Estella has got to be one of the most unlovable characters I've ever encountered. I see she gets her due and is humbled, but what a brutal story to have to read. Jaggers makes the book, for me.
David Copperfield is so self-conscious, and it's his character that's said to be most closely representative of Dickens, that Dickens' infidelity doesn't surprise me much. A bit of a wanker, if you ask me.
You and Dickens are simply on roads that have no intersection. Such things happen all the time, but nonetheless it's a pity.
Great Expectations begins on English literature's grimmest, most frightening Christmas Eve ever. Pip is a small boy weeping at the grave of parents he never knew, buried alongside five older brothers who had all died in childhood. He is in the charge of an unloving sister who abuses him physically and psychologically. With such a burden to bear, is it any wonder that he falls prey to selfishness and pride? But Pip learns through suffering, and what he learns most and best is forgiveness, notably for Estella. She may be, as you say, unlovable, but she was raised by a vengeful and deranged woman whose object in raising Estella was to make her cruel and a source of pain and wretchedness to all (not only men) who encounter her. Indeed, the damage done to Estella is an order of magnitude greater than that done to Pip, who has the shining example of the loving and forgiving Joe Gargery ever before him as a beacon of light and hope.
When Dickens revised the novel's ending—an ending out of favor with our cruel, vengeful, and heartless times—he did no more and no less than suggest that Estella too ought to be given the proverbial second chance. In this instance it would be better described as her first real chance at manifesting a morally balanced outlook. Remember the power of vice! It is orthodox Catholic teaching that a habitual sin, even a grievous one, that is part of a pattern that one has confessed and been absolved of is considered less grievous on subsequent commissions. This is so because the Church in its wisdom recognizes how hard bad old habits are to break, even when one has at them with the best will in the world.
As any inclination toward virtue in the young Estella was ruthlessly ground out by Miss Havisham, the true wonder is that she was able to back away from her own monstrousness to any degree at all. Though even the second ending leaves a Pip-Estella future very much up in the air—remember that readers are not obliged to take Pip's vision of no further separations at face value—I see no cause to harden one's heart against either of them.
As for
David Copperfield, just this: granted, the novel has many flaws of construction, and the author's failure to make his adult hero as interesting as his child hero leaves the last half of the book much tougher sledding than the first half. But if David represents a Dickensian self-portrait, ought we not applaud him for making painfully plain what can befall a man who chooses a wife primarily, if not solely, for erotic satisfaction? For if David's attraction to Dora is not almost exclusively sɛҳuąƖ in nature, then what is it? Agnes is clearly presented as both beautiful and virtuous, but for David she is not the stuff of a certain kind of dream (need I spell it out?). For us readers to see the young adult David as thick or callow is to miss what Dickens takes pains to show us (in the relatively roundabout style, tone, and lexicon of his day): sex has near obsessive importance for him. If this is a self-portrait, it does neither painter nor subject much credit.
No member of Dickens's original reading audience would have been as disordered as a member of, say, Philip Roth's (or any other more or less contemporary novelist who trades in degradation and filth). Thus, such a man or woman would have seen David as, first, culpably weak and, second, astonishingly fortunate, in that his erotic mistake had the good grace to die young and give our hero a second chance to tie the knot with Agnes, who must have seen in him something more than just ill-managed horniness. Indeed, the novel's true merit lies in this complexity: namely, that we may draw conclusions about David from his words, his actions, his effect on others, or any or all of the foregoing.
And not even a word has been said about the amazing Peggottys, the ever-willing Barkis, the remarkable Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the wise and good Mr. Dick, the Micawbers, Uriah Heep, and my own favorite: Steerforth, one of literature's most dangerous and attractive villains. I wonder sometimes whether I am alone in thinking that Graham Greene reimagined the David-Steerforth relationship in writing
The Third Man. Greene never confessed to having it on his mind, but he did freely admit to being deeply affected by
David Copperfield.
Topic: DICKENS CONFERENCE (Read 6146 times)