The reason miss Havisham is still wearing her wedding dress is because 25 years ago when she was preparing for her wedding she received a note telling her that her fiancé had left her. After hearing this she stopped where she was with getting dressed with only one shoe on and accessories still on her dressing table and she stopped all her clocks at 20 minutes to 9 as this was the time when she found out she was ‘dumped’. She is very clearly obsessed with this as when she first talks to Pip she puts her hand on her chest and asks ‘what lies beneath’ Pip says her heart but she quickly snaps at him shouting ‘Broken!’ This shows she is obsessed about letting everyone know about her misery almost as if she gets pleasure from people knowing about her ‘pain’ Charles Dickens does this to show just how adversely affected she was by her fiancé leaving her. The buffet was left ‘decomposing and yellow’ much like miss Havisham has let herself rot and turn yellow.
In Carol Ann Duffy’s’ poem ‘Havisham’ miss Havisham is seen in a different light as it is written from her perspective and not Pips as it is in ‘Great Expectations’. It starts with miss Havisham talking about her Fiancé, she is obviously angry about this as she calls him ‘beloved sweetheart bastard’ then she says ‘not a day since then I haven’t wished him dead’ This shows just how angry she is about being ‘dumped.’
In ‘Havisham’ Carol Ann Duffy makes miss Havisham seem less than human in many ways, first of all she degrades her by not giving her a proper title, just ‘Havisham’ not ‘Miss Havisham’ just ‘Havisham’ this makes her seem in an under class, then she says that she spent ‘whole days cawing nooooo’ this makes her seem like a crow as a crow caws, also the crow is an ugly bird so this makes miss Havisham seem even worse.
In both ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Havisham’ miss Havisham is shown as an evil old woman, however her appearance is described more shockingly in ‘Great Expectations’ as miss Havisham is described through the eyes of a small child, Pip. In ‘Havisham’ she is described through her own eyes, also her description in ‘Great Expectations’ was of her appearance, ‘her white hair, the yellowing dress e.t.c’ and in ‘Havisham’ it is more so her feelings and not so much to do with her appearance.
‘Great Expectations’ was wrote in a time when gothic novels were very popular, for example Bram Stocker’s ‘Dracula’ or ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelly, also ‘The Castle of Otranto’ by Mrs Radcliffe, as a result of this Mrs Havisham is portrayed in a very gothic way, as when Pip first sees her he compares her to a waxwork, ‘see was very similar to a waxwork I remember having once seen that quite scared me’ also because ‘Great Expectations’ was written a lot earlier than ‘Havisham’ so Charles Dickens will have been a lot more restricted with the language he could use. You can see this as in ‘Havisham’ Carol Ann Duffy describes miss Havisham making love to her fiancé then biting off his manhood, Charles Dickens would never had dreamed of putting that in his novel so it shows that the two pieces of writing are different not just because of the authors styles or format but also because of the social and historical context.
