| Miss Havisham |
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Miss Havisham is a pivotal character in the Charles Dickens Novel , '' Great Expectations '' ( 1861 ). Miss Havisham's mother died when she was just a baby, and her father spoiled her as a result. When he died, he left her most of his money. As an adult, she fell in love with a man named Compeyson, who was only out to swindle her of her riches. Her cousin Matthew Pocket warned her to be careful, but she was too much in love to listen. At twenty minutes to nine on their wedding day, Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realized that he had defrauded her. Humiliated and heartbroken, Havisham had all the clocks stopped at the exact point in which she had learned of her betrayal. From that day on, she remained by herself in her decaying mansion the Satis House , never removing her wedding dress and only allowing a few people to see her. Miss Havisham later had her lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, adopt a daughter for her. "I had been shut up in these rooms a long time (I don't know how long; you know what time the clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here asleep, and I called her Estella ." While helping Estella from ever suffering like she had was Miss Havisham's original goal, it changed when Estella grew older. "Believe this: when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more. But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place." Miss Havisham's and Estella's interaction with Pip , the protagonist of the story, a poor Working-class Boy called by Miss Havisham to her estate to entertain her, forms one of the central threads of the Plot . Havisham is redeemed at the end of the novel when she realizes that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss Havisham begs Pip for forgiveness. "Until you spoke to {Link without Title} the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!" After Pip leaves, Miss Havisham's dress catches on fire from her fireplace. Pip rushes back in and saves her, but she ultimately lapses into a coma. Miss Havisham is a contradictory character in Literature and in the context of her time. Unlike most unmarried women of the era, her wealth gives her tremendous power, which she uses to coax others to do her bidding and to advance her aims, yet she allows her disappointment at being jilted to ruin her life, thus giving the man who spurned her ultimate power over her. She lays waste to her estate, symbolic of herself, and tries to spread her cynicism and malaise to everyone she touches. In the 1965 Penguin edition, Angus Calder notes at Chapter 8, "James Payn, a minor novelist, claimed to have given Dickens the idea for Miss Havisham - from a living original of his acquaintance. He declared that Dickens's account was 'not one whit exaggerated'." In the Thursday Next series Dickins' Miss Havisham is also one of the main characters in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde . She is one of the leading operatives of Jurisfiction , the organisation that polices the BookWorld. She takes Thursday on as an Apprentice, and one of their first assignments together is to circumvent a plot hole in Expectations[/i . It is never explained in Dickins' novel how the heavily-manacled Magwitch was able to make it to land from the prison ship where he was incarcerated. For this purpose, Miss Havisham had a custom steam-driven motor launch. Miss Havisham has a long-running rivalry with fellow Jurisfiction operative The Red Queen from '' Alice In Wonderland '', and the two engage in a constant battle of one-upmanship. They both attend a closing down sale at a bookshop that is little more than a brawl, with (largely thanks to Thursday} Miss Havisham emerging the victor, and with a broken ankle. She is also something of a speed demon, frequently sneaking into the "real" world in order to race the fastest cars she can find, both fictional and real. Her rival in matters of landspeed attempts is Mr Toad from '' The Wind In The Willows ''. It is during one of these landspeed attempts that Miss Havisham's car suffers an engine explosion, causing her mutilation by fire and subsequent death to be hastily worked into the plot of ''Great Expectations'', both of which had previously been absent from the "Nextiverse" version of the story. |
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