6 - In the shadow of Satis House: the woman's story in Great Expectations

Summary

After the various experiments in narrative form and perspective in the novels that directly precede it, Great Expectations might seem a return to more conventional narrative gestures for Dickens, a return to the boy's autobiography (and its requisite story of identity) that we seemed to leave behind after David Copperfield with the immersion in the widerranging social fiction and novelistic experiments of the 1850s. Adept Dickens readers might note the specifics of the reprise: the return of Dora and Agnes in Estella and Biddy; the splitting of the bosom friend, Steerforth, into Herbert Pocket and Bentley Drummle; the careful regret and hard-won wisdom of the first-person narrator and the romance of maturity. Where, after the intervening years, is Bleak House's pain of self-creation; Amy Dorrit's searing self-renunciation; the return to history and self-annihilation in A Tale of Two Cities, the novel that precedes Great Expectations, and whose terrors and fantasies the novel of identity might seem to elide? But note the other returns that Great Expectations makes: to the violence of coming to consciousness that Oliver Twist and other novels suggested; the darkness of the prison fiction and the revision of the Newgate story; the snaky convulsions of the inheritance plot, of the dead father's will and the mother's seeming perversion of the son's story.