Lecture 10-24 (Dickens III) PDF

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I.

Fortune

-Most disturbing scenes. Diabolical corn-chandler Pumblechook: He was waiting for me with great impatience. He had been out early with the chaise-cart, and had called at the forge and heard the news. He had prepared a collation for me in the Barnwell parlor, and he too ordered his shopman to “come out of the gangway” as my sacred person passed. “My dear friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, taking me by both hands, when he and I and the collation were alone, “I give you joy of your good fortune. Well deserved, well deserved!” This was coming to the point, and I thought it a sensible way of expressing himself. “To think,” said Mr. Pumblechook, after snorting admiration at me for some moments, “that I should have been the humble instrument of leading up to this, is a proud reward.” Pip the older narrator knows that Pip the younger is being taken in. So there is some free indirect discourse. Pip decides he had been ‘much mistaken’ and then realizes that Pumblechook is a good fellow. “Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low. But what else could be expected! what else could be expected!” As he extended his hand with a magnificently forgiving air, and as I was broken by illness and unfit to quarrel, I took it. “William,” said Mr. Pumblechook to the waiter, “put a muffin on table. And has it come to this! Has it come to this!” Eventually Pumble becomes so irritating, b/c as Pip says release the teapot – gives Pumble the opportunity. “Yes, young man,” said he, releasing the handle of the article in question, retiring a step or two from my table, and speaking for the behoof of the landlord and waiter at the door, “I will leave that teapot alone. You are right, young man. For once you are right. I forgit myself when I take such an interest in your breakfast, as to wish your frame, exhausted by the debilitating effects of prodigygality, to be stimilated by the ‘olesome nourishment of your forefathers. And yet,” said Pumblechook, turning to the landlord and waiter, and pointing me out at arm’s length, “this is him as I ever sported with in his days of happy infancy! Tell me not it cannot be; I tell you this is him!” Confessing misdeeds toward Pumblechook to Joe. “Says you, ‘Joseph, he gave me a little message, which I will now repeat. It was that, in my being brought low, he saw the finger of Providence. He knowed that finger when he saw Joseph, and he saw it plain. It pinted out this writing, Joseph. Reward of ingratitoode to his earliest benefactor, and founder of fortun’s. But that man said he did not repent of what he had done, Joseph. Not at all. It was right to do it, it was kind to do it, it was benevolent to do it, and he would do it again.’”

These scenes are disturbing because they work on our sense of injustice. Pumble not a great benefactor: he says he was always certain of Pip’s low destiny and fortune. But is this unjust of Pumblechook: does he get the moral right if he replaces himself with Joe? A story about the fruits of ingratitude? Punished with the loss of happiness he might have had. Faithful Joe and Biddy rewarded; Pip is punished w unsatisfied desire and bachelorhood. Perhaps Pip deserves a kind of taking down, and Joe won’t give it to Pip. Maybe Dickens uses Pumblechook to dress Pip down in Joe’s stead. But this isn’t a simple moral tale. Pip isn’t quite an awful soul – he’s often kind. His weaknesses are understandable. A reverse of a moral tale where bad deeds get punished and vice versa. Pip doesn’t earn his rise or earn his fall. Absurdities of Pumblechook’s attitudes remind us that Pip hasn’t changed much and neither deserves or undeserves his fate. Prodigygality as Pip’s weaknesses. Strain of Pumblechook’s rationalizing becomes evident when he talks about fortune: “Here is wine,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “Let us drink, Thanks to Fortune, and may she ever pick out her favorites with equal judgment! Idea that capricious fortune meets out justice is oxymoronic. Pip’s reward of helping convict under duress is enormously out of proportion to what he does. Not a children’s fable where reward is calibrated to action. “I don’t take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond, or so fat that he couldn’t see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a bird’s-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the neighborhood. I tell you what I should like. We are so harmonious, and you have been a blacksmith,—-would you mind it?” “I shouldn’t mind anything that you propose,” I answered, “but I don’t understand you.” “Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There’s a charming piece of music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.” Dickens is telling us what kind of story this is: Philip who gets punished according to crime. But Pip, limited control over destiny, fate is arbitrary and limited, the playthings of fortune. Herbert makes Pip Handel: (/handle) Pip is used, turned like a handle to accomplish other people’s purposes. GE is a story about pip. ‘Pip’ break through the shell of an egg like a little bird. A ‘pip’ is also a black dot on dice, appropriate for a character beholden to luck, throw of the die. Die can land so that he is crushed by the world, or on the top enjoying affluence. Magwitch requires him to retain the name Pip, to remember the result of being in the right place at the right time. Magwitch the benefactor: name ‘Abel.’ God simply chooses Abel’s offering over Cain’s for no apparent reason. The matter of fortune has an important connection with doubling. Thin of doubles not just as parallels, but as psychological projections of the original characters.

