Great Expectations - The Role Of 'origins' In The Charles Dickens Novel

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is a nineteenth-century novel that employs realist conventions. The theme of origins, whether it is concerned with the development of plot and character, or the appreciation of a text's influences, features heavily in Great Expectations. A greater understanding of a novel is achieved through studying the genres and conventions which comprise it.

Great Expectations is essentially a realist novel although it incorporates several other genres and conventions into its vast narrative. The story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of Philip Pirrip, or Pip, who, as a young man, recounts his childhood spent in rural Kent. Although the omniscient narrator is mostly associated with the third person narrative, where they are able to enter certain character's minds and impart proceedings from their perspective, the approach Dickens has adopted allows the adult Pip to assume a degree of omniscience, albeit focalized, as he relates his childhood adventures. This is facilitated through the narrative’s dual approach, evident from the beginning, where the action cuts between the adult Pip's viewpoint, and that of the child, of which current proceedings are focalized through. It is the adult Pip who speaks, yet the child Pip who sees.

The theme of origins is prevalent throughout Great Expectations, both in the novel's storyline and form. It begins with the child Pip visiting the churchyard that houses the graves of his father, mother, and five brothers. The reader learns from the adult Pip that the story's protagonist never knew his family, but he goes on to recall how he had speculated as to their physical appearance. The theme of origins is apparent in the novel's form as well. Through the employment of this dual perspective, the reader is able to see the adult Pip's origins – what he was, and what he became. This type of autobiographical fiction is sometimes given the label Bildungsroman, or apprenticeship novel. It allows the author to feature the viewpoint of a very young character, but also to convincingly convey their story using a mature level of language.

The dual nature of Great Expectations is integral to the novel's realism. The convict Magwitch naturally appears very frightening to the child Pip. His sudden appearance and physical description allude to the Gothic genre, 'A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg' (p.4), as well as the grotesque, when the convict is limping in the direction of the gibbet that had once held a pirate 'as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again' (p.7).

Magwitch is a pivotal character in the story as he is the source of Pip's actual expectations. Miss Havisham and Estella are the origin of the protagonist's false expectations. The jilted embittered spinster is similar to Magwitch in the way that Dickens employs elaborately melodramatic conventions to depict her – descriptions even more fanciful and non-realist than those of the convict. Magwitch's presence leads onto one of the plot's major revelations, Estella's origins. It is Estella's snooty rebuff of the child Pip - 'Why, he is a common labouring-boy!' (p.59) - that instigates the protagonist's class consciousness. Unlike Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations spans a huge spectrum of society, featuring characters of many different social classes. Perhaps the novel's biggest irony is that Estella is Magwitch's daughter. She originated from the lowest class – a child of the prison hulks.

The novel highlights the importance of realizing that one's expectations may originate from misleading premises. Eventually Pip is able to re-establish his relationship with his brother-in-law, the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. This episode conforms to realist conventions as a central character's acknowledgement of their sense of morality is regarded as integral to realist fiction, as evinced in the didactic nature of Austen's novels.

Great Expectations is a novel of immense depth and variety. It continually defies any attempt at genre classification by conveying its narrative through both realist and non-realist conventions.

By: Ben H. Wright

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