BENGALURU:Remember that eccentric lady in her wedding gown and her uneaten wedding cake in Great Expectations? Significant to the plot of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel, Miss Havisham was central to the plot, not just because of her pivotal role in the novel but also because of her character traits that transcended well beyond the novel, the century and even literature and inspired a fair share of imitations.
The most defining moment of Miss Havisham’s life was getting jilted by her fiance, Compeyson, that goes on to dictate her entire life and eventually results in a twist of fate that ends her life. Heartbroken and cheated, she loses her will to live a normal existence and stops all the clocks in her house to immortalise the moment, refuses to ever get out of her wedding gown and lets the wedding cake rot, as she wiles her time away in her mansion, Satis House.
She adopts Estella, who Dickens’s protagonist, Pip falls in love with and it is because of this same reason that Miss Havisham manipulates her ward’s life as a cruel vindication on her behalf from life perhaps. But Miss Havisham is fraught with guilt when Estella leaves her to marry Bentley Drummel and she realises that what she managed to do was inflict the same kind of heartbreak and pain on another innocent person that had ruined her life. She begs Pip to forgive her and right after, she is fatally injured when her dress catches fire.
My teenage self’s take on Miss Havisham was quite sympathetic. Scorned by her lover and abandoned in her wedding dress, she came across as one of those tragedies that make for a good story but a cruel reality.
Quick trivia about the character of Miss Havisham is that many think that Dickens had a little inspiration from Down Under for his historic character. Eliza Emily Donnithorne, a woman who shared a similar fate, much before the novel —jilted by her fiance, she allegedly lived in a dark house and let the wedding cake rot and always left her door ajar for the lover to return —is considered as the most probable topic of his study notes that Dickens obtained from two researchers from Sydney.
However, my preliminary perceptions were merely because I never managed to finish the novel then. Years later when I studied it in a humid classroom in college, Miss Havisham’s antics filled me with more outrage than the fact that we were called in for extra classes on Saturdays to just finish the novel! Grotesque, repulsive, manipulative and deranged were the words that I would use -- in contrary to my initial perception.
Perhaps, William Congreve’s famous description of a scorned woman (yes the hell hath no fury one) fits Miss Havisham best, especially when she persuades Pip saying: “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces—and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper—love her, love her, love her!”