Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011
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The Relationship between Selfhood and Otherness in Great Expectations: A Lacanian Reading
By
Islamic Azad University, Rasht Branch
1. Introduction
Great Expectations is the story of Pip and his initial dreams and resulting disappointments that eventually led to his becoming a genuinely good man. Dickens uses Pip’s transformation from an innocent boy into an arrogant gentleman and his redemption as a good-natured person to illustrate the idea that unrealistic hopes and expectations can lead to undesirable traits. Great Expectations reflects the cultural and social complexities in childhood. Pip is Dickens’s most complicated hero, demonstrating at once the traits of criminal and gull, of the victimizer and victim. He is victimized by his dream, and the dream itself, because its profoundly anti-social and unethical nature, forces him into a relation with a world in which other human beings fall victim to his drive for power.
For Lacan, human beings are not originally possessed of unified selves at all. Entirely dependent upon their parents for food and warmth, human infants are initially largely passive (Booker, 1996: 36). Jean-Michel Rabaté states that "The child’s experience is just a fluid and formless currency of drives and sensations, without there being any consciousness of a centre of Self to feel them" (2001: 60).
Also for Lacan, it is the awareness of abstract relationships of this kind which allows the child to enter into "full social being" - but "this full social being is founded on repression, the deferral of pleasure, and therefore the division of the Self" (2001: 60). The paradox of Lacan’s thought is that full social being must always be founded on some fundamental lack or alienation (2001: 12).
The opening paragraphs of Great Expectations seem to present the kind of transition Lacan describes. Lacan believes that Mirror-stage which roughly corresponds to Freudian Oedipal phase, happens at the imaginary phase (The child sees itself in the mirror and understands that it is an image of itself). However, it is an image, just an idea of the Self not the Self itself. It is the other, (ideal ego). Lacan also uses an idea of Other to distinguish between the concept of the Other and actual others. The concepts of Other roughly corresponds to culture, cultural rules and Laws. Observing this mirror image permits human beings to perceive images that have discrete boundaries, allowing them to become aware of themselves as independent beings who are separate from their mothers (Conner, 1985: 113-114).
Since Pip has a direct and spontaneous relationship with language itself, he ignores the social frames from which it comes, 'capturing' his own name from Others and, in an act of Self-naming, transforming it into the simple (and Self-mirroring) signifier, 'Pip':
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister - Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. (Dickens, 1996: 3)
The novel starts with a name, Pip. From its very first paragraph, Great Expectations says, in the voice of its narrator that pronounces everything, he could not pronounce his own first name, Philip, or his last name, Pirrip. Both in his mouth became simply Pip, and they have occurred to him in the mouth of Others.
Arguing the shape of the words on the tombstone and its influence on Pip, Steven Conner declares that Pip, deprived of the sight of his parents, finds a likeness for them in the writing on their tombstone, his inability to understand the meaning of the words encouraging a fixation upon the shape and color of the words on the tombstone and indeed the shape of the tombstone itself (1985: 114-115).
The boy who interprets his parent’s nature from the shape of the letters on their tomb has to learn to read better, simply to understand what he has lost. The next paragraph seems to mark the abrupt arrival of consciousness of Self:
My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; … and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea ; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. (Dickens, 1996: 3)
The narrative here suddenly fixes itself at a particular moment in time, "its tense moving from the generalizing 'iterative' into the temporally particular 'singulative'" (Conner, 1985: 115). Pip has for the first time become able to separate himself from the things outside him, and to perceive the separation of those things from Others.
Pip, though perhaps aware that 'Philip Pirrip' is the name that he shares with his father, is able to detach himself from the name and to recognize that it is his father and not he who is 'dead and buried'. Suddenly in the graveyard Magwitch appears as a terrible and unidentifiable voice, "hold your noise!" (Dickens, 1996: 3).
2. The Process of Pip’s Identification with Magwitch (Other)
Lacan argues that the infant must separate himself from its mother and form a separate identity, in order to enter into civilization. That separation entails some kind of loss; when the child knows the difference between itself and its mother, and starts to become an individual being, it loses that primal sense of unity that it originally had. This is the element of the tragic built into psychoanalytic theory (whether Freudian or Lacanian): to become a civilized 'adult' always entails the profound loss of an original unity, a non-differentiation, a merging with Others (particularly the mother) (Bressler, 2007: 153-154). In this section, the process of Pip’s identification with Magwitch (Other) is studied.
