Mrs Joe is possibly the least angelic person in the entire book, primarily as step by step, Dickens parallels her on every single stage with the Angel, to make her as least angelic as he can, or at least, it appears that he does. She carries with her a stick used for whacking, which Dickens ironically christens “Tickler”, which she uses to attack both Pip and Joe regularly. There is the image of the thimble, which would usually be used by a housewife similar to the one described in Patmore’s poem in order to safely knit and sew clothes, and yet Mrs Joe uses it to bash Pip on the head, which is almost the exact opposite of its original purpose. Dickens also appears to cover the ideal of women being perfect cooks, usoing the symbolism of Mrs Joe dropping nails from her top pocket into the bread dough as she is kneading it.
being housewives, they would go out an earn money for the family.
The women in Great Expectations range through the social classes from the very top to the very base, and yet all of them have severe defects and are not usually very friendly or caring at all. The most evident of these are the characters of Mrs Joe Gargery and Estella, and to a lesser extent, Molly, Jaggers’ servant. They all come from different backgrounds, and yet one deals out physical abuse to her husband and brother, one treats the main character with neglect and pretends to loathe him out of spite simply because he’s madly in love with her, and the other murdered her newborn baby, of which examples can give us quite a good idea of Dickens’ attitudes to class as it shows that there is no difference in how nice a person is just because of their status in society.
Dickens is trying to suggest that the idea that it was the social class that you were brought up in that defined your personality and character in later life was pure speculation and had no basis in truth whatsoever. It is therefore an opinion voicing not only Dickens’ personal and more subtly hidden opinions on women, but also another expression of his more widely-known opinions on the Social Class system of England in the Victorian era. Dickens had a “sense of social justice” in that he was a firm believer that the poor of the country were being treated horribly by the people further up the class system, and although he was no radical or revolutionist, he did believe that it was wrong and so voiced his opinions quite openly in his books concerning this issue. He went from working in a factory when he was twelve to a world renowned author in 30 years, and so held these beliefs firmly and was not merely passing abstract comment on these issues. Dickens’ dislike of women does stem back to his aforementioned mother, but also from his mistress, Ellen Ternan, who bore a likeness not uncanny at all to that of Estella’s. She would tease him, taunt him, ignore him, order him about, deliberately forget celebrations, never thank him or do anything which would normally have constituted as being an “angel in the house”. Added to this, when his wife Catherine Hogarth found out about this affair she filed for a divorce and received it in 1858, and although Dickens was madly in love with Miss Ternan at the time, he shared a different kind of love with his wife, and was deeply heartbroken by the turn of events.
Even though Dickens and Ternan stayed together until death, it is thought that the events over that short period of time made Dickens mistrustful of women, and so therefore all of the female characters in his books are not looked too highly upon, apart from Biddy ironically, who is a caricature of his wife. Pip even mistreats Biddy in the book not dissimilarly to how Dickens did Catherine in real life.
Because of his views on feminism, Dickens could be compared to Henry Higgins from the George Bernard Shaw play “Pygmalion”. Henry Higgins is an obsessive rich eccentric, who is infatuated with phonetics and accents. He also takes a dim view of women, also stemming back to his mother when he was a child, so the comparison is even more apt. In the play, Higgins eventually falls in love with Eliza, much in the same way that Dickens loved Ternan. Higgins shows lots of anti-feminism tendencies, such as the mistreatment of her in the beginning of the play when he calls her a “squashed cabbage leaf” while showing respect and friendliness to his male guest who is there at the same time. It is clear that Dickens shared a similar mistrust of women because he builds up so many of these nasty female characters from his books, and shows that he would have thought dimly of the kind of nice, friendly woman portrayed in Coventry Patmore’s poem.
Dickens has a tendency to base the characters in his books on real people in his life, primarily the female ones. He speaks through his characters and so they become an advocate for his own point of view, feelings, and opinions. However, it should not be assumed that each and every character is a carbon copy of the women in his life. The women in Great Expectations clearly reflect the traditional Victorian ideals of his time. This is usually seen through the negative treatment of women who did not conform to his ideals.
However, it still seems that all the women who have ever given him grief in his life are depicted as the most nasty, uncaring people on the planet with little resemblance to the woman depicted in Coventry Patmore’s poem, and yet the single women who ever shows the mildest bit of compassion in his book, i.e. Biddy, is based on the woman who, even though she may have been not the right women for Dickens as she was unexciting and dull, he still has compassion for her, and so depicted her as the perfect example of womanhood, as “the angel of the house”, which may actually mean he supported this particular view of women in the household after all.
