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beccaelizabethGreat Expectations by Charles Dickens is a 19th century realist novel. Pip is the first person homodiegetic narrator and focaliser, both the young boy experiencing the events and the man of the last chapter looking back and evaluating them. This allows a sophistication and ironic detachment in the narration, a distance and use of language that would be implausible from a young boy. While the whole story is analepsis from the point of view of the narrator, the now of the story follows the young Pip, so the narrators comments are more like proleptic hints. Rare anachronies provide background diegeticly; an account of the past starts and ends:
I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life [...] This release had befallen her some two years before [Dickens, 1860, quoted throughout]
When time changes it is clearly signposted:
Within a month, I had quitted England, and within two months I was clerk to Clarriker and Co., and within four months I assumed my first undivided responsibility.
Basically a bildungsroman, a journey to maturity, Pip growing up and trying to be a gentleman, yet with elements from many genres: crime thriller, fairytale romance and gothic horror. Different genres create different expectations. From the start it is about reading and misreading, expectations clashing with events. Pip's misreading of his life as romantic narrative, focused around Estella and Miss Havisham, is brought to his attention by the moments of gothic horror, Miss Havisham hanging from a beam, Newgate handshakes as Estella arrives. Death, imprisonment, darkness – the wedding that never happens.
This conflict shapes the ending, where what the reader wants depends greatly on their understanding of genre. In a romance Pip would win his true love, but if romance is a mistake in order to mature he must not be trapped in his childish error. The endings of Great Expectations are interesting, since they seem to deal with the mystery, crime and punishment first, then go on to fulfill the expectations of those readers who want the story to be a romance. But to read it in that way misses some of the ambiguity of the ending. Estella says that she and Pip “will continue friends apart”, and while the last paragraph has them holding hands and leaving the “ruined place” to go into “the broad expanse of tranquil light”, the very last line can be read in quite contradictory ways. “I saw the shadow of no parting from her.” That can be read as saying he sees no shadow so there will be no parting, which would make parting a shadow that disrupts tranquility. However it can also be read as “I saw the shadow”, that he saw it everywhere, so it is “no parting” that breaks the tranquility, staying with her that is dark. It manages to keep a little bit of both genres in there at once, trapped or hopeful as the reader chooses.
But either way disrupts another ending, that appropriate to aware maturity. And another relationship, that between Pip and the only one he treated generously with no expectation of acknowledgment, much less reward. Pip “lived happily with Herbert” for eleven years after he quit England, and many years before. At his lowest point Pip was a snob and a spendthrift, drawing Herbert into bad habits. His unearned expectations were morally corrosive, and tainted by criminal associations. But “the secret of Herbert's partnership” sowed the seeds of another possibility. Allowing Herbert to earn his own rewards, not repeating what was done to him, Pip's one generous act matured along with the two of them into a working partnership that allowed Pip to pay off his debts and live an adult life, with industry, reflection and enlightenment.
We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
That realisation seems a fitting ending to the bildungsroman – Pip is finally a mature member of society. By the start of the last chapter he even has a next generation to raise, a young Pip with whom he can avoid the mistakes in his own past. However, societal expectations at the time held marriage to be a main goal in life. Pip living a bachelor life with Herbert in that sense appeared to be stuck in an early or adolescent phase. But even a misty prospect of heterosexual union apparently satisfies all expectations.
Beloved by Toni Morrison is a 20th century novel, very postmodern, written from a black feminist perspective. Central characters are black women; their experience is presented as an important thing to write about. This changes the focus of most texts about the time (the end of slavery in the USA). It can be read as a kind of feminine bildungsroman - Denver and Sethe both journey towards maturity. This fits something McDowell suggested:
The Black female's journey, ... , through at times touching the political and social, is basically a personal and psychological journey. The female character in the works of Black women is in a state of becoming “part of an evolutionary spiral, moving from victimization to consciousness.” [McDowell, 1985, p195]
But the text is multivocal and multifocal – many different narrators and focalizers tell their own stories in their own way. This has the effect of disrupting any attempt to read the text as only one character's story. From the polyphony emerges a kind of shared experience, full of individual differences, the many stories of a particular group. Morrison has said she looks through the official history for the story buried underneath, then tries to tell it in their voices, not some overriding official one. Phrasing is more colloquial, drawing on traditions of oral storytelling and alternative versions of English. The various characters in Beloved each have their own voices and journeys.