Regarding the parents and society and the influence of them on Magwitch and Pip, Dennis Walder elaborates that:
In Great Expectations the private crime against the child is Mrs. Joe’s and Pumblechook’s and Wopsle’s, all 'foster parents' either by necessity or Self-conceit: while the social crime is the public treatment of Magwitch. That the two kinds of crime are inherent in each other we are made aware of as we are led to identify Magwitch’s childhood with Pip’s; the brutality exercised toward both children was the same brutality, though the 'parents' in the one case were private persons, and in the other, society itself. (1995: 250)
The identification of Magwitch with the figure of a vengeful father in Pip’s mind seems to be made clear enough by the fact that Magwitch springs up "from among the graves" (Dickens, 1996: 3). The horror of Magwitch which Pip had as a child in the churchyard and during the fight with Compeyson in the ditch on the marshes would have stayed with him for life; he had indelible memories of terror linked to Magwitch. In Dickens’s David Copperfield, there is a similar experience. The young David Copperfield suffers from the similar apprehension that his father will rise up from his grave in the garden.
Humphry House in his article "G. B. S on Great Expectations" comments on the issue:
Pip was to be Magwitch’s means of Self-expression, just as Estella was to be Miss Havisham’s; they each wanted to use a child to redress the balance of a world gone wrong, to do vicariously what they had failed to do direct. In the Temple Magwitch is not really concerned much about the grateful return for Pip’s help on the marshes; he is concerned to view assess, appraise the 'dear boy' as his own creation. (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 646)
Thus, emotionally as well as socially and financially, Pip appears as 'help-less'. He directs nothing; things happen to him; everybody except Joe and Biddy uses him for purposes of their own.
For Lacan, the coming to awareness of the symbolic order involves an unconscious awareness of the prohibition implicitly contained in the father’s name and the No-of-the-Father. Lacan believes that symbolic order or the realm of the Father includes Otherness and Lack. The position of other/Other (Otherness) entails a Lack that in turn entails a desire, desire to be the center of the symbolic order, the center of language. The Father (not the real father) comes to represent cultural rules and Laws in symbolic order (Rabaté, 2001: 12). In the case of Magwitch, Pip’s surrogate father, the name 'Magwitch' remains hidden for the most of the narrative even though Magwitch causes Pip to lose his name − Pip of course becomes 'Handel' in his new role as a gentleman.
Pip identifies himself with Magwitch. By the sudden incursion of Otherness and violence into his life, Pip is forced into crime and deceit and yet finds a sort of compensation in thinking of himself, in a sense, just like Magwitch. In other words, Pip masters this Otherness by a kind of specular capture, coming more and more to identify himself as a convict: "While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, ‘What’s a convict?’ Joe put his mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I could make out nothing of it but the single word ‘Pip’" (Dickens, 1996: 11).
When Pip asks what a convict is, the only word Pip understands of Joe's explanation is 'Pip'. Reinforcing Pip's identification of himself as a criminal, his sister says criminals who murder and rob (which Pip intends to do) always start by asking questions (which Pip has been doing). A little later he thinks he has somehow murdered Pumblechook with the doctored brandy. When he runs into the sergeant, he thinks the handcuffs are for him.
At this point Pip seems to be beginning a kind of transfer of personality. Steven Conner writes: "Pip’s identification is affected through a fixation upon the most striking thing about the convict’s appearance"(1985: 119), the fact that he wears an iron on his leg. Magwitch looks "as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in" (Dickens, 1996: 6).
There is a shift in Pip’s feeling toward Magwitch. In the last chapters Pip loves Magwitch. Christopher Ricks in his article which is about the relationship between Magwitch and Pip writes: "Pip’s refusal to take any more money from Magwitch is plainly right. One should not take money from someone whom one finds repugnant. And by the time that Pip loves Magwitch, the convict’s fortune has been forfeited to the Crown"(qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 672). He adds that,
It was easy enough for Dickens to make convincing Pip’s early shrinking from the money; the latter attitude needed to be more delicately handled. What happens is not a grand renunciation of the money, but a firm resignation to losing it; the firmness makes Pip admirable, the resignation instead of renunciation makes him plausible (1999: 672).
Pip has probably one of the guiltiest consciences in literature. For example, when Pip had stolen food for Magwitch, he thinks that he is like a convict. In taking food to the convict, Pip is stealing, and he certainly knows that stealing is a crime. He not only suffers for his sin of snobbish ingratitude toward Joe and Biddy, but also suffers throughout much of the novel from what can only be called a conviction of criminal guilt.
Readers are disinclined to pursue vengefully a sinner who gets so little pleasure out of his sin; remorse at his ingratitude to Joe, fear and insecurity about his great expectations, and hopeless yearning for Estella, all combine to make him unhappy with his conditions. Pip’s feeling of guilt can be compared to Dostoievsky, with reservation but without absurdity (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 669-670).
