the monster is a creation of the suffering psyche, a creation that punishes its creator. Pip is haunted by the idea of being "in some sort... [Magwitch's] murderer" (p. 352; Ch. xli). His dreams are of this, he says. He wakes, Lawlrence Jay Dessner deliberately frustrates his patron is solipsistic, but that is the way of the ego. Pip's realization that he is "in debt" with "scarcely any money" brings on acute anxiety: "Then there came one night which appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror; and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I found I could not do so" (p. 437; Ch. lvii). Pip recovers from his sudden and severe illness and goes off, chastened but cheerful, to accept his punishment: eleven years of exile, celibacy, and only moderately rewarding toil for Clarriker and Co. The exchange of loving sacrifice is unequal; the bargain, at last, in Pip's favor. He has found his stern, dread-provoking father, and, with Dickens' help, engineered a socially acceptable patricide, his victim's forgiveness, and the opportunity to say over his deathbed: "It was dreadful to think that I could not be sorry at heart for his being badly hurt, since it was unquestionably best that he should die" (p. 423; Ch. liv). Parallel to this acceptance of patricide is Herbert's situation. He cannot marry Clara Barley until her father's death. Pip felt "that Herbert's way was clearing fast, and that old Bill Barley had but to stick to his pepper and rum, and his daughter would soon be happily provided for" (p. 395; Ch. lii). Old Barley is, eight pages before Magwitch's death, fading. "Not to say an unfeeling thing," says Pip, "he cannot do better than go" (p. 427; Ch. Iv). Magwitch dies blessing Pip: "You've never deserted me, dear boy" (p. 435; Ch. Ivi). This, of course, ignores Pip's initial repulsion, but it reverberates with echoes of Pip's supposed desertion of Joe, with Wemmick's treatment of his aged parent, with, indeed, a large part of the novel's content. At Magwitch's end, Pip tells him that Estella, the daughter he deserted, lives. Magwitch kisses Pip's hand and dies. Pip prays over the body in the equivocal words of the Pharisee (Luke xviii.10-13). The equivocation, about which critics have argued,29 marks an epoch in this equivocal relationship. Magwitch dies, but there is a sequel in which Pip's muted, residual guilt finds expression. With Magwitch gone, he turns to Joe Gargery: "Oh Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me!" (p. 439; Ch. lvii). The absurd- 447 ity of imploring Joe to strike him! As David Goldknopf says: "If the novel can be said to have a generic moral it is: the heart has its reasons, and those reasons will fight reason, experience, and fact, to man's dying breath" (The Lilf of the Notel, p. 5). The working out of Pip's psychological distress involves a good deal more than those few episodes discussed here. The exorcism of his feelings of guilt requires symbolic, purifying deaths by fire and by water, and, through Orlick's attempt on his life, the threat of obliteration in the limekiln. With the novel's end comes the resolution of Pip's search for parental surrogates. He receives forgiveness and utterly superfluous promises never to blame him again from Joe and Biddy (p. 455; Ch. lviii), and then, after the passage of years, Pip is reborn as their child. It is told as a dream, a hallucination: "I touched [the latch] so softly that I was not heard, and I looked in unseen. There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as ever. though a little grey, sat Joe; and there. fenced into the corner with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was-I again!" (p. 457; Ch. lix). Pip exists again, as a young boy. with loving and living parents, without the psychological complications of his first incarnation. The two Pips--one could as well refer to them in the singular--return to the graves of their original parents and the comic play of the novel's first page is reprised. Pip finds peace, but scars remain. He will not marry, he says; the last chapter, either version, is window dressing. He will be sober and sad, and loyal, another emasculated Joe. He will meditate on his life and then explain it to us and to himself, as well as he can. Grelt Expectations is that explanation. The explanation tells us how it has felt, how it feels "now" to remember it and tell it. It does not, explicitly, tell us why things happened as they did, although it often is on the verge of discovering a more adequate rationale than its surface projects. The secret of Pip's "innermost life of my life" (p. 223; Ch. xxix) is embedded in the fiction. After all the novel's secrets have been solved, as Chesterton said about Dickens' works in general, wc have the sense "that even the author was unaware of what was really going on, and when [the plot's secrets are unraveled,] we simply do not believe." It is as if those characters "were keeping some- 448 Great Expectations: "the ghost of a man's own father" When the novel's surface makes us uneasy with its apparent intent, forces us to learn more about the work than its creator gives evidence of knowing, we may hesitate to award the praise reserved for