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Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume

9, Number 2, June 2011, pp. 347-361 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/pan.2011.0016

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The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations

Adina Ciugureanu

Ovidius University, Constanta

When Dickens decided, in 1860, to start writing Great Expectations, he

initially intended to return to the style of his former highly successful
Pickwick Papers, the reason being the increasing financial difficulties
he was having at the time. In a letter to John Forster (dated September
1860), he confessed that he had an idea for a new serial novel which he
was going to write in a most singular and comic manner. In October
of that year, after producing the first chapter, Dickens wrote to Forster
again, adding that he was trying to pursue the grotesque tragic-comic
conception which had inspired him when writing David Copperfield
(Dickens 1860, IX: 325).
The end result turned out to be different. To the contemporary reader,
the description of characters such as Miss Havisham, Mrs. Joe Gargery,
and Molly, among others, is, indeed, rather grotesque but not particularly
comic. The aggressor-victim conflict involved in their representation is
at times, outr, though made enjoyable by the warm irony and sarcasm
that both sustains and undermines the grotesque. This article analyses the
three characters in psychological and feminist terms, with a view to explaining aspects of their behavior usually perceived as strange. Unlike
the motivation of Miss Havisham, those of Mrs. Joe and Molly are better
understood only at the end of the novel, when the secrets are unveiled
and, despite their narcissistic personality disorders, the conduct of these
characters can be brought into the purview of Victorian ethics (Bruner
3365)1 as well as of the period debates on sexuality, crime, marriage,
and divorce.

***
The folk psychology concept (Bruner) would, in our case, amount to normalizing
the behavior of the grotesque characters in terms of the Victorian middle class morality.
1

This work was supported by CNCSISUEFISCSU, project number PNII IDEI 1223/2008.

Partial Answers 9/2: 347361 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

348 Adina Ciugureanu

Attempts to understand the character of Mrs. Joe Gargery involve the

unanswered question regarding her desire to keep seeing Orlick, her aggressor, every day after she has been assaulted by him. Is she masochistic
or repenting? Cruel or forgiving?
When Orlick lures Pip to the old sluice-house and confesses the assault upon Mrs. Joe, he gives the following account of his crime: I come
upon her from behind, as I come upon you tonight. I givit her. I left her
for dead (1985: 437). It therefore seems impossible for Mrs. Joe to have
seen her aggressor that night. Why then would she summon him to her
every day after she regains consciousness but not her ability to speak?
How does she know that Orlick has been the aggressor? Or does she? Joe
and Pip suspect that Orlick was the culprit, but do not have the proof to
indict him until the end of the novel. The connection between Orlick and
Mrs. Joe looks at least strange, if not completely uncommon, considering Mrs. Joes own unrestrained aggressiveness before the attack when
Orlick and the other male characters, with the exception of Uncle Pumblechook, were around.
Mrs. Joe Gargery is presented as utterly intolerant of her young brother, whom she has brought up by hand. She has never forgiven him for
having had to do so, and her animosity has extended to her husband as
well:
She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. . . . She
was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over
her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in
front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit
in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so
much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all:
or why, if she did wear it at all, she should have not taken it off, every day
of her life. (3940)

Pip does not reveal his sisters first name. She is always addressed as
Mrs. Joe Gargery or Mrs. Joe, her Christian name is annulled as is her
femininity by the image of the pins and needles thrust in her impregnable bib. Her imperviously aggressive attitude to her brother and to her
husband, the latter physically strong yet apparently weak in character,
seems to be associated with her psychotic belief that she is actually the
victim of both, which is emblematized by her compulsive display of her
coarse apron. Whenever she becomes enraged for being opposed by either Joe or Pip (the reasons for her furies are usually unpredictable), she