In rejecting Joe, Pip of course is rejecting unconditional love, as well as selflessness, honesty, faithfulness, and compassion. As a gentleman with expectations, Pip does not entirely lose these qualities; however, they are expressed mainly in his relationship with Herbert. In embracing his great expectations, he replaces Joe as a guardian with Mr. Jaggers. Joe, the man of love, sees hidden under the surface the real nature of people and things; he cuts short Pip's dilemma with the moral truth that "lies is lies" (Dickens, 1996: 57). Jaggers, the man of facts, looks at the surface and is guided by the evidence, not feelings (during the conversation in which Jaggers confirms that Magwitch is Pip's benefactor, Jaggers insists on the evidence that Magwitch is in New South Wales, though he knows Magwitch is in London) (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 671).
Steven Conner argues that the striking thing about these insistent associations is their indirectness. Pip constructs his imaginary identification with Magwitch by a number of associations arising from the leg-iron, which is to say that "a metaphorical relationship is displaced into unconscious metonymies" (1985: 120).
The leg-iron is of course a metonymy in itself, standing for Magwitch by synecdoche, but it begins to move on into other metonymies − the bread and butter, the table-leg, and the handcuffs. When Magwitch sends his fellow-convict to the village to pay Pip back, he will use a file to identify himself and to remind Pip of the secret relationship between them. The file is of course associated with the leg-iron, but in an interestingly ambiguous way, for in one obvious sense the file is the exact opposite of the iron, being the means used to free Magwitch from it. So Pip’s anxious identification with Magwitch not only fixes upon the leg-iron but on metonymic displacements of it.
Pip initially seems terrified by threatening presence of the leg-iron, as though it were an object of power in itself and, of course, later on in the novel the leg-iron actually becomes a weapon, when Orlick uses it to strike down Mrs. Joe. But it is also a burden and, at the same time, a secret, something that can be lost.
The leg-iron is, for Pip, metaphorically speaking a penis. The leg-iron has become a variable sign, which encompasses different significations of power and mutilation, possession and loss. It would be better, therefore, to see the leg-iron as signifying not a penis but a phallus; the phallus is differentiated from the physical penis in Lacan’s writing, because it is not the physical organ itself, but the idea or sign of the organ, which can therefore encompass variable and opposite significations of presence and absence and possession and lack (Conner, 1985: 121).
The Law-of-the-Father is another term for the Other, for the center of the system, the thing that governs the whole structure, its shape and how all the elements in the system can move and form relationships. This center is also called the phallus, to underline even more the patriarchal nature of the symbolic order. The phallus, as center, limits the play of elements, and gives stability to the whole structure. The phallus anchors the chains of signifiers which, in the unconscious, are just floating and unfixed, always sliding and shifting (Rabaté, 2001: 12).
The phallus is not the same as the penis. Penises belong to individuals; the phallus belongs to the structure of language itself. No one has it, just like no one governs language or rules language. The phallus is the center. It governs the whole structure, it is what everyone wants to be (or have), but no one can get (no element of the system can take the place of the center). That is what Lacan calls Desire, the desire, which is never satisfied, because it can never be the center, rule the system or be satisfied (Bressler, 2007: 154).
Lacan says that boys can think they have a shot at being the phallus, at occupying the position of the center, because they have penises. Girls have a harder time misperceiving themselves as having a shot at the phallus because they are constituted by and as lack, lacking a penis, and the phallus is a place where there is no lack. But, every subject in language is constituted by/as lack. The only reason we have language at all is because of the loss, or lack, of the union with the maternal body. In fact, it is the necessity to become part of 'culture', to become subjects in language, that forces that absence, loss, lack (qtd. in Bressler, 2007: 154-5).
Pip’s Self is split by conflicting, irreconcilable responsibilities, the responsibility to his family (Other) and to the law (Other) and the repressed responsibility to Magwitch. There will be no private life which is not traversed and inhabited by Law and public life in the form of conscience. In other words, "the coming to awareness of himself as a full being involves taking on a loss of Selfhood for Pip" (Conner,1985: 122); in order to become a full social being, he needs to repudiate Magwitch, even though "it is precisely this repudiation which divides him from himself", marking out an area of repressed desire and knowledge which will return periodically to haunt him (1985: 122).
