“I may truly say I’ve never had this apron off since born you were. It’s bad enough being a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother.”
As soon as the reader is introduced to Mrs. Gargery it is made very clear that she resents the fact that she has had to raise Pip as her own.
“Who brought you up by hand?”
“You did” said I.
“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.
I whimpered, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that……”
Although Pip and Mrs. Joe are related, she never seems to show any warmth or love towards him. During the Christmas meal with visitors Mr. Pumblechook, Mr. Wopsle, Mr. Hubble and Mrs. Hubble, Mrs. Gargery even insinuates that she wishes Pip were dead. “...and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.” Throughout the meal, it is clear that Mrs. Gargery thinks very little of Joe and Pip, and tries to act in a higher social class, talking down to them both.
Even though Mrs. Gargery treats Joe in a degrading and humiliating way, she still expects him to stick up for, and stand by her. This is made perspicuous in the forge, when Mrs. Joe overheard Joe allowing Dolge Orlick to have half a day off, otherwise known as a “half holiday.” As soon as Mrs. Joe realised what Joe was doing, she stormed in, and what followed was a tempestuous argument between Mrs. Gargery and Orlick. During the argument, Orlick used insults such as “You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery” and “I’d hold you, if you was my wife. I’d hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.” These taunts really affected Mrs. Gargery, and Dickens exposed a weaker and more vulnerable side of her character. At this point, Mrs. Gargery shrieks whilst saying “What did he call me, with my husband standing by? Oh! Oh! Oh!” In a frenzied attempt to let out her frustration, due to her husband not sticking up for her, Mrs. Gargery began a outburst of “clappings” and “screaming” followed by a fit, where she “beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down – which were the last stages on her road to frenzy.”
However, Mrs. Joe Gargery’s life, including her temper and violent tendencies were profusely affected after she was attacked by Orlick. This attack totally changed Mrs. Gargery. In the novel, Pip describes her as “lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of her head.” However, her temper was described as being ‘greatly improved’ and ‘she was patient’. She would move very irregularly, and ‘A tremulous uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a part of her regular state…’ After the incident, Mrs. Gargery is left with mental dysfunctions. She begins to hallucinate, her hearing and speech is impaired and she cannot write properly. . “Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied; her hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her speech was unintelligible.”
Although she may only seem a little strange before her assault, Mrs. Joe Gargery’s idiosyncratic and capricious behaviour was eminently more evident at the time it was written. This was due to the views of how women should behave in the Victorian period. The two main aspects of Mrs. Gargery’s character which makes her so eccentric and divergent is her ability to dominate the household and her husband in such a way that he is frightened of her, and her obsession with cleaning and doing simple chores and tasks in specific ways. This may not be very strange in the 21st century; however a wife like that in the 19th century was unheard of. After she had been assaulted, there was a substantial change in her behaviour, as she became mentally unstable. However, her change in behaviour was due to the effects of her injuries, both mentally and physically, Orlick had inflicted.
In my opinion, Charles Dickens had several reasons why he portrayed Mrs. Joe Gargery in this way. Firstly, I think Mrs’ Gargery’s violent behaviour created more sympathy from the reader towards Pip. As Dickens himself was of a poor background, he always made sure people knew just how hard life was, and he used his novels as ways of campaigning for better living and working conditions especially for young children. The second reason is for a similar reason. Dickens’ commonly spoke well about the poor in his stories, for example David Copperfield, Pip and Oliver Twist, so I think Mrs. Gargery was a contrast, to show people that not all poor people in his stories are nice. Thirdly, the derogatory treatment of both Pip and Joe by Mrs. Gargery helped to bring them together and make the reader understand their strong friendship bond. Without the disparaging treatment of them both, Pip would have been unable to find solace from her rages in Joe, as they wouldn’t be united under a common oppression.
Another reason is to covertly hint at Mrs. Gargery’s desire to ascend the social class ladder. This is done by her meticulous cleaning and task routine. Mrs. Gargery yearns to be in a better social class, and in order to make herself feel more aristocratic, she makes sure her house is perfectly tidy and she does everything as well as possible. For example, in one part, Dickens’ goes into great detail, describing how she butters her bread. “My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied....First, with her left hand, she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib. Then, she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaister – using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf; which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves.”
Mrs. Gargery longs for a place in higher society, where the character Miss Havisham currently resides. However, Miss Havisham longs to be in a relationship, which is what Mrs. Gargery is currently in. Even though Miss Havisham and Mrs. Gargery are both totally different characters, they both long for what each other have. Miss Havisham doesn’t realise how easy her life is, living in such wealth, and Mrs. Gargery doesn’t realise what she has, her loving husband and brother.
