Who is miss havisham

Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could. Great Expectations , which creepily begins in a foggy cemetery, is a novel all about ghouls and monsters. She sees herself as a monster, too. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.

Miss Havisham is a bitter recluse who has shut herself away since being jilted on her wedding day. She never leaves the house and has stopped all the clocks so that she is unaware of time passing. She always wears her wedding clothes and has left the prepared wedding feast to decay in one of her rooms. As a result of her experiences, Miss Havisham hates humanity, particularly, men. Miss Havisham invites the young Pip to the house so that Estella can practice on him. He mistakenly believes that Miss Havisham wishes them to have a future together and he also thinks she is his mystery benefactor.

Although she eventually regrets what she has done and her character starts to change, it is too late. In a tragic accident, Miss Havisham is horribly burned when her wedding dress catches fire and she dies shortly afterwards. Miss Havisham is clearly suffering from psychological damage so the reader does not condemn her completely.

She is one of the mother figures in the novel. Dickens had an erratic relationship with his own mother and this is perhaps reflected in the relationship between Pip and Miss Havisham. From that day on, she remained locked in the huge house in decay huge decaying house, never removing the wedding gown, leaving intact to rot on the table a wedding cake, and allowing only a small circle of people to see her.

Later Miss Havisham adopted an orphan girl, Estella. While Estella was still a child, Miss Havisham began looking for boys with whom she could practice at breaking their hearts. In this way, using Estella, Miss Havisham wanted to avenge the wrong suffered, by wounding the feelings of men. Miss Havisham reappears at the end of the book when Estella is about to marry Pip's rival, the obnoxious Drummle Bentley, and realizes that she has broken the heart of Pip in the same manner in which years earlier hers had been broken.

With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded vengeance pursued destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer greatly because of her quest for revenge.

Miss Havisham is completely unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella.