Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations, attempts to delve into the Victorian gender construction. Incorporated within this persona is the struggle to break away from the cycles of generations of abuse and patterns of sterility. Through the eyes of his young protagonist, Dickens arranges an immediate gender conflict through absent mothers and deficient mother substitutes as the pivotal female characters in the beginning of the novel; Pip's dead mother, and his caretaker and sister, Mrs. Joe. Later in Pip's adolescence he stumbles into a relationship with miss Havisham, Dickens' woman in white, the vehicle through which the author explores women's struggles with love, pride of nobility, and the issues instilled in them through their parents or caretakers. Miss Havisham's quest for revenge against her fiance drives her to instill within her adopted daughter Estella the incapacity to love so that she will never feel the pain of unrequited desires. Dickens produces an image of women either devoid of femininity and impotent, or love-mad and utterly absurd.

The female first described in Great Expectations is Pip's deceased mother. Havin

The next encounter that Pip has with a female proves to be the most influential in his adolescent life, carrying through into his adult imagination. He is invited to play at the notoriously rich and insane, Miss Havisham's, Statis house. Miss Havisham is posed as Dickens' characterization of the mad-love Victorian bourgeois female. As he looks upon her affected as though in a painting, he notes her jewels, her fancy gown, her trinkets and possessions scattered around the room. This is Pip's first exposure to the finer belongings of the upper classes. Miss Havisham is the incarnation of the idea that desire is the pain of consciousness. She deliberately trains her adopted daughter, Estella, to disregard emotions and to make everyone love her while she herself should love none. Thus does Estella become the medium through which Miss Havisham's unrequited desires may be avenged upon the world. This bitterness and resentfulness drives her to sustain her physical form in the closest state of decay, but always hanging to life by a thread. Though, only forty she strikes young Pip as an old woman reminding him of the following story,

g never seen his parents he imagines his mother as "freckled and sickly" (Dickens, 3). The novel thus begins with a negative image of women and motherhood. Later Pip introduces his sister and mother substitute, Mrs. Joe Gargery describing her as harsh and unapproachable, far from the mother of Victorian fantasy. In Mrs. Joe's marriage to Joe the typical male and female roles are reversed. This reversal is pointed out to the reader through her very name to which Dickens affixes the title Mrs. while Joe remains ever casual Joe. Pip's sister is aggressive, domineering, physically and mentally abusive. Pip states, "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." (Dickens, 8). Here Dickens takes an article of clothing associated with domesticity and nurture and manipulates the object transforming it into devoid of usual maternal traits. He also uses this device with Mrs. Joe's bread knife transforming it into a deadly dagger.

It is here that Dickens pursues the figurative and literal stagnation and immobility in his female characters. Miss Havisham, the love-mad woman is incapable of progressive motion, neither can she leave the Statis house nor can she allow her clocks to pass the minute that she was abandoned on her wedding day. This is the first effective instance of this paralysis of engendered women. In another case of this later in the novel, Mrs. Joe, struck down by Orlick becomes a passive, incapable, sympathetic female character. She is given the qualities of the Victorian female ideal while her freedom to move about is stripped from her. The immobility of women throughout Dickens' Great Expectations is given one exception, that of the

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Approximate Word count = 1992
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)