Pip’s anxiety that he will lose the bread and butter seems associated with the fear that he will lose his organs to the violent young man who "has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver" (Dickens, 1996: 5). Pip does not know exactly where his heart and liver are but understands clearly the threat of mutilation, which seems also to involve a castration threat:
Jaggers did not conceal from me that although there might be many cases in which the forfeiture would not be exacted, there were no circumstances in this case to make it one of them. I understood that, very well. I was not related to the outlaw, or connected with him by any recognizable tie; he had put his hand to no writing or settlement in my favour before his apprehension, and to do so now would be idle. I had no claim, and I finally resolved, and ever afterwards abided by the resolution, that my heart should never be sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish one. (Dickens, 1996: 362)
'I finally resolved…': These are the words not of a plaster saint, but of a decent man (Pip) who manages not to repine. But of all Pip’s good deeds it is his loyal love toward Magwitch which most matters. It more than counterbalances his ingratitude to Joe and Biddy, partly for the good reason that Pip’s love toward Magwitch is very strongly felt, partly for the bad reason that Joe and Biddy, due to all their naiveté and extreme innocence, remain characters sadly insubstantial compared with Magwitch. Christopher Ricks states: "The fact that, when Magwitch first returns, Pip feels nothing but repugnance for him, is not only the most powerful reason why his final love is so moving, but also the most powerful reason why it is so convincing. It is likely enough that Pip would shrink from Magwitch" (1996: 672).
3. Mrs. Joe: Family as the Other
Readers meet Mrs. Joe Gargery (as the Other) early in the story. She is Pip’s sister, twenty years older than he. Mrs. Joe’s harsh, dominating, bullying temperament is made known to readers at the very outset. She wields a cane to which she has given the name 'Tickler', and she has often been using this cane to punish Pip. She has a very sharp tongue too. Her treatment of both Pip, the boy and, Joe, her husband, is equally callous and dictatorial. There is absolutely no touch of maternal or sisterly affection in her attitude towards Pip, and not the least touch of wifely affection in her treatment of Joe.
Mrs. Joe represents a well known type of woman, namely the shrew, the housewife who thinks herself to be indispensable to the household and who is constantly nagging at her husband and making too much fuss about little things. Her quarrelsome and scolding nature, which largely determines her behaviour towards Joe and Pip, is depicted in a comic light. Indeed, she is one of the foremost comic characters in the novel and provides a lot of (unconscious) humour by the way she behaves in various situations and on various occasions (Lall, 1997: 128).
The contrast between the ill-temper and meddle-some nature of Mrs. Gargery and the gentleness and non-interfering temperament of Joe is most striking. Joe is surely unlucky in being married to such a woman. However, readers must recognize the important fact that she did bring up Pip who became an orphan in his early childhood and who had no other relative to look to his upbringing. Her part in the plot of the novel is slight, but it is basic. In addition to having brought up Pip, she also unconsciously contributes a little to Orlick’s motives for revenge against Pip, apart from provoking an attack upon herself. After Orlick has caught Pip in a noose in the sluice-house, he says that one of his reasons for his hostility to Pip is that Pip’s 'shrew sister' favoured Pip while she ill-treated Orlick.
Michal Peled Ginsburg in his article "Dickens and Uncanny: Repression and Displacement in Great Expectations" states that, "Mrs. Joe does not show much motherly feeling toward Pip; she is described throughout the novel as a violent and domineering figure who inspires only fear: both to Pip and to childlike Joe" (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 700).
Mrs. Joe appears as "all powerful" (Dickens, 1996: 7). She is never called by her first name – a naming which would have defined her as a woman – but is always referred to by way of a masculine name – Mrs. Joe. Readers should see that an attempt was made to represent Pip’s sister as occupying the place of the father rather than that of a mother.
As the two figures of the father − Magwitch and Mrs. Joe − inspire the same feelings – fear and guilt – it is this parallelism between them which explains the fact that Pip, against all reasons, sees Magwitch’s second appearance as the return of the dead Mrs. Joe. "What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on" (Dickens, 1996: 254).
4. The Contrast between Miss Havisham and Magwitch (Others)
The opposition between Miss Havisham and Magwitch (Others) is one which underlies the novels of Dickens in general. The world of Miss Havisham is for Pip the world of fairy tales and fantasy as opposed to reality. Enclosed within a wall, unknown to the world at large, with its clocks all stopped and its windows and doors locked, the world of Satis House appears to Pip as strange, and Miss Havisham, its mistress and emblem, is "the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see" (Dickens, 1996: 46).