The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations 349

turns on her allegedly aggressors and viciously attacks them while using,
in her furious torrents of words, the apron and the duster, the symbolical
objects of a housewife, as weapons of enslaved womanhood.
Pip does not seem to have the ability to understand his sisters frustrations, such as having married beneath her (her predicament had made
this her only marriage option), and having to do the housework herself,
without the help of a servant. He does not in fact understand any of the
women he observes (Miss Havisham, Estella, Molly, Biddy); he tends to
perceive them as mysterious creatures and to misinterpret their desires,
misfortunes, or griefs. Dickenss own filial and marital problems may
have underwritten Pips failure in understanding the women in his life
(Barzilai 93; Phyllis 481521).
Though Dickens held progressive views on better pay for womens
work, on their access to education, and on marriage and divorce settlements, his attitude to a womans place was conservative: she should
leave the public sphere to men and be content with remaining in the private sphere; she should be the image of home, peace and happiness (Oliver Twist 29), a Home Goddess (Our Mutual Friend 2). Mrs. Gargery
may be a good housewife but not the angel of the house: she is dictatorial, abusive, and constantly complaining, and she crosses the line
between the private and the public when she proposes to take control of
Pips new opportunities in life. She craves to be the center of attention. If
by creating the character of Stephen Blackpools drunken wife in Hard
Times Dickens aimed to draw attention to the difficulties in obtaining
legal separation from ones wife, his portrayal of Mrs. Joe Gargery, six
years later, may have been an indirect comment on the spreading feminist views. Mrs. Joes truculence may be a satire on the call on women
to oppose the patriarchal power of men in the house and to struggle for
more rights. The result of the inversion of roles in Mrs. Joes house is
an unnaturally aggressive milieu of the protagonists early childhood.
Nineteenth-century readers were likely to see Mrs. Gargery as a comic
character, incarnating what was seen at the time, from the male perspective, as inappropriate domestic power struggle.
Frances Power Cobbe, a feminist activist in the 1850s and 1860s,
made public various cases of womens aggressive resistance (nagging,
acts of disobedience, etc.), even on trivial matters, to the purse-or-stick
power wielded by men, masters of the house, claiming that the relationship between husband and wife was in many cases comparable to the
one between master and slave (Jackson 9). In the Gargery household the
vectors of control are reversed: Mrs. Joe manages her husbands earnings

350 Adina Ciugureanu

and makes plenty use of Tickler, yet she refers to herself as a slave
with the apron never off (Dickens 1985: 51).
The famous dinner scene, during which Pip is trying hard to hide his
share of bread, which he intends to give to the convict, starts with the
description of Mrs. Joes ritualistic cutting of the bread: she jammed the
loaf hard and fast against her bib where it sometimes got a pin into it,
and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths (42).
The pins and needles of Mrs. Joes bib are not only symbols of her female
status but also symbolic weapons. Later that night, displeased with Joe
for a trifle, she takes him by the whiskers, and knock[s] his head for a
little while against the wall behind him (43). Her aggressiveness is answered with utter meekness by Joe, who looks at her in a helpless way;
then [takes] a helpless bite, and look[s] at [Pip] again (ibid). Though Joe
is apparently meant to look like a victim, he seems to be impervious to
his wifes moods, his apparent dread of her being described as comic or
passive. Joes unresponsiveness makes Mrs. Joe even more furious and,
therefore, even more grotesque and ridiculous.
Yet though Mrs. Joe is intended to be a comic character, her portrayal
reveals a tragic dimension which is associated with narcissism. Contrary
to the general critical belief that Miss Havisham is the narcissist in the
novel, I shall argue that Mrs. Joe too displays symptoms of narcissistic
personality disorder.
According to Elsa F. Ronningstam, a psychotic narcissist shows contempt and depreciation of others, lacks empathy and understanding, is
egotistical, craves to be the center of attention, becomes enraged for unreasonable causes and, whenever cross, becomes authoritarian and aggressive (12). Mrs. Joe despises both her brother and her husband: she
calls the former a monkey (1985: 41) and the latter a staring great
stuck pig (43). When at the Christmas dinner scene others allude to
Pip as a four-footed Squeaker, a Swine (58), Mrs. Joe consents. She
seems to have no womanly feelings of love or pity as she describes Pips
illnesses and tumbling during his infancy almost as criminal acts (59).
Her politeness towards the people who do not belong to her household
lasts as long as she is praised or addressed as the central figure in the conversation. In her uttermost egocentricity, she opposes her husbands education for fear [he] might rise (79). She is authoritarian and becomes
aggressive for no reason: following the capture of the convicts, when the
whole company returns home, she clutches Pip as a slumberous offence
to the companys eyesight, and takes him up to bed with such a strong
hand that [he] seemed to have fifty boots on and be dangling them all

