Great Expectation Coursework

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Haleemah Quadri                                                                                                                         5th/12/2009

     

   The first visit Pip had to Miss Havisham’s house frightens and intimidates him ‘the passage were all dark, and that she had left a candle burning.’ Dickens uses dark imagery to show a bit of clue to the audience the kind of person Miss Havisham is and it emphasises the dark side of Miss Havisham. This makes Pip scared because this is because this is different to where he came from, the house was huge. This shows how different his life is compared to Miss Havisham and Estella and how mysterious the house seems to him and us.

Dickens creates a frightening atmosphere by describing the house in a really sinister way, ‘grass was growing in every crevice.’ Dickens has portrayed the house as being uncared for because it tells and shows us that Miss Havisham hasn’t cared for herself so if she can’t do that, she obviously won’t care for her house. It shows how mysterious scary and Miss Havisham is. Dickens describes Pip as ‘half afraid’ towards Miss Havisham and the house. This shows how the reader understands his trepidation.

Pip’s social background is much lower compared to Miss Havisham and Estella, his mum and dad are dead, and he lives with his sister and her husband Joe, who is a blacksmith. His sister is worried and afraid Pip will follow in the footstep of her husband and wants him to achieve ‘great expectations’. Pip comes from a poor and low status background, so seeing a house like Miss Havisham’s has different feelings, he feels amazed but at the same time worried. ‘This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid.’

Estella treats Pip in a very controlling and rude way. She makes him feel useless and shows him how lower class he is compared to her. She treats him like a dog, always controlling what he does and always saying stuff about how he looks. ‘He is a common labouring boy, and what coarse hand he has.’ This makes Pip start to see who he really is and he begins to worry about how he looks, because before he didn’t really consider himself inferior. Pip also tried to be nice to Estella but every time he tried she never seemed to care or notice. ‘After you miss’ to this she returned ‘don’t be ridiculous boy, I am not going in.’ This is done by Dickens to tell the audience that throughout the novel Pip will go through some adventure and Estella treatment towards him was one of them. It was the beginning.

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The house would really intimidate Pip because the Satis House compared to his house is like a palace ‘the great front entrance had two chains across it outside.’ Also all of the riches he sees ‘jewels sparkled on her neck.’ This shows a different side of Pip because of his reaction and also to describe what exactly was inside the house and to describe the opposite of Pip’s life. The entrance to the house was mysteriously dark. Pip has also never seen such wealth before, so his expectations changes after his first visit. He becomes ashamed of himself, his ...

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