The fact that Miss Havisham is "perfectly incomprehensible" to Pip (Dickens, 1996: 53) means that he cannot interpret her actions according to the laws of reality which govern his own world. Hence Miss Havisham is the 'fairy godmother' who, for no particular reason, will endow Pip with all that his heart desires. Pip himself is the prince, who would
restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin- in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any attributes save those she possessed. (Dickens, 1996: 187)
The world of Magwitch, on the other hand, is the world of what in the nineteenth-century novel was regarded as 'reality' – the world of squalor and need, of destructive passions and crime. Pip’s misinterpretation can be seen as a representation of the heart’s desire to escape from the world of reality (governed by strict, immutable laws) into the world of pure imagination and fantasy, a desire which is crushed by the inevitable discovery that such an escape is impossible.
Miss Havisham and Magwitch use these kids in a personal and delusional dream of revenge. "But whereas Miss Havisham’s 'revenge' is born of hatred, Magwitch’s comes from a comparatively innocent pride" (Bloom, 1996: 53). Estella is to provide for Miss Havisham the spectacle of males in agony; Pip is merely to charm himself, and society, and so to justify Magwitch’s ruined life.
The theme of Great Expectations is the attempt to find some integration of an individual Self into social life. Throughout most of the narrative, Pip mistakes 'Otherness' for himself, remolding people and events in order to have them conform to his private fantasy. This egotism involves the continual rejection of all antipathetic elements. So, in order to become a gentleman, Pip must always repress the memory of the association with Magwitch. He also rejects Others, of course, including his bogus benefactor Pumblechook and the frightening Orlick, not to mention Joe and Biddy and his apprenticeship to Joe. Pip therefore achieves totality and unity of Self only at the cost of excluding fundamental parts of himself.
5. Estella and Mirror-Image
Considering mirror-image between Estella and Pip, Harold Bloom in Modern Critical Views – Charles Dickens states that
For Estella most overtly seems what Pip is not: a child cherished by a loving parent and surrounded by every material comfort and security. The narrative quickly moves to establish the Otherness of Estella. Even her name is the sign of a distance. Estella is a star, an unreachable object, an illusory expectation upon which life’s happiness founders. (1996: 266)
Estella and Pip are linked through ties of identification as well as opposition. In this sense Estella is the mirror-image of Pip: "if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested". The inverted symmetry of Lacan’s mirror stage, which "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination", is itself perhaps derived from Freud’s discussion of the means of representation used in dreams (Bloom, 1996: 267).
The book is full of images of inner emptiness: Estella warns Pip that she has no heart. Miss Havisham has been blighted emotionally just at the moment of sexual flowering and her bodily life in an ancient bridal gown symbolizes psychic paralysis. The convicts who are central to the theme of authenticity in the book are outcasts, and have no place in society: "Magwitch is desperate to have a real identity and tries to make Pip into his false image of a gentleman" (Holbrook, 1993: 133).
In Miss Havisham, the libido that survives in the shape of a self-destructive force has an intensity that both Estella’s cold beauty and Pip’s yearning for her lack. A great deal of the fire in Pip’s experience comes to him from other people – Mrs. Joe, Magwitch, Miss Havisham herself – but if Estella is desirable, she feels no desire herself. Her starlike coldness inspires in him a love that is warm enough to endure, to go on feeding itself over the years, but not hot enough to act to claim its object. It is the fact that she is out of reach that makes her so desirable: "When I first went into it, and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky" (Dickens, 1996: 52).
David Gervais in his article "The Prose and Poetry of Great Expectations" elaborates that "Pip’s abiding sense of Estella is given early: a lighted candle receding down the darkened passages of Satis House, beckoning as it recedes. The afterimage of her that lingers with him is cold and beautiful like diamonds. Whether she scorns or beguiles him, her spell arrests him in a dumb and unresolved longing" (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 696). Not that the novel puts her on a pedestal, like Agnes in David Copperfield, Pip cannot help seeing her as a very real, as well as a very elegant, young lady too. There is a hint of the theatrical about her, but she is not ethereal. It is, indeed, precisely the discrepancy between what he wishes her to be morally and what he fears she really is that entices Pip. David Gervais says that, "Pip loves Estella for what is unlovable in her, for her very indifference. It is inside this treacherous rift between desire and its object that Eros has delicately insinuated himself" (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 696). Pip is concerned with impersonal things – with class, with status, with habits, occupations, gestures, and language standard in a particular social milieu. Thus, he loves what Estella represents, not what/who she is.
