Vanity and Virginity: Mrs. Wickham versus Miss Havisham
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Prose Assignment
Vanity and Virginity: Mrs. Wickham versus Miss Havisham
If Lydia Wickham had known of the existence of 'Pride And Prejudice', she would have wanted to be the star. She is self-centered ('seldom listened to anyone for more than half a minute'), boisterous ('laughing and talking with more violence than ever') and foolish ('she has no money, no connections, nothing that can tempt him to...she is lost for ever'). Her elopement is, as she knows, unacceptable and unless she is extremely shortsighted she should be able to see that there is no hope for a respectable marriage at the end of it.
Miss Havisham, when she was Lydia's age, had the world at her feet. She was young, beautiful, accomplished and rich (in Herbert Pocket's words,'Miss Havisham was now a heiress, and you may suppose was looked after as a great match'). She could have had any man she wanted but she chose the one who would break her heart ('he practiced on her affections in a systematic way, that he got great sums of money out of her'). And she knows this. Because of her mistake she is bitter and she has 'set out to wreak revenge on the whole of mankind'.
Victorian England was nowhere near as cosmopolitan as it is now. The main religion now is Christianity; then it was the only acceptable one. Children of all classes were raised as churchgoers and people felt the need to be seen to be religious; perhaps they also needed this belief for everything science had not yet explained.
Alongside religion came thickset moral values. Morality is hard to define; I will call it a set of unwritten rules made and followed by society. One of these rules was against sex before marriage, and Miss Havisham to the end of her life is presumably still a virgin due to that rule. However, Lydia broke this rule and lived with a man before even talking about the ceremony, which was seen as scandalous! Lydia was branded as unclean and disgraceful ('the humiliation, the misery, she was bringing on them all') although Wickham did not share the blame. He was looked on slightly less favourably than before, however he was not seen as shameful or dishonorable. In a way I find it ironic how Miss Havisham was cheated out of sex and Lydia was cheated out of love.
In a way, Victorian women were expected to act like female birds: look pretty, attract a mate, reproduce, stay at home and look after the offspring. They were not expected to be great thinkers or to have a career. A woman's way of making money was to marry a man with it. Image was extremely important at every stage of the game.
However these rules were somehow twisted in the cases of both Miss Havisham and Lydia Bennet. Miss Havisham was already rich due to the fortune from her father's brewery, therefore not only did she not ...
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In a way, Victorian women were expected to act like female birds: look pretty, attract a mate, reproduce, stay at home and look after the offspring. They were not expected to be great thinkers or to have a career. A woman's way of making money was to marry a man with it. Image was extremely important at every stage of the game.
However these rules were somehow twisted in the cases of both Miss Havisham and Lydia Bennet. Miss Havisham was already rich due to the fortune from her father's brewery, therefore not only did she not have to marry for money, she did not have to marry at all. Lydia, on the other hand, was not financially secure; her parents were moderately well off but they had a large and somewhat extravagant family to provide for. She marries a soldier, and by the end of the book they are already reduced almost to begging ('Wickham would like a place at court very much, and I do not think we shall have quite enough money to live on without some help' - this is one of her more subtle statements!)
Are both these books then a lesson in how to marry successfully? To answer I think we must take a look at why they were written.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was disgusted with the fickleness of his society. His main aim in writing was to pull back the glossy veneer of glamour, wealth and beauty and expose the gritty reality of poverty, cruelty and two-facedness that pervaded Victorian high-class life. Most of his novels reflect this cynicism, for instance Oliver Twist with its dirt and its prostitution, and Nicholas Nickleby with its personal hardship. Great Expectations is perhaps his most complicated and demanding novel, as it has several plots running at once; all of them worthy of a book themselves!
One of the most original of these plots is that of Miss Havisham; the eccentric bitter old lady. Dickens seems to want to warn the reader against living in the past; his warning could be against trust, but how can anyone be happy without trust?
'Over and over again we would make these journeys'
Is this mere weariness on Pip's part or is it a deeper statement from Dickens? The repetition is resonant of Miss Havisham's thoughts, which are always centred round her happy time.