Denver had the most schooling of the main characters, and values it since her much hoped for father could also read. Her clarity of language helps demonstrate this influence on her. She speaks in a relatively formal way, with long but complete and grammatical sentences.
If you can't read they can beat you. ... So it was good for me to learn how, and I did until it got quiet and all I could hear was my own breathing and one other who knocked over the milk jug while it was sitting on the table. Nobody near it.
[Morrison, 1997, p208]
Her acceptance of the household ghost is shared by most of the characters around her. But the schoolteacher who taught her to read doubts the ghost exists, so there are alternatives presented within the text. However many people take a thing for granted, it isn't necessarily true. Which reflects in interesting ways on the theme of beliefs held by white people about slaves – however common the belief they were nothing more than animals, their alternative perspectives, presented here, would strongly disagree and had their own truths.
Denver's interior monologue ends almost as Beloved's begins: “She's mine, Beloved. She's mine.” ; “I AM BELOVED and she is mine.” It is Beloved's only complete grammatical sentence. Yet it echoes and mirrors Denver's line, so the apparent clarity dissolves in the lack of separation. Omniscient narration, zero focalisation, freely changes point of view. A story might start out being told by Denver then become a flashback to Sethe's experience. Beloved does not always make it clear when such a change occurs. Time is rarely clearly marked – there is a before, after, and until, but the narrative moves between times smoothly. Long sentences flow through emotional connections in a stream of consciousness. Linear chronology is not the organising principle here, personal significance is. Past and present merge together around the edges; memories can live in more than one mind. As Beloved says:
I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too
All of it is now it is always now
[Morrison, 1997, p210]
Beloved uses only fragments, incomplete, with no punctuation between them. Fractured sentences suggest incomplete sense made by a broken mind, or a damaged person. Through much of the book the character Beloved is seen mostly through the eyes of others, their stories about her building up to a kind of patchwork picture of a person. Often contradictory, the beliefs held about Beloved show us more about those who meet her than they do about her. Yet in this section where Beloved tells her own tale we get, instead of clarity, more broken pieces. There is room to believe any of the stories so far told about her – that she is a slave girl recently escaped, or that she is the baby ghost come back. But any particular story leaves anomalies, things difficult to explain.
The stories overlap like patchwork, giving different pieces of events, times, and places; ambiguities, anachronies, and zero focalization. Every character has a voice and an opinion and a lot of different readings can be drawn from their different interpretations. Truth is then presented as subjective and multifaceted. This is characteristic of a postmodern approach, and quite unlike the single overriding 'objective' truth, typical of realism, that structures Great Expectations.
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles, (1860) Great Expectations. 1996 edition London: Penguin
Morrison, Toni, (1997) Beloved. London: Vintage
Barry, Peter, (2002) Beginning Theory. 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Genette, Gerard, (1980) Narrative Discourse. New York: Cornell University.
Pope, Rob, (2002) The English Studies Book. Great Britain: Routledge.
Short, Mick, (1996) Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose. United Kingdom: Longman
McDowell, Deborah E., (1985) 'New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism'.
in Showalter, Elaine, The New Feminist Criticism. London: Virago
McDowell quotes Washington, Mary Helen, (1980) Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers. Garden City, N.U.: Anchor Books p43
Interview with Toni Morrison, New York: 1 November 2002
Interviewer MR
In class handout photocopies, says Toni Morrison and Interview with Toni Morrison on the top, pages 10-19
Learning Outcomes Achieved:
1. Display, orally and in writing, the knowledge, skills and critical theoretical understanding necessary for advanced work in English, in particular the skills of close reading.
2. Write clear, accurate and effectively argued essays with appropriate scholarly referencing.
Comment
Very mature and academic style of writing. The analysis brings in many of the wider ideas and issues within the texts. Draws upon theoretical approaches in reading and analysis, and brings in secondary reading to support ideas.
ASPECTS FOR IMPROVEMENT
This is a very good essay. However it sometimes seems as if there is a much longer essay in here trying to get out. Because of this, your analysis was not always as closely applied to the two extracts (and the close reading element of the task) as it might have been. Nevertheless, your approach is perceptive and mature, displaying a comprehensive understanding of the texts and the wider themes, ideas and issues.
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