The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations 351

against the edges of the stairs (73). The news we keep hearing of her
is that she is on the Rampage (40). The scene preceding her attack by
Orlick, where Mrs. Joe forces herself to become blindly furious by regular stages (142) is an iterative one: Here my sister, after a fit of clappings and screamings, beat her cap off, and pulled her hair down which
were the last stages of her road to frenzy (142). She becomes a perfect
Fury and a complete success (142). Her rampaging is deliberate and
induced by her wish of always having the upper hand.
Mrs. Joe is narcissistically concerned by the way she looks when she
has guests or goes to town. She likes to draw attention by showing off
the spotless cleanliness in the house and by wearing ostentatious clothes
or carrying unnecessary articles of property, when she goes out a
very large beaver bonnet, . . . a basket like the Great Seal of England in
plaited straw, a pair of patterns, a spare shawl, and an umbrella despite
its being a fine bright day (127).
As a result Mrs. Joe emerges not merely as a functional grotesque figure but as a person whose narcissism points to psychological depth in
Dickenss portrayal of secondary characters. Her grotesque rampaging
is replaced by meek behavior after the criminals attack. One may choose
to see that as a comic punishment for her improper behavior, or else as a
morbid return to the bliss of the Victorian patriarchal family in which the
wife is gracious and silenced. Yet one may go a step further and read her
inability to speak, her partial paralysis and impaired sight and hearing after
the blow on the head as Dickenss depriving her of the abused instruments
of her former power: physical violence has turned into physical immobility while psychological aggression has caused her becoming mute. Her
dearest desire is to share the company of the aggressor, Orlick, to watch
him, to conciliate him (151). This behavioral twist goes beyond the
symbolism of misconduct and punishment, into the psychological realm:
it is a regression to a childhood stage reminiscent of Lacans Imaginary
order. In her relation to Orlick, Mrs. Joe displays the bearing of a child
towards a hard master (151) reduced to infantilism, she is forced back
to the childs neediness and is able only to express needs (for food, drink,
people to see) and to communicate to the outside world through a few
sounds. The order in her house is restored with the coming of young Biddy
who takes over the chores and looks after the disabled mistress.2
2
This is the ideal order that Dickens himself had in his own house when his wife became incapacitated after ten births and several miscarriages and her sister Georgina Hogarth
moved to the Dickenses and became, as Biddy is called in the novel, a blessing in the
household (150).

352 Adina Ciugureanu

Mrs. Gargerys connection with the real world is almost cut off: from
time to time she would put her hands to her head, and would then remain
for about a week . . . in some gloomy aberration of mind (150). The aberration, however, may be read as continuing some disorder of mind
that existed before Orlick hit her. After that catastrophe, just like before
it, Mrs. Joe craves for everybodys attention and, desperately clinging to
people and objects, still manages to create a world in which she holds
the central place. She is now spared the hateful daily house chores; she
is well looked after never left alone now (154); she is surrounded
by all the attention she presumably lacked when she was healthy. As a
victim, she enjoys everyones compassion. Her narcissism moves from
the psychotic form to a more passive shy one, complete with shame
reactions, modesty, humility, yearning and ability to wait (Ronningstam
104105). Pip sees an air of humble propitiation in all she does (1985:
151); her mood is positive: she laughed and nodded her head a great
many times (170). Before she dies, she has her arms put round Joes
neck and miraculously manages to utter the words Joe, Pardon, and
Pip (302). Her wish to see Orlick daily, her enjoyment of the company
of the people whom she had victimized, and her eagerness to be reconciled with them may be read in moral terms, as repentance; but this
conduct can also be read in psychological terms as a Narcissistic attempt
to embrace, through the others, her ideal self, the object of her real love.

