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Once Upon A Time: Fairy Tale Motif In Great Expectations

Satisfactory Essays

Jeremy Jacobs
Mr. Reese
English 9
15 February 2015
Once Upon a Time: Fairy Tale Motif in Great Expectations
With no serious distinction between child and adult morality, Charles Dickens builds Great Expectations with an underlying fairy tale motif, which has an important role in the novels structure. Following the cycle of the hero’s journey wheel, Pip comes across two mentors, one an heiress and the other a convict, who both act as typical characters in the standard fairy tale sorry. In the somewhat supernatural symbolism of the book, lies Miss Havisham, who, much like a wicked witch spun out of one of Hans Christian Andersen's fables, keeps Pip enthralled, employing Estella's beauty. Magwitch, the convict "boogeyman" and mysterious stranger, …show more content…

While this outward appearance seems to be true, in reality it is all a fraud; having sacrificed her life to memorialize her dead hopes, Ms. Havisham has frozen herself in time, wallowing away in her misery, and still wears her wedding dress with the clocks stopped at "twenty minutes to nine" (R), almost like a dark Snow White who is never to be awakened. The decaying feast and yellowing dresses represent what should have been in Havisham's life; in their preservation, they represent loss. In truth, Havisham is no fairy godmother;instead, she is a "witch" (r). Skeletal and like waxwork, she is the monstrous side of the female figure, and has raised Estella as a weapon to take revenge on men, as she has never let go the injustice of what her fiancée had done to her. Pip realizes Ms. Havisham's intent early on, hearing Ms. Havisham tell Estella to “break his heart” (r) while playing the game Beggar My Neighbor, but is smitten by Estella, and clings to the hope that Estella is meant to be with him. With the promise of adulthood and riches, Pip is entranced, imputing characteristics such as beauty and goodness onto Ms. Havisham, but looks past what Havisham really is: darkness, evil, a witch, and a …show more content…

Scaring Pip almost to death, he devours his food, taking "strong sudden bites" (R) in a way more doglike than human and imputes violence into Pip's life threatening to "cut [Pip's] throat" (R). First encountered in the graveyard , Magwitch is described as “fearful” dressed “in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg” (r). Combined, Dickens presents a fairy tale-esque description like that of a classic monster. As a boogeyman figure in the novel, Magwitch manifests one of Pip's greatest fears: that Pip may one day turn out to be like Magwitch, someone he sees as so vile and disgusting he should never have been born. Pip already suspects he posses criminal qualities, and contact with Magwitch only exacerbates these fears, adding guilt into the

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