6. Desire
Lacan declares that the Other is a structural position in the symbolic order. It is the place that every one is trying to reach, to merge with, in order to get rid of the separation between 'Self' and 'Other'. The Other is the thing to which every element relates. But, as the center, the Other cannot be merged with. Nothing can be in the center with the Other, even though every thing in the system (people, e.g.) wants to be. So the position of the Other creates and sustains a never-ending lack, which Lacan calls desire. Desire is the desire to be the Other. This desire can never be fulfilled (Bressler, 2007: 154).
Lacan argues that desire comes out of the imbalance between what human beings perceive (language and image) and what they want. In their desire for the real they displace it with every thing (human beings are born with desires, when their desire is fulfilled, they will fall into another chain). He believes that there is no finalized fact, just interpretation. So there is not real Self; every person has one interpretation of his own Self (Rabaté, 2001: 59-61).
As for lacking and desiring, Michal Peled Ginsburg in his article "Dickens and Uncanny: Repression and Displacement in Great Expectations" argues that from the moment Pip visits Miss Havisham and sees Estella for the first time, he feels himself lacking and desiring; and the great expectations which eventually are revealed to him are the fulfillment of this desire; they are the transformation which eliminates or 'fills up' the lack (qtd. in Rosenberg, 1999: 702).
The desire for Estella and Pip's feeling of insufficiency are two sides of the same coin: desire is the feeling of a lack. It is Estella's perfection and self-sufficiency (her pride) that show Pip what he is lacking, and it is the fact that she makes him feel imperfect that transforms her in his eyes to a perfect and totally self-sufficient creature.
The two associated objects of Pip’s desire, Estella and gentility, exist outside himself, the desire comes from himself, and by his own exertions; he may hope or expect one day to attain or be united with those objects.
Miss Havisham encourages Estella to entrap Pip and break his heart, for practice. Estella complies, and they play a card game. Later, Miss Havisham explicitly urges Pip to love Estella:
"Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?" Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!" … "Hear me, Pip! I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!" … "I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!" (Dickens, 1996: 194)
Though Pip is aware that the love she refers to sounds like hate, despair, revenge, death, and a curse rather than a blessing, he perseveres in his attachment to Estella. Pip, both in his dream of having great expectations to win Estella and in the realization of those expectations, is passive; he waits for others and for events to act upon him and give him direction, meaning, and purpose. He wishes to become a gentleman because he is unhappy with his status, and his desire to be a gentleman makes him unhappy. Great Expectations displays progressively Pip’s alienation from himself. He therefore finds himself separated even from his own desire. Regarding Pip’s false idea of gentility, Anthony Mortimer in his book York notes on Great Expectations explains that
In fact, Pip’s false idea of gentility has become a prison which forces him into futile social gestures such as keeping a useless servant or joining the Finches Club. It is a positive sign that Pip is never self-satisfied for very long. He knows that his way of life is unsatisfactory, although he still does not acknowledge the moral roots of his frustration. (1980: 48)
Pip is forced to recognize that not only are the objects of his desire unattainable, but also that his desires are not even really his own. He is acting out the desires of Others, or their desires are acting through him. In fact the combination of Magwitch’s desires and Miss Havisham’s becomes Pip’s desire.
Neither Magwitch nor Miss Havisham are the originators of their own desires any more than Pip is of his own. Magwitch’s desire is the adoption of a generalized social ambition which cannot be fulfilled personally; his vengeful project requires him to see his wealth and legitimacy conferred on a surrogate at a distance from him.
Similarly, Miss Havisham’s desire is a deflected one which comes from 'somewhere else'; she desires to see inflicted on another man the pain which she has suffered, but this is in itself an identification with Arthur and a re-enactment of his desire to hurt and swindle her. Miss Havisham succeeds in freezing the props and the hands of the clock, but at the expense of cutting off real possibilities for herself. The empty estate is filled with images of objects of desire memorialized and thus no longer obtainable. The wedding cake is there, but inedible. The estate's wealth came from a brewery that now stands empty.
She cuts off time for herself symbolically, but not in reality. The clock stands still, her virginity untouched, the cake uneaten, but her lack of fulfillment turns on processes of decay – cobwebs, insects, rotting, her own aging. She preserves her moment of near triumph, but she surrenders to her abandonment and, ever increasingly, her lack of desirability; thus she compensates the lack by creating a duplicate of herself, in Estella, another orphan whose parents long remain a mystery, too. She breeds Estella to be pure desire, above others, and proud of it.
Miss Havisham and Satis House, both in ruins, represent wealth and social status for Pip; the irony is obvious. Their decayed state prefigures the emptiness of Pip's dream of rising in social status and of so being worthy of Estella. With them, Dickens extends his satire of society from the abuse of children and criminals to the corruption of wealth. Miss Havisham's fawning, self-interested, envious relatives and their competition for her wealth illustrate the evil effects of the love of money. Dickens sees the valuing of money and status over all else as a primary drive in society, which is dominated by the mercantile middle class.
