needed by their households and debated matters of public concern". The
historian Catherine Hall has observed that women in the domestic sphere did
more than just sew, cook, and clean. They functioned as moral and religious
guides for their husbands. The "division between male and female worlds had
a religious connotation, for the marketplace was considered dangerously
amoral. The men who operated in that sphere could save themselves only
through constant contact with the moral world of the home, where women
acted as carriers of the pure values that could counteract the destructive
tendencies of the market". This construction, which placed women
firmly in the home and men in the marketplace, developed within the
middle-classes. Lower class families which depended on two incomes for
survival clearly could not conform to this construction. Hall argues that,
while working-class families could not operate according to the
middle-class construction of the family, they did accept many of the ideals
of middle-class domesticity. The notion that the home provided a moral
center and a place of comfort for the husband was particularly popular with
the working-class family.
As Michael Slater illustrates, Dickens subscribed to the bourgeois
construction of femininity and domesticity. He, like most Victorians,
imagined men and women as having different, yet complementary, natures. The
place where these two natures come together most "naturally" is, of course,
the bourgeois home. "This idea of virtuous womanhood as possessed of
innate, God-given powers to uplift, regenerate and redeem, which is so
ubiquitous in Dickens's writing, is inextricably bound up with his
celebrated idealization of the domestic. It is always in terms of personal
relationships, especially within a family grouping, that woman, for him as
for most Victorians, realized her full moral and spiritual potential."
(Slater 309) Great Expectations strikingly lacks female characters who fit
this womanly ideal. The only female character in the novel who comes close
to fitting this ideal is Biddy. Most other female characters are horribly
deficient at performing the duties which Victorian culture prescribes to
them. Miss Havisham, for example, raises Estella as a heartless femme
fatale, rather than as a virtuous, self-effacing "angel of the house." As
we shall see, conflict in the novel emerges when its characters do not
conform to this Victorian gender construction.
The first woman Pip describes in the novel is his dead mother. Because he
has never seen his parents, nor any likenesses of them, he imagines his
mother as "freckled and sickly". The novel thus begins with a negative
image of motherhood. Absent mothers and deficient mother substitutes are
integral to the narrative from its very beginning. The next female
character Pip introduces is his sister/mother substitute, Mrs. Joe Gargery.
He describes his sister as harsh and unapproachable, far from the loving
mother of Victorian fantasy. "She was tall and bony, and almost always wore
a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two hoops, and having
a small impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles." Mrs. Joe is clearly the opposite of the ideal Victorian woman. Pip
depicts her more as a monster than as a woman. U.C. Knoepflmacher points
out a humorous scene from Chapter Four which illustrates Mrs. Joe's lack of
a feminine identity. After Mr. Wopsle claims that "What is detestable in a
pig, is more detestable in a boy," Mr. Hubble adds, "Or a girl." Mr. Wopsle
then responds: "'Of course, or a girl, Mr. Hubble,' assented Mr. Wopsle
rather irritably, 'but there is no girl present.'" Mr. Wopsle thus
presents the Gargery household as operating without any sort of feminine
influence.
Since Mrs. Joe is the antithesis of the womanly ideal, Pip must look
elsewhere for maternal nurturing, which he finds not in another woman, but
in his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery. Throughout the novel, Dickens presents
Joe as a maternal figure in Pip's life. Like the ideal wife in Victorian
culture, Joe neglects his own comfort and well-being rather than disturb
the family setting. Joe has internalized the beatings his father gave his
mother to such an extent that he refuses to return the blows Mrs. Joe deals
to him and Pip with the Tickler.
I see so much in my poor mother, of a woman drudging and slaving
and breaking her honest hart and never getting no peace in her
mortal days, that I'm dead afeerd of going wrong in the way of
not doing what's right by a woman, and I'd fur rather of the two
go wrong the t'other way, and be a little ill-conwenienced
myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there
warn't no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all
on myself.
Dickens's depiction of Joe is like that of the self-effacing mother
who sacrifices her own well-being for the sake of her children. Joe
re-assumes his role as mother substitute towards the novel's end, when Pip
is recovering from his illness. Pip states that he "was like a child in
[Joe's] hands," and that Joe "did everything for me except the household
work, for which he had engaged a very decent woman". While Joe's role
as a mother stops at his performing strictly feminine household chores, he
still functions as a maternal figure in his caring for Pip.
What, then, are the consequences of this reversal of gender roles?
Certainly Dickens would not advocate an arrangement like the Gargery's, in
which the woman is characterized by her masculinity and the man by his
femininity. For Dickens, the only possible result of a situation in which
gender roles are confused is violence and disorder. Pip is the victim of
this gender inversion. Growing up in the Gargery household, as Carol Siegel
claims, leads Pip to internalize the belief that "it is either beat or be
beaten in marriage". Siegel characterizes Pip as a masochist, as one
who has so internalized the beatings from his sister that he comes to
identify female love with violence and pain. Thus, when it comes to
choosing a sexual-object, Pip chooses the heartless Estella over the
compassionate and loving Biddy. Although Pip recognizes that Biddy is
clearly the more suitable love-object of the two, his desire for pain
overwhelms his sense of reason. He comes to realize, when walking with
Biddy on the marshes, that "Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or
Biddy to-day and somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain,
and no pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her
own breast than mine". Despite this realization, Pip masochistic
tendencies lead him to over-value Estella and to hope that, "perhaps after
all Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune when my time was out".
Dickens's solution to the problem of women who do not act in accordance
with Victorian gender construction often involves a violent taming of them:
Mrs. Joe is beaten into submission by Orlick, Molly is tamed by Mr.
Jaggers, and Estella is beaten by her husband, Bentley Drummle. Any
deviance from gender norms on the part of women in Great Expectations is
greeted with violence. It is interesting to note that all women, whatever
their class background, are forced to submit to Dickens's bourgeois
construction of gender. Thus Dickens, like many Victorians, held up the
middle-class definition of gender as the ideal which the lower- and
upper-classes should emulate. This ideal woman, then, is one who is firmly
rooted in the home and who subordinates her own self in favor of her
husband and children.