Orlick – the other person who works for Joe, structurally parallel to Pip. Pip is apprentice, Orlick just gets wages, he’s a journeyman. Not going to rise in the hierarchy. Orlick also has little affection for Mrs. Joe. If Orlick violently assaults Mrs. Joe, it is just what Pip would like to do: Pip’s repressed desires. Double plays the part that has to be disavowed. Trabb’s boy as if it comes out of Pip’s head. Even contempt and hatred for Estella and Miss Havisham the more well off verbalized in Trabb’s boy. Double as alternative lives: The optative: A mode of reflection or thinking about what could have been; how could my life has been different, had I chosen a different fork in the path. Pip could have been Trabb’s boy or Orlick. Miss Havisham lives through a double, and Magwitch lives through a double: the alternative life path. In gaining fortune and losing it again: pip gets to live alternative destinies in succession. He’s his own optative. By calling to mind alternative scenarios. Not only to think ‘ what if’ but to think about the capriciousness of fortune. Why this emphasis? Thesis: What can see most rigid and fixed in Victorian society is quite contingent and arbitrary. The class structure. A gentleman is someone who doesn’t have to work for his money. Social rank inversely correlated to how much work you do. Struggle with sense of contradiction between English work ethic: everything should be earned bourgeoisie. Vs Social system from middle ages: top of the order does nothing to earn a living. More intense conflict in GE. Miss Havisham, dead hand of laboring classes. She does nothing in a spectacular way in a home that used to be a brewery, a place of production. Used to be a person who did things, now she sits in her room all day. Mrs. Pocket: absent mother, babies endangering themselves, she just reads a book of titles. he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.

Aristocracy. Dickens never got over the fortunes he had as a boy. How do you get by without contributing productive labor to society? The criminal who takes what others in some more robust way, earn. Criminal guilt: I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs. Pip imagining himself thought of as criminal for simply having been born. Making decisions about birth / giving up the struggle early in life. Pip sense that the life of crime that may have been predicted for him might become a reality. When Mr. Wopsle reads story of George Barnwell places Pip in position of malefactor: When Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic, Pumblechook’s indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever; … Even after I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, “Take warning, boy, take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the weakness to become my benefactor. Note on 492: Barnwell is an apprentice who murders his uncle. Criminal double for Pip. Functions as a kind of projection a figure who does things Pip might like to do, embody sense of guilt or ingratitude. Layers on associations. I could not help wishing more than once that evening, that Mr. Jaggers had had an Aged in Gerrard Street, or a Stinger, or a Something, or a Somebody, to unbend his brows a little. It was an uncomfortable consideration on a twenty-first birthday, that coming of age at all seemed hardly worth while in such a guarded and suspicious world as he made of it. He was a thousand times better informed and cleverer than Wemmick, and yet I would a thousand times rather have had Wemmick to dinner. And Mr. Jaggers made not me alone intensely melancholy, because, after he was gone, Herbert said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty. -Even though Pip hasn’t committed crime, but is embedded in crime since expectations bestowed by Magwitch. In Pip’s story gentleman and criminal are mingled w Australia. No gains that come from the

exploitation of others are not ill gotten gains. Relying on other people to make your money, perhaps you are exploitative in a certain sense? A time in Britain where reformers were paying attention to the plight of the poor, calling attention to exploitation of members of the colonies. Pip makes his fortune in Egypt. Parallel between New South Wales $ and Cairo $. Criminality of fortune. Is every gentleman living on the backs of others? --What kind of story is Great Expectations? Two endings: first ending page 508. Another novelist counseled that it seemed too sad and left no hope. The older ending might seem flatter, more realistic, more true to life. Preferred by high school teacher. Mao likes second ending even better: “We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. “And will continue friends apart,” said Estella. I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her. Prose is beautiful. Gorgeously ambiguous: leaves open by a tiny bit that they will continue together even to the altar. Stronger is the idea that there will not be shadow of another parting – ie, this might be the last parting they share together. Suggests that Pip sees something at this crucial moment. Sees the ghost of a chance he’s missed out of, specter of what his life might have been like in a different universe. Vision of alternative story in which things work out in which he gains what he most desires. Fits with fairy tale quality of novel. Drummle is spider, Havisham witch and fairy godmother. Take us out of the realm of realism and into the realm of romance (ala what is not quite realistic). Magic: centering on Havisham Estella Orlick Jaggers, portentous mists. In the flatter ending, Pip is walking along Picadilly he sees Estella. But in the revised version it’s the first visit in 11 years for both, and they say a last goodbye to Satis house which will be changed into something non-magical. Old ending: we’re not going to have Miss Havishams in the new world. Mrs. Dalloway: final moment has exactly the same structure. Ends with a man who has gone to the colonies in pursuit of a livelihood confronting a woman he has always loved but can never have.

New meeting between man and woman comes in different circumstances, after a war. Does the new ending lack the magic? Or does it make us feel like this is no ordinary world, even without magic?...