Miss Havisham and her decayed house have another relationship; it parallels the diseased state of her mind. By stopping time, symbolized by the clocks all reading twenty to nine, Miss Havisham has stopped her life, which thereby becomes death-in-life. By willfully stopping her life at a moment of pain and humiliation, she indulges her own anger, self-pity, and desire for revenge; she imagines her death as "the finished curse" upon the man who jilted her (Dickens, 1996: 72). In her revenge, which destroys her life, she is like a child who hurts itself in its anger with someone else.
7. System of Money as the Other
In fact Pip’s alienation from himself is brought about because of a number of different sorts of sign systems which, though separate, interweave in various complex ways. Among these are the systems of language and of family relationships, but the most important of them is the system of money (as the Other).
Money in Great expectations, as in many of Dickens’s novels, is the principal system whereby relations between the individual Self and society are established. In Dickens’s work, money is very often conceived and presented as a sort of language; and this equation is not too surprising. Steven Conner explains that, "Money, like language, is a system of signification in which the meaning (value) of individual units can exist only by virtue of the whole economic system which lies behind them" (1985: 140).
The bond between Magwitch and Pip is at first an imaginary one, immediate and direct, cutting out all relationships of a more indirect social kind. Magwitch acknowledges this in his 'returning' to Pip the two one-pound notes, and Pip himself recognizes the reciprocal bond it establishes; it can be seen as a financial representation of the mirror stage in that it combines recognition with possessive hostility. Pip sees the "two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the county" (Dickens, 1996: 64), not as abstract signs, but as belonging to Magwitch and full of his unpleasant, bestial 'presence' (even though, of course, it is Magwitch’s surrogate who has brought them). What is more frightening for Pip is the fact that they are not spent but left in a tea pot to torment him, and this represents very nicely the imaginary removal of signs from movement and exchange.
Considering Money and financial positions, James A. Davies in his book, The Textual Life of Dickens’s Characters, writes: "Pip becomes ashamed of his origins but cannot escape them. A key scene is that in chapter 34 when Herbert and Pip, debts rising around them, combine to 'look into [their] affairs'. They examine their papers, list their bills and calculate their financial positions" (1989: 95).
In this novel, Dickens merges the motif of money and gentility with the passion of love. Pip loves Estella for her beauty, but he loves her also because he sees her as the exquisite representative of a higher kind of life. The connection between Pip’s love for Estella and his love for the façade of wealth and position is very prominent. Almost at the very outset of his life, Pip develops a sense of inferiority and thus suffers a good deal. This sense of inferiority is born in his mind at the time of his first meeting with Estella at Miss Havisham’s house. Estella treats him with contempt. She calls him stupid, clumsy, labouring-boy with coarse hands. Pip’s sense of inferiority urges him towards self-improvement. He tells Biddy that he would like to become a 'gentleman', mainly for the sake of the beautiful young girl who lives at Miss Havisham’s house.
I established with myself on these occasions, the reputation of a first-rate man of business -- prompt, decisive, energetic, clear, cool-headed. When I had got all my responsibilities down upon my list, I compared each with the bill, and ticked it off. My self-approval when I ticked an entry was quite a luxurious sensation. When I had no more ticks to make, I folded all my bills up uniformly, docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into a symmetrical bundle. (Dickens, 1996: 224)
Given Pip’s belief that he is a gentleman, his pride in his own business acumen and clerical expertise is oddly misplaced. Bentley Drummle, for instance, a 'real' gentleman by birth, would simply despise such qualities. In Victorian terms Pip will never be a 'real' gentleman, not only because he is far too conscious of money and cares what people think of him, but because he has always belonged to the world of small-businessmen. Readers see this again in chapter 17, when he is greatly impressed by Biddy’s powers of management, and later, when he wishes to help Herbert and thinks, instinctively, of furthering his friend’s business career through secret financial sponsorship. James A. Davies says:
Throughout his life, Pip practices the first rule of business, the need to provide what the customers want. In chapter 9, after his first visit to Satis House, he satisfies his family circle’s desire for class-and-wealth-based fantasies. He frequently and not unwillingly provides Estella with material for her practiced sadism. And despite himself he provides Magwitch with what the latter considers to be evidence of gentlemanly behaviour. Pip tries hard to be a gentleman but, instead, becomes the businessman whose thought-patterns have always controlled his thinking. (1989: 96)
The imaginary fixation on the nature and origins of money continues throughout Great Expectations. Magwitch spends his money in order to purchase and possess the image of a gentleman in an act of imaginary aggression towards Pip. Magwitch is forced to make his purchase through Jaggers and Wemmick (they themselves stand for the larger abstraction of the Law). Right up to the end, Magwitch seems to remain unaware of the fact that his money is not innocent, and not even his own in one sense; though he carries it round in his pocket-book and takes care to hand it over to Pip, this act of physical exchange can be and is negated by the structure of law which intervenes between them (and actually gives the money value in the first place). At the end of the narrative the money passes out of Pip’s hands and into the possession of the Crown.