Although Miss Havisham and Mrs. Gargery are of totally nonconforming social classes, many aspects of their life and personality are very similar. During the novel, both of the women die in their own homes, Mrs. Joe Gargery died in her kitchen after being attacked by Orlick. “In the midst of the kitchen.... she was the wife of Joe.” Miss Havisham died after being burnt in her house by the hearth. “I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated in the ragged chair upon the hearth......with a whirl of fire blazing all about her.” Another important correlation between both women is that they both despise men. They are stubborn and adamant in their decision making and they are both very bitter. Their children are also not their own. Pip is Mrs. Gargery’s sister, and Estella is adopted from Molly. Both characters are used to bring the main character, Pip, closer to another person. In Mrs. Gargery’s case, Pip became close to Joe, and in Miss Havisham’s case, Pip became close to Estella.
However, the two women have many differences, too. The most obvious is the social classes. Mrs. Joe Gargery is downtrodden and poor; where as Miss Havisham is rich and aristocratic. Miss Havisham tends to get along and like Pip; however, Mrs. Gargery despises him. Although Mrs. Gargery’s ambitions are practically impossible to achieve, at least she has some aspirations, where as Miss Havisham is just living without a reason. Also, Mrs. Joe Gargery is married, but Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar.
Miss Havisham as a name is a pun on the phrase ‘having is a sham.’ This explains Miss Havisham’s life in its entirety. Miss Havisham’s life is a sham, as she is living in the past, and Mrs Havisham’s wedding was a sham. Also, it shows that money is not everything, and that to be rich doesn’t mean you will automatically be happy. Miss Havisham never recovered from her disastrous wedding day, and lives in the past. Her life is defined by a single tragic event, her jilting by Compeyson on what would have been their wedding day. From that moment forth, Miss Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak. She stops all the clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the moment when she first learned that Compeyson was gone, and wears only one shoe, because when she learned of his betrayal, she had not yet put on the other one. “...I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.” On her decaying body, Miss Havisham’s wedding dress becomes an ironic symbol of death and degeneration. The wedding dress and the wedding feast symbolize Miss Havisham’s past, and the stopped clocks throughout the house symbolize her determined attempt to freeze time by refusing to change anything from the way it was when she was jilted on her wedding day. Although it is Miss Havisham’s choice to stay in the past, she is clearly not a happy person. On Pip’s first encounter with her, he describes her as “I should have felt almost sure that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a watchful and brooding expression.” After Miss Havisham’s humiliating abandonment at the altar, she swore to seek revenge on the male species. With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to achieve her own retribution on men. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded vengeance pursued destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer greatly because of her quest for revenge. At one point she tells Pip to love Estella, regardless of Estella’s feelings towards Pip. Her constant repetition of the words “love her” creates an obsessive and virtually psychotic side to Miss Havisham. “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you love her, if she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces- and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper- love her, love her, love her!” Although this is directed at Pip, it is evident that this is how Miss Havisham feels about Compeyson. Throughout the beginning and middle of the novel, Miss Havisham is completely unaware that her actions are harmful towards Pip and Estella. She realises that hurting Pip and Estella will not make any difference to Compeyson and what he did to her. She is redeemed at the end of the novel when she realises that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own, and rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. “Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done!....” Miss Havisham immediately begs Pip for forgiveness. “My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, ‘I forgive her,’ though ever so long after my broken heart is dust- pray do it!”
Dickens portrays Miss Havisham in a very unique way. There is a dramatic irony between Miss Havisham and Pip. It is ironic how she wanted to watch him become miserable, just because he is of the male gender, and ironically she grew to like him. She even paid for part of Pip’s expenses for the partnership. Yet what is more ironic is that Miss Havisham does not praise herself for the good deed. In the beginning of the novel, Miss Havisham displayed a harsh, cold attitude towards Pip. This is displayed when she says “Well, you can break his heart?”
Miss Havisham’s house was ironically called ‘Satis House’ meaning ‘satisfaction’ although it provides no satisfaction for Miss Havisham. The crumbling, dilapidated stones of the house, as well as the darkness and dust that pervade it, symbolize the general decadence of the lives of its inhabitants and of the upper class as a whole. Miss Havisham’s character is changing throughout. In the beginning of the novel, she is hell-bent on revenge, because she was jilted on her wedding day by Compeyson. She adopts Estella and makes sure they have no heart and then trains them to break the hearts of men. “I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.” Then, she realises what she has done to Estella. When she understands it is as bad as what was done to her, she asks for forgiveness. Due to her positive change, she becomes more likeable to the audience. She is dumbfounded and destroyed, beyond the point of repair, and her quirky and peculiar idiosyncrasies fade away.
Dickens’ chose two very different female characters, which both helped and hindered Pips journey to becoming a gentlemen. In my opinion, I think Dickens’ created these characters to show that in both ends of the social spectrum, there are still people who are not happy. Dickens’ intended message about women that he tried to portray in this book is mixed. In Mrs Joe Gargery, he shows strength and dominance over men, where as in Miss Havisham, he shows total dependence on men, and we see her world fall to pieces without one. I think he decided to use such extreme characters to help readers understand and realise that not all women are the same. They can vary from being confident and domineering, to being dependant on others and very impressionable.