***
A similar case of a characters struggle for an ideal self at the expense
of the real one is Miss Havisham. Since the serialized publication of the
novel Miss Havisham has intrigued critics and readers alike. This character defies categorization. Is she insane, sadistic or merely cold-hearted
and utterly calculated? Is she a victim turned victimizer or a woman who
becomes aggressive through self-victimization? Her famous portrait at
the beginning of the novel seems to be cut out from a parallel reality:
She was dressed in rich materials satins, and lace, and silks all of
white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent
from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was
white. Some jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other
jewels were sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress
she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite
finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on the other was on the table
near her hand her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were

The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations 353

not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with
her handkerchief and gloves, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped
about the looking-glass. (87)

The looking glass is central to the construction of Miss Havishams

identity and of the world she has built around her. Dickens uses the word
looking glass three times in the description of Pips first encounter with
Miss Havisham and Estella, and repeats it many times in the Havisham
scenes of the novel. It is the gilded looking glass that draws Pips attention when he enters the room in which Havisham resides. Her visual
inspection of herself and of her reflection in the mirror before she addresses Pip (Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and
looked at the dress she wore, and at the dressing table, and finally at
herself in the looking glass, 89), signifies her strong need of reassurance
that she is what she wants to be. Victim and aggressor in one, she maintains an alienated relation of self to its own image. Choosing to freeze
the moment of her misfortune (she was abandoned by her groom on the
wedding day), she is unable to recompose her identity and relies on misidentification with her image in the mirror.
Her self-imposed split identity may also be read in terms of the narcissistic personality disorder. Drawing on Freuds essay On Narcissism
(1914), Juliet Mitchell re-discusses the narcissist traits, which, derived
from self-love may move out to objects, leading to self-destruction and
death (3233). As she puts it, at first, the self loves the self (or the ego),
only later does it put out some of this self-love on to other objects
(33). It is in this phase that the conditions for narcissistic psychosis are
created. And this is also the case of Miss Havisham. As the reader knows
from Herberts description of Miss Havisham, she was a spoilt child . . .
her father denied her nothing (1985: 203): she seems to have built an
ego while a child as an ideal of which she became enamored with the
help of her father. The abandonment she suffered on her wedding day
and the discovery that bridegroom was a crook caused such a hard blow
on her ego that it could not go beyond the catastrophe, or leave it behind,
and therefore she perpetuated it in the desperate attempt to cling to the
ideal self that was perfectly happy in the past.
In Freuds words, what [the narcissist] projects before him as his
ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which
he was his own ideal (80). The result is the egos engagement in an
overestimation of itself or of the objects attached to itself (Mitchell 35).
Miss Havisham overestimates her ego-ideal in her belief that she has the
power to manipulate peoples lives and create, by corruption, deformed

354 Adina Ciugureanu

personalities (Estellas and Pips). She is morbidly attached to things

the furniture in her room, the jewels she puts back on the dressing table
on the exact spot from which she took them (1985: 89), her wedding
dress, her bridal veil and shoes. Trapped in her own imaginary world, in
which she still holds the central position, Miss Havisham attends to the
objects around her in a fetishist manner.
The focus on the wedding shoes (another important detail described
in the excerpt above), one on her foot, the other on the dressing table by
the mirror, has both fetishist and libidinal connotations. Exhibited on the
dressing table, the white shoe represents frozen sexuality and unconsummated marriage, a reminder of shattered dreams of possible fulfillment
through matrimony.
At the time when Miss Havisham had her bridal shoes made, there
was no distinction between left-foot and right-foot shoes. Shoes had
a broad rectangular front and were flat-heeled (Pearsall 34647). This
is probably why Dickens does not mention which of Miss Havishams
shoes is on the dressing table. Yet, the shoe was an object with fetishist
connotations, a symbol both of the vagina and of submission, as well as,
possibly, of tyranny (347). Miss Havishams misusing her shoes properly
and her strange decision to keep them apart is not only indicative of her
unconsummated marriage and desire to build a family, but also of her
split self, of her oscillation between womanhood (submission) and manhood (dictatorship). Her hubris, for which she pays dearly, is similar to
Mrs. Joes: she challenges the patriarchal world in her obstinacy to reveal
its stringent rules and limited choice for women: marriage, celibacy, or
prostitution. If Mrs. Joe chooses marriage (even though beneath her social status) over celibacy, Miss Havisham ostentatiously chooses celibacy. When a woman opposes the patriarchal world, the Law-of-the-Father
as Lacan would put it, she becomes an object of ridicule, a grotesque figure, a monster, a stereotype pitted against that of the angel of the house.
Unlike Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham has a love-hate relationship with
her own self. One of the major traits for people with high narcissism, according to Elsa Ronningstam, is an extroverted attitude (22) which may
manifest itself through complaining. Juliet Mitchell, on the other hand,
describes the case of the complaining woman as self-love disguised by
self-hate so that the reproaches can safely be made (37). When she first
meets Pip, Miss Havisham complains about not having seen the sun for
a long time and having her heart broken (1985: 88). She utters the
word broken with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with
a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it (ibid). It is in this attitude,

The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations 355

uncommon for a brokenhearted person, that Havishams narcissism lies.

