Unrequited Love in "Porphyria's Lover" Essay

Submitted By hashim2007
Words: 1940
Pages: 8

Portrayer of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is a novel which portrays the life of Pip, a young orphan who turns into a gentleman living in the marshes of Kent with his sister and her husband, one evening he remembers his dead parents and goes out looking at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, an escaped convict springs up from behind a tombstone, grabs Pip, and orders him to bring a file for his leg irons and food. Pip obeys with no rejection, but the frightening convict is soon captured anyway. The convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the items himself which is ironic this escaped convict is being kind in a way to pip.

One day Pip is taken to the home of Miss Havisham being call Satis house by his Uncle Pumblechook, who wears an old wedding dress everywhere she goes and keeps all the clocks in her house stopped at the same time. While he is there, he meets a young girl named Estella who he think is beautiful, but treats him coldly and unfairly. Nevertheless, he falls in love with her and dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman so that he might be worthy of her. He even hopes that Miss Havisham is intending to make him a gentleman and marry him to Estella, but his hopes are destroyed when, after months of regular visits to Satis House, Miss Havisham decides to help him become a common laborer in his family’s business, but the feelings of Estella hasn’t got any better she still treats him coldly and unfairly.

Unexpectedly, one day Mrs. Joe, is viciously attacked and becomes invalid. From her signals, Pip suspects that Orlick was responsible for the attack. One day a lawyer named Jaggers appears with strange news for pip: a secret benefactor has given Pip a large fortune, and Pip must come to London immediately to begin his education as a gentleman, at this point the reader of the novel must have a lot of ideas who that person might be. Pip happily assumes that his previous hopes have come true—that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that the old woman intends for him to marry Estella.

When pip finally reaches London, Pip befriends a young gentleman named Herbert Pocket and Jaggers’s law clerk, Wemmick. He furthers his education by studying with the tutor Matthew Pocket, Herbert’s father. Herbert himself helps Pip learn how to act like a gentleman. When Pip turns twenty-one and begins to receive an income from his fortune, he will secretly help Herbert buy his way into the business he has chosen for himself. Herbert and Pip enjoy themselves in london running up debts. Orlick shows up again in Pip’s life, employed as Miss Havisham’s porter, but is promptly fired by Jaggers after Pip reveals Orlick’s unpleasant past. Mrs. Joe dies, and Pip goes home for the funeral, feeling remorse. Several years go by, until one night a familiar figure barges into Pip’s room—the convict, Magwitch, who stuns Pip by announcing that he, not Miss Havisham, is the source of Pip’s fortune obusily by now the reader is as surprised as the thought it propaly was miss havisham and not magwitch the escaped convict.

Pip feels morally bound to help Magwitch escape London, but as the convict is pursued both by the police and by Compeyson, his former partner in crime. A mystery begins to fall into place when Pip discovers that Compeyson was the man who abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar and that Estella is Magwitch’s daughter right about now the reader is in shock from all the information dickens has depicted al at once in one scene. Miss Havisham has raised her to break men’s hearts, as revenge for the pain her own broken heart caused her. Pip was merely a boy for the young Estella to practice on; Miss Havisham amazed in Estella’s ability to toy with his affections.

As the weeks pass, Pip sees the good in Magwitch and begins to care for him deeply. Before Magwitch’s escape attempt, Estella marries an upper-class man named Bentley Drummle. Pip makes a visit to Satis House miss