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Ethan Villarreal
Ms.Roitz
Pre­Ib LA 9
12/10/14

Pip’s Life: How the House Changes Him
Great Expectations is a wonderful novel written by Charles Dickens that has many symbolic settings. Such as, the Marshes symbolize uncertainty, or how Jaggers office is so gloomy and sad, or how his childhood house showed him how much he didn't like his childhood.
The most important of these settings is the Satis house. It shows how Pip sees the upper class in the beginning, and how the upper class changed his life forever.
In the beginning of the story Pip walks to the Satis house with his Uncle Joe. He tells the story of the first time he sees Miss Havisham's house,
"
Which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred...
I peeped in... and saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. (55)." This shows how detailed the description was of the house. Everytime Dickens does this it is an important part of the novel. Then, the very first time Pip gets invited into the house he sees a beautiful girl named Estella who, who
"was very pretty and seemed very proud(56)”. He learns very quickly that she doesn't feel the same way about him. As he’s not quite cut out for the lifestyle of the upper class. For example, when Estella made fun of him saying,
"He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!(60 )" Later, she says his hands are too big and his boots look funny.Every opportunity

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Estella gets she demeans Pip. Although, once in a while she flirts with him. Pip still doesn't know how he feels about her and takes this differently than most people. Instead of being
887embarrassed about it he was really angry that he wasn't more like them and
"wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up.(62)"
When Pip leaves the Satis house to go to London and become a gentleman with his new fortune, he still returned multiple times to visit Estella. Pip feels like his newly given wealth made him a proper gentleman in and outside the Satis house.When he revisits he recalls, “I had gone up the staircase in the dark many a time. I ascend it now, in lighter boots than of yore.”(234) Estella and Miss Havisham treat Pip the same way they did when he was an apprentice living at the gritty, grimey, and noisy forge. Pip is really disappointed because he thought since he gained his newfound wealth they would respect him. But, they treated him as the same boy that called knaves jacks. He had only returned to gain Estella’s heart with this wealth, but he was still turned away by her. Hence, he had not lived up to one of his own Great
Expectations. This is Pip’s final visit to the Satis house (well at least the house part) . His true feelings are, “It would have been so much better for me never to have entered, never to have
seen”(358).