While Pip and Estella are playing cards she comments on how much of a ‘labouring boy’ Pip is. She says that he has ‘coarse hands and thick boots’. The author writes this to accentuate the fact that Estella feels she is greater that him. Also miss Havisham is using Pip to make herself feel better. She tells Estella to ‘Beggar him’. She says this in context to the card game (Beggar Thy Neighbour) but the reader knows that she means ‘beggar him in life.
Estella is very vindictive. She is like a product of Miss Havishams upbringing but growing up too fast.
Pip meets Estella at Satis House where we are introduced to Miss Havisham. Her house is like a prison as she has boarded up the windows and barred the windows. The way in which the house is described makes us feel as if the overgrown gardens are like the sea, and Satis House is like a ship stranded at sea. This reminds us of Magwitch and the prison hulks. The word ‘bars’ is repeated many times to accentuate the fact that Miss Havishan lives in a house like a prison. The theme of imprisonment is prevalent throughout the whole chapter.
Miss Havisham has imprisoned herself by never going out and living like the dead. She is like the seeds in Mr Pumblechook’s drawer, as if she could ‘break out of these jails and bloom’.
Mr Pumblechook is a local seedsman, he is a pompous greedy man. Miss Havisham asked him to find a local boy to come and ‘play’ and because he knew Mrs Joe (Pips sister) he picked Pip. Pip had to go and stay with Mr Pumblechook for a day because it is close to Satis House. When he was staying there Mr Pumblechook was being very greedy, he gave Pip minuet amounts of milk mixed with warm water and a small piece of bread. Mr Pumblechook is very inconsiderate towards Pip because Pip has to sleep in an attic in the corner with his nose a few inches from the roof. Thee seeds can also be a metaphor for Pip himself who needs the right condition to enable him to reach his full potential. He can be seen to be jailed by his childhood. Everyone is against him, it is as if he is fighting an ongoing battle against a brick wall and he has no one to turn to until the wall breaks.
Miss Havisham mean to Pip because at exactly 20 to nine she received a letter from her fiancé, Compyson. The letter stated that he doesn’t want to marry her any more. This made her ‘heart broken’ and she ceased all the clocks at 8:40. 8:40 is when her life stopped and she became she prisoner in her own home. I believe that she stopped the clocks, stayed in that one room, left everything in the same place and kept her wedding dress on because she is trying to make herself believe that it didn’t happen. In the paragraph where Pip is observing Miss Havisham’s room words of death and decay are reiterated, words such as ‘grave,’ ‘shroud’ and ‘corpse-like’. The phrase ‘once white, now yellow’ is also repeated often. The effect of this is that it emphasises the fact that Miss Havisham is old, dull and withered, not only on the outside but inside as well. Repeating words and phrases is a characteristic technique of
Dickens, which I think is extremely effective because it really helps you visualize the situation.
When describing Miss Havisham and her house Dickens has split the description into 2 paragraphs. The difference between the first and the second is that in the first Pip has an impression of Miss Havisham that she is a lady in white, dressed like a bride with lots of jewellery. However in the second paragraph pips perception changes. When he becomes acclimatised with his surroundings he sees things in their true light. Things had ‘lost its lustre and faded yellow’. Everything had ‘no brightness’ and Miss Havisham had ‘shrunk to skin and bone’. Pip realises that she is not really a lady in white but an old and dismal woman in a decaying house. Therefore in the second paragraph the vocabulary changes to words of death and decay, which symbolises Miss Havishams life after being jilted. Words like ‘withered’, ‘skeleton’ and ‘lying in state’. I believe that the author has chosen these words to make us fell sorry for Miss Havisham and what happened to her.
Pip is also unfairly treated in life by a multitude of people. This injustice makes Pip fell diminutive. The passage on page 60 makes us feel sorry for Pip because it tells the reader how he was brought up and raised by a substitute mother. Throughout most of the book the sentence ‘bringing me up by hand’ has been repeated many times. This means that Pip was brought up violently and was ‘capriciously’ harmed by tickler. Mrs Joe called the cane that she hurt Pip with ‘tickler’, I think that she called it this to sway away from the fact that it inflicts pain. ‘Bringing me up by hand’ also means that Mrs Joe brought him up herself and she did everything for a child that isn’t hers. This passage therefore makes us feel sorry for Pip as he tells us about his life and how vulnerable he was and that he was hurt ‘perpetually’ as a child. Dickens uses words like ‘violent’, ‘hunter’ and ‘injustice’ to portray Mrs Joe as a wicked stepmother like in Cinderella. The fable of Cinderella could be associated with the whole book with Mrs Joe and Estella as the wicked stepmothers. The glass slipper incident is portrayed as when Pip gets the money, because he spends the money that he gets from his benefactor on dressing and acting like a gentleman. He is seeing if the slipper of gentlemanliness fits him.
In conclusion I believe that Chapter 8 is an extremely important chapter in the novel as this is when Pip begins to peruse his ‘Great Expectations’. This chapter is relevant to today because it shows how bitter you can get when something bad happens to you. Don’t allow yourself to get bitter you should just get on with life. In Pips life after meeting Estella all he wants to do is become a gentleman, I believe that this is the theme of the book. Becoming a gentleman. Therefore I think that Chapter 8 is the most important chapter in the book due to the reasons given above.