8. Society and Law as the Other
By the end of the novel, Pip begins to have some apprehension of the alienation of the Self from itself imposed by social life. Steven Conner states that, "Wemmick and Jaggers operate a system of bullying exploitation which is really just as reprehensible as the swindling of Magwitch, but the 'imaginary' binary opposition of the Law and the criminal prevents that association from being articulated" (1985: 143).
Crime and imprisonment are inseparable from the Law. Society (as the Other), in the form of the legal system, continues to be cruel, unjust; in a word, criminal. Jaggers tells of children being raised by society to grow up to be criminals and finally transported or executed. The casts of the hanged men in Jaggers's office, which for Pip are inseparable from official proceedings, form a continuum with the mass condemnation of thirty-two men and women to death. The bond that connects all human beings is repudiated by the legal system; the institutionalization of such a procedure condemns the legal system and the society which created and perpetuates it. Dickens writes an impassioned denunciation of the legal system and affirmation of the bond connecting the condemned and the judge:
The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err. (Dickens, 1996: 369)
Ramji Lall, in his book Great Expectations – A Critical Study, describes the society and the Law of Dickens’s time as follows: "The Law is the mechanism which Society has developed and which it enforces to protect its own interests and to dispense justice". The Law protects the strong and the weak alike, the gentleman and the commoner, the adult and the child. Dickens, however, gives us "the bitterest satire on legal pretensions", and on the cruelties inflicted by the powerful upon the helpless, especially upon children (1997: 46).
In Great Expectations there is little evidence that Dickens wants to attack the class system as such. Anthony Mortimer elaborates that, "What he attacks is the idea that social status reflects some intrinsic superiority. Social ambition is not wrong in itself: it becomes wrong when it involves condescension, cruelty, or indifference towards the poor and blind admiration of the rich" (1980: 50). When Pip finally becomes a gentleman, he does so without false ideas about what gentility means. Moreover, Pip’s gentility is no longer a gift from above: it is achieved largely by eleven years’ hard work. In this, no doubt, Dickens reflects the views of his audience who believed in 'self-help' and admired men who rose socially as the result of their own honest efforts. Pip prospers because he collaborates with Herbert, and the money for Herbert’s partnership comes originally from Magwitch. Pip does not inherit a fortune from his convict, but he does get what the Victorians would have called 'a start in life'. It is no more and no less than what he deserves.
Jaggers provides a rather different case of isolation: an isolation within the system. Unlike Miss Havisham or Magwitch, he has no motive for revenge against a society that makes him prosperous and powerful: unlike Estella, he takes no particular pleasure in making others suffer. But his power and prosperity are based on the fact that he deliberately rejects real human involvement and substitutes the mechanical processes of the law. Anthony Mortimer says that, "The legal system is his way of avoiding personal responsibility for the fate of his fellow creatures. He is characterized by the gesture of washing his hands. And yet, as readers learn in chapter 51, there was an occasion when he stepped out of his role as agent of the system in order to save a poor child (Estella)" (1980: 52). For a brief moment the legal mask is dropped: the effect is only to make readers realize more poignantly the extent to which Jaggers has let his profession imprison his better instincts.
Mortimer adds that, "If Jaggers is isolated within the system, Magwitch is isolated by the system. His first memory (chapter 42) is of being cold, hungry, and abandoned, and society has been able to offer him nothing but preaching and prison" (1980: 52). His reaction, like that of Miss Havisham is to create an agent for his revenge. As Miss Havisham uses Estella, so Magwitch uses Pip. There, however, the resemblance stops. Magwitch has not willed his own isolation. Though socially an outcast, he is not devoid of human sympathy, and his patronage of Pip is motivated by gratitude as well as revenge. When he gets to know Pip as an individual and not merely as 'my gentleman', the revenge motive gradually disappears. Magwitch, who of all characters had the best reasons for disbelieving in human fellowship, becomes at last one of those who affirm it most strongly.
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