On the one hand, she seems to hate her fate and the conditions she has
imposed on herself (that is why she needs diversion and calls for Pip);
on the other, she seems to take pride in her matchless situation and in her
non-conformist, exhibitionistic attitude. Sending her relatives away on
the day of their yearly visit, Miss Havisham theatrically holds the head
of her stick against her heart and fantasizes about the day of her death:
[w]hen the ruin is complete, . . . and when they lay me dead, in my
brides dress on the brides table which shall be done, and which will
be the finished curse upon him (117). Although time has stopped in her
room, she is well aware of the days of the week and of their passing and
knows exactly when her birthday is each year.
Miss Havisham lives in the vicious circle, in which Narcissus also
found himself, and which is described by Freud as follows:
A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we
must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in
consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. (68)

Miss Havishams inability to love, the strong feelings of revenge that

darken her mind not only cause her to look older and sicker than her age,
but also make her think of death and look like a corpse (I am yellow
skin and bone, 114). Pip describes her having shrunk to skin and bone
and compares her to a skeleton he saw at one of the marsh churches (87).
Being unable to reach her former self, Miss Havisham is like Narcissus
whose fate is death caused by his striving to unite his own self with its
reflection in the water. Yet, destiny plays Havisham a trick: the fire that
kills her and burns her house down is not only destructive but also purifying, eventually freeing what she tried so hard to stifle: the capacity
to forgive and to love. Significantly, at the moment of her death, she has
the revelation of what a unitary self might have been when she replaces
the looking glass on her table by the mirror of Pips eyes in which she
perceives the grotesque yet real image of herself: Until you spoke to
[Estella] the other day, and until I saw in you a looking glass that showed
me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I
done! What have I done! (411).
In Dickens and the Art of Analogy, H. M. Daleski argues that Miss
Havishams intention to avenge her desertion through Estellas cruelty
to men is secondary to her hidden motivation: the ravenous hunger
for love that [she] is seeking to satisfy (26162). Daleski reaches this
conclusion after analyzing Miss Havishams striking, highly romantic

356 Adina Ciugureanu

definition of love (blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole
world), which she utters in a hurried, passionate whisper. The desire
for love pitted against the desire for revenge creates the victim-aggressor
duality, which overlaps with the narcissistic pattern. It is always the other
side, the other image of her ego that Miss Havisham continually misses.
This also accounts for her failure in achieving either of her goals: to be
loved and to be avenged.
Miss Havishams externalizing some of the self-love on to other objects, which, according to Juliet Mitchell, is responsible for the psychotic
form of the narcissistic personality, is also relevant in the Havisham-Estella relationship. In her essay, Spiders, Spinners, and Spinsters: Dickenss Great Expectations, Shuli Barzilai dwells on Ovids story of the
woman metamorphosed into a spider and discusses Miss Havisham as
both spider and spinner, weaving the web in which Estella and Pip get
entangled (8597). The bond between Miss Havisham and Estella can,
therefore, be metaphorically read as a spider-prey bondage, in which the
spider, Miss Havisham, reveals cannibalistic drives (94). The aggressive dimension of Miss Havishams personality is thus heightened by the
overtones of the myth of Arachne.
My reading of the Havisham-Estella relationship also takes into account the less famous aspect of the Narcissuss story, the Narcissus-Echo
link. In love with Narcissus, Echo is unable to connect to him because
of his fascination with his self and because of her inability to express
herself in words, the consequence of Junos curse upon her. Echo ends
up being no more than the repetition of words provided by Narcissus
(Segal 17071). Similarly, Estella repeats Miss Havishams teachings,
though turning the tables on her:
So proud, so proud! moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her grey
hair with both her hands.
Who taught me to be proud? returned Estella. Who praised me
when I learned my lesson?
So hard, so hard! moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.
Who taught me to be hard? returned Estella. Who praised me when
I learned my lesson? (323)