those works of supreme esthetic perfection. Whatever loss this decision entails, it does bring forward to our attention a compelling biographical drama. GrealtE.xpectationsmakes us spectators to the contlict waged, during its writing, in the wounded psyche of Dickens. It is an epic, marvelously courageous, struggle. Dickens fails to repress, transmute, comprehend, control, transcend the private impulses which are the work's occasion. His great expectation, one might say the great expectation of art generally, is precisely this translation of private matter into public discourse, the triumphant escape from personality, from Yeats's "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." No doubt, Vivian, in "The Decay of Lying," is right: "The only real people are the people who never existed.... To art's subject-matter we should be more-or-less indifferent." But few would give up Dickens for Wilde. Nor need it surprise or distress us that we see and can verbalize complexities in Great Expectations when Dickens, who made us see, seems innocent of our psychological sophistication. Dickens was, as few have been, alert to and loyal to his own feelings. We stand on Freud's shoulders. Freud stood on Dickens'.31 Unilversity Toledo of Toledo, Ohio thing back from the author as well as from the reader."30 Beneath the Oedipal secret that we have all felt as we have felt the novel's power, there are other secrets for which language and comprehension are not yet. At Miss Havisham's death she begs forgiveness, and then: "She said innumerable times in a low solemn voice. 'What have I done!' And then, 'When she first came, I meant to save her from misery like mine.' And then, 'Take the pencil and write under my name, "I forgive her"!' She never changed the order of these three sentences, but she sometimes left out a word in one or other of them; never putting in another word, but always leaving a blank and going on to the next word" (pp. 381--82; Ch. xlix). Perhaps some Dickensian will accept the challenge Pip puts to us here and find the arrangement of those words that will reveal more about what Pip calls "the sharpest crying of all" (p. 224; Ch. xxix). Despite such recalcitrant material, I believe this psychoanalytic reading provides a unified explanation of this novel's central meaning and of the incongruities between the novel and received critical accounts of it. We might do well to call Great Expectations a "personal novel" rather than a realistic one. Pip's excessive guilt and those excesses and anomalies it generates point to Dickens' personal feelings incompletely assimilated into the novel's realistic texture, the child's heart and the child's special and amoral modes of logic intruding into the controlled distances of art. Contrivances of plot, inconsistencies of moral and political thought, and discrepancies of characterization are functional when we read the novel aright. Notes ' ( i( Quoted by Harry K. Girvetz. Beyond Rilht and Wronli. A Sttud in Moral Theorr (New York: Free Press, 1973). p. 54. from Letters of'Si,lutnd Freul, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic. 1969). p. 436. Gi. K. Chesterton, ('riticisms ttnd o. AIIpprlechitionsf ('arles Dickens (New York: Dutton, 1911), p. 197: John H. Hagan, Jr.. "The Poor Labyrinth: The Theme of Social Injustice in Dickens's Great E.pectations.," Nineteenth-Centurvl Fiction, 9 (Dec. 1954). 169--78; Monroe Engel, The Maturtity Dickens of (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 156-68; G. Robert Stange, "Expectations Well Lost: Dickens' Fable for His Time." College English. 16 (Oct. 1954). 9. 3 Great Expectation.s,ed. Frederick Page, The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press. 1953). p. 434: Ch. Ivi. All subsequent reterences to this work are fiom this edition and are noted by chapter and page number within the text. ' Robert B. Partlow, Jr., "The Moving 1: A Study of the Point of View in Great Expectations," CollhegeEnglish. 23 (Nov. 1961). 122 26. 131. discusses this difficult question. 5 See e.g.. Humphry House, Ilhe lDicken.s1orl.ld 2nd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942). 6 An important treatment of this subject is Julian Moynahan. "The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great E.pectations." EssaYsin Criticism, 10 (1960), 60-79. Barbara Hardy disagrees with vigor ("Formal Analysis and Common Sense." Essas:s in Criticism. 11, 1961. 112--15)but Moynahan, writing in the same issue, will not be moved ("Dickens Criticism." pp. 239 41). See also Robert Barnard, "Images and Theme in Great " Expectations.. Dickens Stulies Annual. 1 (1970). 238-51 Jay Dessner Lawlrence ("The all-pervasive theme of Great Expectations is not money, but guilt," p. 238), and Harry Stone, "Fire, Hand, and Gate: Dickens' Great Expectations," Kenyon Review, 24 (1962), 662-91. 7 I follow David Goldknopf, The Life of the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 146-47, who quotes this passage and refers to the "wink" in it. 8 Ne\w Republic, March 1940, pp. 297-300, 339-42. I quote from the enlarged version in The Woundand The Bolt.: Seven Studies in Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 3-85, and indicate future page references in my text. Wilson's influence in this regard has been widespread. It limits the often insightful Freudian reading of Albert Hutter's "Crime and Fantasy in Great Expectations," in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), pp. 26-65. 