Character Analysis- Rabia Afzaal

Pip

Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip. Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic optimism and his naturally good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep need to improve himself and reach any possible progress, whether educational, moral, or social. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions cruelly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but furiously criticizing himself for bad ones. When Pip becomes a man, for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy affectedly and coldly.

On the other hand, Pip is a very generous and sympathetic person; this can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, furtively buying Herbert’s way into business) and his important love for all those who love him. Pip’s development in the novel may be seen as the procedure of learning to place his inborn sense of kindness and conscience above his immature optimism.

Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip’s want for progress largely overshadows his essential goodness. After receiving his unexplained fortune, his unrealistic wishes seem to have been necessary, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of joblessness. But the discovery that the miserable Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret supporter shatters Pip’s oversimplified sense of his world’s hierarchy.

 Drummle ultimately forces him to understand that one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and that his actions as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about him most. Once he has understood his mistakes, Pip matures into the man who describes the novel, completing the bildungsroman.

Mrs. Joe - Pip’s sister is known only as “Mrs. Joe” throughout the novel. Mrs. Joe is a strict and overbearing figure to both Pip and Joe. She keeps a spotless household and regularly threatens her husband and her brother with her cane, which she calls “Tickler.” She also forces them to drink a foul-tasting mixture called tar-water. Mrs. Joe is petty and ambitious; her only wish is to be something more than what she is, the wife of village blacksmith.   

Miss Havisham

The mad, unforgiving Miss Havisham, a rich dowager who lives in a rotting house and wears an old wedding dress every day of her life, is not exactly a realistic character, but she is certainly one of the most memorable creations in the book. She stops all the clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the instant when she first learned that Compeyson has left, and she wears only one shoe, because when she learned of his disloyalty, she had not yet put on the other shoe. With a kind of overexcited, obsessive unkindness, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to accomplish her own revenge on men. Miss Havisham is a good example of single-minded revenge pursued violently: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer deeply because of her quest for revenge. Miss Havisham is totally unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella. At the end, she realizes that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken the same way as hers was; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain to people that loved her. Miss Havisham immediately begs Pip for forgiveness, strengthening the novel’s theme that bad behavior can be changed by regret and sympathy.