Miss Havisham
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Miss Havisham is a significant character in the Charles Dickens novel, Great Expectations (1861). She is a wealthy spinster who lives in her ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella.
Miss Havisham is a contradictory character in literature and in the context of her time. Unlike most unmarried women of the era, her wealth gives her tremendous power, which she uses to coax others to do her bidding and to advance her aims, yet she allows her disappointment at being jilted to ruin her life, thus giving the man who spurned her ultimate power over her. She lays waste to her estate, symbolic of herself, and tries to spread her cynicism and malaise to everyone she touches.
Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as very elderly, Dickens's own notes indicate that she is only in her mid-fifties.
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[edit] Character history
[edit] Before the timeline of the novel
Miss Havisham's mother died when she was just a baby, and her father, a wealthy brewer, spoiled her as a result. When he died, he left her most of his money.
As an adult, she fell in love with a man named Compeyson, who was only out to swindle her of her riches. Her cousin Matthew Pocket warned her to be careful, but she was too much in love to listen. At twenty-one minutes to nine on their wedding day, Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realized that he had defrauded her and she had been left at the altar.
Humiliated and heartbroken, Havisham had all the clocks stopped at the exact point in which she had learned of her betrayal. From that day on, she remained by herself in her decaying mansion, Satis House, never removing her wedding dress and only allowing a few people to see her.
Miss Havisham later had her lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, adopt a daughter for her.
- I had been shut up in these rooms a long time (I don't know how long; you know what time the clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here asleep, and I called her Estella.
[edit] From protection to revenge
While wishing Estella to never suffer as she had at the hands of a man was Miss Havisham's original goal, it changed as Estella grew older:
- Believe this: when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more. But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.
While Estella was still a child, Miss Havisham began casting about for boys who could be a testing ground for Estella's education in breaking men's hearts as vicarious revenge for Miss Havisham's pain. She tried young Herbert Pocket, a cousin, to see if Estella would "take a fancy to him." She did not, but Pip, the story's protagonist, became Estella's first "victim."
[edit] End
Miss Havisham is repentant late in the novel when she realizes that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss Havisham begs Pip for forgiveness.
- Until you spoke to [Estella] the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!
After Pip leaves, Miss Havisham's dress catches on fire from her fireplace. Pip rushes back in and saves her. However, she has suffered severe burns to the front of her torso (she is laid on her back), up to the throat. Dickens cannot be more explicit, but the implication is that this negative mother-figure, who has nurtured her adoptive daughter on bitterness, not love, has suffered wounds to her breasts. The last words she speaks in the novel are (in a delirium) to Pip, referencing both Estella and a note she, Miss Havisham, has given him with her signature: "Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her!'"
A surgeon dresses her burns, and says that they are "far from hopeless". However, despite rallying for a time, she dies a few weeks later, leaving Matthew Pocket as her chief beneficiary.
[edit] Claimed prototype
In the 1965 Penguin edition, Angus Calder notes at Chapter 8, "James Payn, a minor novelist, claimed to have given Dickens the idea for Miss Havisham - from a living original of his acquaintance. He declared that Dickens's account was 'not one whit exaggerated'."
[edit] Miss Havisham's Fire
An opera called Miss Havisham's Fire revolves around Havisham's character (her first name revealed to be Aurelia). The entire story is told in flashback during an inquiry into Miss Havisham’s death.
[edit] The Thursday Next series
Dickens's Miss Havisham is a main character in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, a current detective/mystery series aimed at high school and adult readers. The stories are set in a fantasy/alternate universe milieu in which characters borrowed from the Dickens era play a prominent role.
She is one of the leading operatives of Jurisfiction, the organisation that polices the BookWorld. She takes Thursday on as an Apprentice, and one of their first assignments together is to circumvent a plot hole in Great Expectations. It is never explained in Dickens's novel how the heavily-manacled Magwitch was able to make it to land from the prison ship where he was incarcerated. For this purpose, Miss Havisham had a custom steam-driven motor launch.
Miss Havisham has a long-running rivalry with fellow Jurisfiction operative the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, and the two engage in a constant battle of one-upmanship. They both attend a closing down sale at a bookshop that is little more than a brawl, with (largely thanks to Thursday) Miss Havisham emerging the victor, and with a broken ankle.
She is also something of a speed demon, frequently sneaking into the "real" world in order to race the fastest cars she can find, both fictional and real. Her rival in matters of landspeed attempts is Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows. It is during one of these landspeed attempts at Pendine Sands, Wales that Miss Havisham's car suffers a front wheel to fall off, the car digs into the sand and rolls and catches fire causing Miss Havisham to become badly burnt and her subsequent death to be hastily worked into the plot of Great Expectations, both of which had previously been absent from the "Nextiverse" version of the story
[edit] In film and television
In film adaptations of Great Expectations, Miss Havisham has been played by a number of distinguished actresses, including:
- Martita Hunt (1946)
- Margaret Leighton (1974)
- Joan Hickson (1981)
- Jean Simmons (who had previously played Estella in 1946 opposite Hunt) (1989)
- Anne Bancroft (1998)
- Charlotte Rampling (1999)
[edit] In popular culture
- In "Pip," a South Park episode based on Great Expectations, Mrs. Havisham is depicted similar to her novel counterpart, with the twist that she ultimately plans to fuse her soul into Estella's body in order to extend her life, and controls an army of robotic monkeys.
- Her character was an inspiration for Melanie Ravenswood in the Phantom Manor attraction at Disneyland Paris. In Melanie's case, her groom was murdered by a mysterious phantom by hanging, though she did not find out what happened to him, wandering the haunted house searching for him to her dying day.
- On The Real Ghostbusters, an elderly woman with a haunted attic goes by the name of Havisham.
- It is believed that Eliza Emily Donnithorne of Newton, New South Wales in Australia was the inspiration for Miss Havisham. [1]
- The poem Havisham, by Carol Ann Duffy is based on the character Miss Havisham.
