Duffy obviously takes the figure of Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations. But the question then is: why? to what effect? what, in this pre-existing figure, presents itself as an opportunity for the writer? how is Duffy's figure different fro...

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Duffy obviously takes the figure of Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations.  But the question then is: why? to what effect? what, in this pre-existing figure, presents itself as an opportunity for the writer? how is Duffy's figure different from Dickens's?One simple thing: The title is Havisham, rather than Miss Havisham - which is how the character is always referred to throughout Great Expectations.  Why, to what effect?Perhaps Miss defines the character socially - whereas the poem concentrates on the nature of the character's individual feelings - the character's psychological/sexual nature, rather than her social being.  The absence of the formal title also makes the 'feel' of the poem blunter, more simply there, perhaps.  Duffy's poem gives Miss Havisham a body, a knot of desires which Dickens does not attempt.beloved sweetheart bastardThe poem begins as if addressed to the jilting bridegroom.  It doesn't continue in this direct address - by the end of the poem the male figure will have become a male corpse - any male (generalised), and radically rendered into an object (no
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longer even alive).The most striking thing about the first sentence is the combination of 'love' (beloved sweetheart) and hatred (bastard).  Dickens's character is motivated by revenge alone - against the male sex in general.  Duffy is interested in the unstable combination of desire and hatred; Havisham's desire - her sexual being - is not simply cancelled out by the unreliability of the bridegroom: it continues, as Havisham's body must continue - in an uncertain, knotted compound.  This is what I take to be central to the poem and Duffy's treatment of the pre-existing character: Duffy gives the character a body, ...

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