When Pip first sees Miss Havisham, she is wearing a wedding dress, which is decayed and yellowed. “….I saw everything within my view, which ought to be white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress…” She had entrapped herself in her house and blocked out all natural light from entering. “No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it.”
Satis house symbolises her mental and physical state. The food is decayed and is continuing to decay, as the banquet table has been left the same as it was on her wedding day, “The prominent object was a long table with a table cloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.” Everything in that house had been stopped in time, like she doesn’t want move forward anymore, “…. I saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in that room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.”
Miss Havisham’s isolation is based on several different reasons and as we read on through the novel we discover these reasons. Miss Havisham also is able to isolate herself as she has the money to do so. This choice of isolation was not a option for the poor. There is a great possibility that Miss Havisham might have been brought up spoilt; where she would as a child get everything she wanted and she only had to ask once. She didn’t get her first love, so she, in her own way dealt with it, by isolating herself; this shows how proud she is. She doesn’t move beyond her heartbreak, after she was “stood up” at the alter.
Miss Havisham’s isolation had many effects and consequences. She had shut herself out from the light of day. Thus shut out all goodness and become dark. “….in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind brooding in solitary, had grown diseased….” She decayed physically and mentally whilst she stays in Satis House. She becomes very bitter and cold. This bitterness grabs hold of her like cancer and she becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge, where she will try to get back at men by breaking their hearts. She does this using Estella and Pip.
She instructs Estella to break Pips heart. “….you can break his heart.” Estella is very rude towards Pip and Miss Havisham and orders Pip to allow her to be rude. “You say nothing of her… she says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her….” Miss Havisham takes great enjoyment in telling Pip Estella has gone abroad, so that she can see his broken heart. “…. Educating for a lady; far out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who see her, do you feel you have lost her?”
In the process of using Estella to ruin Pips life, Miss Havisham ruins Estella’s life too. Estella is thought to be incapable of love because of what Miss Havisham has made her: “I am what you have made me.” She has no heart because of this, she only has a heart to be, “….stabbed in or shot at.” Miss Havisham’s plan for revenge “stole Estella’s heart and put ice in its place.”
The worse consequence she probably had to face was the pain she caused to herself. She ends up miserable and begs for forgiveness instead of gaining the satisfaction of her revenge.
Dickens’ intentions in his portrayal of Miss Havisham show that he wanted the reader to feel sympathetic towards Miss Havisham. Despite Miss Havisham’s faults, Dickens creates sympathy for her. Dickens shows how Miss Havisham is suffering, for what she has done. During her isolation, Dickens also creates sympathy for her, by showing her loneliness and melancholy, “I heard her
walking there, and so across into her room, and so across again into that, never ceasing the low cry.”
The Isolation of Miss Havisham is something she chose to do. The out come of that are very dear consequences. She, in the end had to learn the error of her ways, and put them right.
