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Miss Havisham Essay

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There is a house stuck in time, becoming discolored, and slowly rotting away along with the woman that lives inside of it. This woman is Miss Havisham. In the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Miss Havisham is a character that is often brought up. She treated an innumerable amount of people so poorly she lost her humanity. Through her relations with the main character, Pip, she has developed from a character full of malice to someone who truly understands the importance of showing affection to those that have been there for her all along. Miss Havisham has played a very important role throughout this novel by embodying the theme of destruction of beauty, expressing actions based on her past, and developing the characters Pip and …show more content…

She has destroyed many people around her by stringing them along to do things they wouldn’t normally do and by manipulating them as well. One way she embodies this theme is instead of taking care of herself she destroyed her own beauty and let herself slowly fade away. Her white hair, frail body, and faded wedding dress is only part of how she destroyed her own beauty. She destroyed her beauty even more by becoming a loveless lunatic. Due to her maliciousness, a crucial bond between her and her adopted daughter Estella was destroyed. A relationship between a mother and a daughter should be loving and fun, but not when Miss Havisham is your mother. She raised Estella with no love and fully out of the rage she holds towards men which is kept deeply inside of her. This created a young woman that claimed to have no heart and a woman full of hate for everyone around her that had no room for love for anyone. Finally, her once beautiful home is now destroyed as a result of her giving up on love. As stated by Pip “ But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow.”(56). His description shows just how much Miss Havisham had let something once beautiful fade into something unsightly and

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