The above passage may also serve to illustrate Julia Kristevas description of mother-child relationship as subject and object and subject-object reversal, guaranteeing and mirroring each other (43). According to
her, the child directs to its mother not only the drive for survival, but

The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations 357

also its mimetic aspirations. Dickens shows Estella echoing her adopted
mothers aspirations, both verbally and in shaping her own emotions.
In the Echo-Narcissus story, in which both Echo and Narcissus are victims, Echo is considered to be a less vulnerable survivor compared to
Narcissus. Like Echo, Estella manages to survive in spite of her early
experience; Miss Havisham perishes, symbolically, in the fire. Yet, Miss
Havishams ultimate repentance (write under my name I forgive her,
410) gives her a tragic touch.

***
The third grotesque female character in the novel is, obviously, Molly,
Jaggerss housekeeper, Magwitchs wife and Estellas biological mother. Introduced as a dangerous and mysterious woman, Molly bears the
typical name of a tramp.3 She is actually a tramp, and a murderess, who
started to work in Jaggerss house after being acquitted of a murder she
had indeed committed. Moreover, she has given up her three-year old
daughter for adoption apparently with no regrets. Is this the reason why
she never looks for or asks about her? Will she ever be interested in
her whereabouts or meet her during her life? When the novel ends, both
Estellas biological father and her surrogate mother die. As Estella has
inherited Miss Havishams money, she must have also inherited Jaggers
as her attorney and financial executor. Is it likely that she will meet her
mother one day and find out about her origins?
Molly is a handsome woman who had some gypsy blood in her
(405), a wild beast, who murdered an older, larger, and stronger woman out of jealousy and was close to destroying her own child in order to
punish her man for his infidelities. When young, Molly most probably
haunted the dockyard slums (she lived in Gerrard Street), where fighting between women was an ordinary event, against the background of
prostitution and violence.
In his description of London in the decade between 1860 and 1870,
the French historian Hippolyte Taine includes a passage about the London docks, in which he mentions the following form of entertainment:
Three times in ten minutes I saw crowds collect round the doorways, attracted by fights, especially by fights between women. One of them, her
The name Molly is also found in popular songs about poor and pretty women who
accept and grant favors easily.
3

358 Adina Ciugureanu

face covered with blood, tears in her eyes, drunk, was trying to fly at a man
while the mob watched and laughed. (Pearsall 284)

Gerrard Street where Dickens places young Molly (1985: 405) was also
known for its brothels and prostitutes (Pearsall 288). Molly had been
living there with Magwitch over the broomstick (405), a mark of their
marginal social status. Her fighting another woman was not extraordinary, what was extraordinary was its ending in the other womans being
killed and Jaggerss bid for fame in getting Molly acquitted.
Young Molly is therefore described as a perfect fury in point of jealousy (405). Though belonging to a lower social class than Mrs. Joe
Gargery, Molly could be compared with her in terms of wild rages,
fits of fury. Like Mrs. Gargery, she is tamed, not by a hard blow on
her head, but by blackmail. She is acquitted and allowed to live, due to
Jaggerss brilliant, but dishonest defense, on condition that she gives up
her daughter and restrains her wild nature. In Jaggerss power and under
his spell (he kept down her violent nature whenever he saw an inkling
of its breaking out, by asserting his power over her in the old way, 425),
she becomes a wild beast tamed (404). Yet, does she indeed? Could she
really overcome her violent nature only because Jaggers holds her in his
power? And what is it that may tie her to Jaggers forever?
In his essay Fictional License: The Case of (and in) Great Expectations, Randall Craig claims that Mollys submission to Jaggers after
acquittal is due to his constant reminding her that she owes everything to
him and that she, like his other female clients, have sold themselves to
him soul and body (11617). This is what Molly also seemed to have
done for terror of death (as Jaggers claims, 425), out of the instinct of
survival. Contrary to Jaggerss belief that passion and the terror of death
had a little shaken the womans intellects and that when she was set at
liberty, she was scared out of the ways of the world and went to him to
be sheltered (425), Mollys acceptance of her subjected role in Jaggerss
house may be read through the Narcissus-Echo myth as well. Jaggerss
narcissistic self-hugging personality needs the support of a mirroring image, an image that would remind him of his God-like power over peoples fates and would give him the strength to continue.
According to Virginia Woolf, women have served all these centuries
as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size (35). Therefore, the larger
the mans size, the smaller in stature the woman becomes. In our case,
Mollys submissiveness (she kept her eyes attentively on my guardian,
she would remove her hands from any dish she put before him, hesitat-