Another theme in Great Expectations is the glorification of people with money; this is also a major issue in Pride and Prejudice. Miss Havisham has had her fair share of it ('Miss Havisham was a spoilt child') and is now pestered with fawning and jealous relations - Pip 'found Sarah Pocket: who appeared to have become constitutionally green and yellow' by reason of him. Dickens makes us laugh at these people, but they also awaken something in our own conscience. Pip himself has his head turned by the wish for money; he lives extravagantly and lazily and tries to be a 'gentleman'. What is a gentleman anyway? Pip says to Biddy 'I want to be a gentleman' meaning that he wants to make money. When he does he becomes a snob and forgets his old friends and the forge, making us think that they who are not blinded by worldly ideas were the true gentlepersons. Pip's betrayal of Joe can actually all be blamed on his connection with Satis house as the first time he leaves to go there he says 'I had never parted with him before', later he is ashamed of Joe and later still when Estella says 'what was fit company for you once would be very unfit company for you now' it rids him of 'any lingering intention' he had left of going to see Joe.
However, Dickens is not trying to give people with money a bad name. He shows several instances where money is put to good use; for instance Magwitch's work for Pip, the payment of Pip's apprentice fees and the buying of Herbert's partnership. This shows that he was not entirely cynical about riches in society: perhaps he felt the same about love?
Jane Austen lived a little earlier than Dickens (born in 1775, died in 1817) at a time when the novel was not an entirely respected form of work. Another obstacle in her way was her being a woman; she had to publish her books anonymously or they would not have been successful. Austen was not quite as cynical as Dickens; her books were not aimed at the conscience and she wrote to entertain her audiences. Often her work was based on her own experiences and she did not write very much about the problems of unsuccessful people,only the minor events in a rich and bored person's life.
That said, Austen's work is beautifully written and is a wealth of information. We may laugh at Elizabeth's 'with Wickham! So imprudent a match on both sides!', her panic and her exclamations; but in her worry we can deduce how sinful this act really was. Mrs. Bennet's scheming ('" You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them"...the business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.') at the start of the story shows how disadvantaged the Bennets were without any sons to carry on the family estate; was this the case in many Victorian households?
Austen strikes me as a rather optimistic person; like Lizzy, she is 'witty and vivacious' and has a 'lively, playful disposition, which delights in anything ridiculous'. She pokes fun at haughty, stiff snobs like Lady Catherine deBourgh and Mr. Collins, and laughs at the fussy attention-seeking figure of Mrs. Bennet. At first glance the novel seems, as Charlotte Bronte said, 'an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck' however if one looks closely there is a hint of mischief in the 'commonplace face' and a gust of wind in the 'carefully fenced garden'.
This is partly because the story is seen through Elizabeth's eyes. She is a willful young lady and is not willing to be pulled into the constraints of society. In fact, she teaches Georgiana Darcy who is somewhat her better that 'a woman may take liberties with her husband'. We see Lydia through her scornful/anxious eyes and this influences how we feel about her. If the novel was narrated by Mrs. Bennet, it would be constant praise of Lydia ('Lizzy is not half so good natured as Lydia...Lydia, my love, though you are the youngest, I daresay Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next ball') but as it is, we are influenced by only Lizzy's opinions (' irritable.. ignorant.. insipid...disadvantage of Lydia's society').
The optimistic angle to Lydia's elopement is the happiness it brings to Darcy and Elizabeth, for if Lizzy had not heard of Darcy's part in the affair, they would surely not have fallen in love. This shows Austen's ironic sense of humor and her optimism; however I could be a pessimist and point out how they are profiting from someone else's suffering... which brings us nicely to my next point.
Miss Havisham is seen through Pip's eyes, with awe - first fear, then respect. As a boy he is scared of money, and we can see this in the instance of the fight with the pale young gentleman, when Pip's social conscience tells him 'that village boys could not go stalking into the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolk and pitching into the studious youth of England, without laying themselves open to some severe punishment.' She is very influential in his life especially as she leads him on to believe she has planned something for him, but of course none could be as influential as Estella.
Pip is infatuated with Estella at first, but the first sign of this turning into love is when he pleads with her not to marry Drummle; does he know how badly she will be treated?
'I had heard of her leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality and meanness'.
This does not go to say that all Victorian women were treated badly, or that all people with money were snobs. I think that the main thing we learn from this essay is the importance of balance. Balance between luxury and drudgery, between love and hate and between naiviety and mistrust.
