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A Sacrifice in the Male-dominated Society on the Image of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations

: Charles Dickens is one of the greatest critical realistic writers of the Victorian Age. In his Great Expectations, many vivid female characters are created, leaving deep impression on readers of all countries. Miss Havisham is one of the most impressive creations, and the description of her tragedy displays the corruption of the society. In this paper, the tragedy of Miss Havisham will be analyzed from the feminist point of view, aiming at exploring her tragic life and revealing women’s fate in the male-dominated society. 1 Introduction

Generally regarded as the greatest literary geniuses of his time in Victorian England, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) enjoyed a wider popularity than any previous author had done during his lifetime “because of the magnitude of his artistic achievement and because of the comprehensiveness of the picture it gives of his age.”[1] Dickens’s later work Great Expectations(1861), which is considered as his artistic masterpiece, is the most

perfectly constructed of all Dickens’s novels. “Surely the characters in Great Expectations are the greatest collection in all of English fiction.”[2] as Keith Love asserted in the introduction to Great Expectation, it is no doubt that Dickens skillfully portrays all the characters and makes all of them impressing and vivid. Among them, Miss Havisham is certainly one of the most strange and memorable creations in the story. Her horrible dressing, grotesque life style and mad behavior impressed the readers so much that most people treat her as evil. Actually, she is a tragic female character worthy of sympathy. In this paper, the tragedy of this female character Miss Havisham will be analyzed from the feminist point of view, aiming at exploring her tragic life and revealing women’s fate in the male-dominated society. 2 Literature Review of Great Expectations

Great Expectations is Dickens’s later and mature work. It was for a long time classified as a book about the Victorian Age, and Dickens, the spokesperson for the age, attracting many critics and reviewers.

In Great Expectations, the distinctive character Miss Havisham attracts critics’ and researchers’ attention,

the articles at home referred to the analyses on the character and image of Great Expectations are numerous. In a typical study of this type, Li Guangming (2007) suggested that Miss Havisham is a victim of complex forces which from her family and the bourgeois society.[3] Whereas some critics feel that Miss Havisham has her own limitations, as Cai Wei (2006) claimed that her insane actions don’t start from her abnormal psychology but her double personality.[4]

“The western critics for a long time focus their comment on the theme and characters of Dickens’s novels.”[5]Most criticisms are traditional criticism, which highlight the factors outside the literary text, putting Miss Havisham in psychological and sociological circumstances for analysis. Psychoanalytic criticism concentrates on the relationship between the development of Miss Havisham and social circumstances.

Great Expectations “attracts the attention of scholars coming from a wide variety of critical approaches: feminist, new historicist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist, as well as from more traditional historical and formalist perspectives.”[6] With the