The Victim-Aggressor Duality in Great Expectations 359

ingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back and wanted him to speak
when she was nigh, if he had anything to say, 1985: 235) is the mirror
which Jaggers needs for constant reassurance of his being the Master, of
his domineering attitude which creates an enlarged patriarchal image of
himself. As Pip perceptively notices, Jaggers was very much aware of
Mollys submissive, yet tentative attitude towards him, as there was in
his manner a consciousness of this, and a purpose of always holding her
in suspense (235).
Jaggers makes plenty use of his dominant image both at his office
(he bullies people around, scares them off) and at home where he treats
Molly as if she were a tamed animal. Against her will, Jaggers clapped
his large hand on the housekeepers, like a trap (236) and ordered her
to show both her wrists to his young visitors. Her pleas to be left alone
(Master, Dont, Please, 236) are met with stubborn refusal until
Jaggers considers that the show was over: Thatll do, Molly, said Mr.
Jaggers, giving her a slight nod; you have been admired, and can go
(237). Jaggers addresses Molly as if she were a trained tamed beast used
to entertain people. Yet, even if she is reduced to a lesser human, to Pip
she has not lost the aura of a monster and witch:
I cannot say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to
be parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at the
theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if it were
all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out of the Witches
caldron. (235)

Molly is the other facet of Miss Havisham. The difference between them
lies in the distinction between the social classes they belong to. If the financial situation had been reversed, they would have very well fitted into
each others models. Missing a partner to reflect and be reflected by, Miss
Havisham needs the looking glass to mirror the other that completes her
ego. In the Molly-Jaggers relationship, Molly serves as the speculum for
her masters conflated ego just as the master is a constant reflection of the
consequences of Mollys wild nature. As Jaggerss slave, Molly is the extension of his Narcissistic personality. In their master-slave relation, the
strong ties that connect them reveal a more or less subconscious recognition of each other in a mutual reflection of their personalities of subject
and object into each other. They are both the subject and the object of the
other. Yet, the balance of their relationship is rather delicate. As a matter
of fact, it may be held under control as long as Molly is kept silent (as

360 Adina Ciugureanu

she actually is in the novel). If Molly had ever thought of speaking, of

telling her own truth, Jaggerss figure would have begun to shrink to a
more realistic dimension. As her masters speculum, a speaking Molly
would become the pool in which his narcissism would perish as would
her image of a face rising out of the Witches caldron.
The aggressor-victim paradigm in Dickenss Great Expectations is an
exceedingly rich source of distinct attitudes which the characters display
and more often than not surprise the reader with. Interestingly, each of
the aggressors was sometime a victim. Mrs. Gargery was a victim of
the patriarchal society in which a woman gained status only when she
got married. Her compliance with the society rules had a reverse effect
upon her: she turned into a vicious victimizer and fell prey to her own
aggression. The victim of a vicious man, Miss Havisham also falls into
the trap of her own aggressiveness and dies a victim. Likewise, Molly,
the victim of a cruel society, responds with similar cruelty, but is offered
the chance of survival on condition she accepts to return to a different,
yet comparable, victim position. The aggressor-victim duality in Great
Expectations reveals itself to be triangular: each of the three female characters suffers some kind of victimization before she unveils her aggressive nature, so strongly focused in the novel. With the exception of Miss
Havisham, what triggers the aggressiveness of the other two characters is
inferred in the text rather than explained. Yet, the three female characters
are made to suffer the consequences of their own behavior and become
victims of their own aggression. Is this divine retribution or commonsensical effects of cultural psychology by which people organize their lives
and then live the results of the degree to which their beliefs and desires
have (or have not) been fulfilled? Irrespective of the answer, there are, I
think, different kinds of pleasure that may be derived from reading about
these characters: the misogynic pleasure of seeing a woman put in her
place, the voyeuristic pleasure of peeping into a womans boudoir, and
the sadistic pleasure of holding a woman prisoner of her own faults and
misfortunes. All of these are tempered by the unease about the destiny of
the three women, no happy ending being available for their predicament.

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