9 Holland, "Romeo's Dream and the Paradox of Literary Realism," Literature and( Psycholoq,. 13 (1963), 97-104. quotes and discusses this statemlentof Freud's. In his essential work on the subject, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), Holland touches on the linkage between sentimentality in popular fiction and "oedipal fantasy" from which "most of the greatest literature... builds" (pp. xiii-xiv, 47); Stoehr, Dickens. The Dreamer's Stance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1965); Stoehr's critical method and his remarks on Great Expectations are most useful although his conclusions about the novel's "true subject" (p. 99) are at variance with mine. '0 Sylvia Anthony's The Discovery of Death in Childhood (New York: Basic, 1972) is a useful summary. Most volumes of The Psychoanailtic Study of the Child (New York: International Univs. Press) and of the Journal of Child Psycholoqy andC Psychiatry contain relevant material. l The Form of Victorian Fiction. Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 6. 12 Charles Klingerman, "The Dream of Charles Dickens," Journal of the American Psychoanalysis Association, 18 (1970), 784. 3 The Poetical Works of'Matthei- Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 193. 14 Charles Burkhart, Charlotte Bronti.: A Psychosexual Study of Her Novels (London: Gollancz, 1973), p. 73. 5 "Thanatos: The Death Instinct in Dickens' Later Novels," Psychoanalysis anc Psychoanalytic Review, 47 (Winter 1960--61),28. 16 Dickens was interested in the relationship between his dreams and his fiction, as Warrington Winters has shown ("Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams," PMLA, 63, 1948, 984-1006); Dickens was not the only Victorian who believed that "there is a mental existence within us, a secret flow, an absent mind which haunts us like a ghost or a dream and is an essential part of our lives." So wrote Eneas Sweetland Dallas. 7he Gay1 Sc'ince (London: Chapman & Hall. 1866). ..199 (quoted by Helene E. Roberts, "The Dream World of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Victorian Studies, 17, 1974, 380). On the limits of Dickens' awareness of depth psychology, see Leonard 449 F. Manheim. "The Personal History of David Copperfield: A 9 Study in Psychoanalytic Criticism1," Almrican l1 ulo1,1 (1952), 21 43, esp. 41-43. 7 R. D. McMaster, ed., Great Expectations (New York: Odyssey, 1965), p. 6, n. See also Charles Parish. "A Boy Brought Up 'By Hand,' " Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1962), 286--88, and Robert J. Finkel, "Another Boy Brought Fiction, 20 (1966), Up 'By Hand,'" Nineteenth-CenturyE 389-90. 18 Manheim. "Personal History of David Copperfield," p. 42. '1 "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw Ilamlc. I l Poems of Gerard Manlei' Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 90. 20 See my "Great Expectations: The Tragic Comedy of John Wemmick," Ariel. A Reviewlof International Enqlish Literature, 6 (April 1975), 65-80. 21 See Moynahan, "The Hero's Guilt," and Karl P. Wentersdorf, "Mirror Images in Great E.pectations," NineteenithCentury Fiction, 21 (1966), 203-24. 22 Jay Leyda, ed., The Complete Stories of Herm7an Melville (New York: Random, 1949), p. xxviii. 23 I follow J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens:. The World of. His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), esp. pp. ix-xi. 24 "The Law as 'Father,'" A,merican /inuito, 12 (1955), 17 23. " 25 See Manheim, "The Law as 'Father,' p. 21, on Bleak House: "There never was a kindlier, more long-suffering, gentler father than John Jarndyce.... What better atonement could one make to a once-despised father' [i.e., Dickens' father]." 26 Bella Wilfer, Jenny Wren, Amy Dorrit, and their fathers, to name a few. 27 Quoted by Roberts, p. 392, from "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," Sigmmund Freud, Charaicterand Culture, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 38. 28 Shirley Panken, The Joy of Sufferin.' The Psychoanalytic Theoryand Therapyof Masochism (New York: Aronson, 1973). Panken speaks of "Moral Masochism" (p. 41) and says that "Masochistic individuals remain unaware of the extent to which they fear and exaggerate moral failure" (p. 43). 29 The debate is summarized by K. J. Fielding, "The Critical Autonomy of Great Expectations," Review of' EnIlish Studies, 2 (1961), 83-85. 30 Graham Greene, "The Young Dickens," The Lost Childhood rand Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), p. 54, paraphrases and then quotes from G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, a Critical Study (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906), pp. 170-71, Ch. vii. 31 I acknowledge with gratitude the helpful counsel of my colleagues, Louis B. Fraiberg and Wallace D. Martin, at the Univ. of Toledo, and the incisive criticism and suggestions of George H. Ford, James R. Kincaid, and William D. Schaefer.