Christopher Ricks asks, in his essay on Dickens's Great Expectations: "How does Pip [the novel's fictional narrator] keep our sympathy ? (Ricks 202). The first of his responses to this central inquiry is: that Pip is "mistreated by his sister Joe and by all the visitors to the house" and that Pip "surprises" his unrequited lover, Estella, with "contagious contempt for his common thing” (Ricks 202). In answering this way, Ricks immediately assumes a dichotomous contrast between the natural human and the educated (practiced) human. Ricks says that the natural Pip is good and therefore retains the reader's sympathy while the manipulated Pip is evil and behaves in a way that the reader cannot sympathize with and wants to condemn. The reader sides with the base Pip and blames not him, but his situation and others, for his problematic behavior. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get the original essay The abbreviated childhood stories provided by many of the novel's characters support this charged nature/culture divide, in which nature is the base and education is the biased corruption of this base. The reader sympathizes and is intrigued by the stories the characters tell about their childhoods, as the stories easily explain why these people act the way they do and make excuses for them when they act maliciously. Children act according to the way they were raised to remedy and balance the past, and their basic good character only reappears once this task is accomplished. Miss Havisham, the schadenfreud terrorist of the novel, “was a spoiled child. Her mother died when she was a baby and her father refused her nothing” (Dickens 165). So when she grows up and desires a particular man and doesn't get him, she becomes, literally, stuck at that moment (twenty to nine) until she balances the scales by "breaking" Pip's "heart" with his adopted daughter, Estella. Miss Havisham's brother, Arthur, who grew up in similar circumstances (dead mother, same father) "proved tempestuous, extravagant, unworthy of respect – altogether evil" (Dickens 166). He's so used to getting everything he wants that when his father denies him a large inheritance, he steals it from his sister with the help of her ill-intentioned fiancé, Compeyson. Young Estella also falls into this mold. When Miss Havisham asks her for love, Estella responds, “if you ask me to give you what you have never given me, my gratitude and my duty cannot accomplish the impossible” (Dickens 279). She cannot love because Miss Havisham denied her that by raising her, and so poor Estella enters into a loveless relationship with Drummle which causes her to suffer. Only then can she begin to engage with a true heart. Characters residing at the other end of the economic spectrum surrender to the same pattern. Magwitch explains that he was "raised to be...a hot spirit" by his indifferent environment (Dickens 301). He doesn't remember adults watching over him, so he had to steal to save his life. Like Miss Havisham, he changes when he balances the scales by giving Pip the money and help he never had, and getting love in return. We do not know how or by whom Orlick, Mrs. Joe's abuser and Pip's would-be murderer, was raised, and the lack of this knowledge is what allows the reader to view him as so completely vicious. The adult human does not only apply to the antagonists of the novel, it can also be applied to its protagonists. Joediplomatically recounts his youth to Pip in front of the fire near the beginning of the book. He tells us that his father "struck my mother in the most merciless manner... [and] hammered me with a rigor matched only by the vigor with which he did not hammer his anvil ” (Dickens 44). In order to balance things out in his adult life, he intentionally enters a relationship in which the woman mistreats the man. Her relationship with Pip's sister complements her parents' relationship, just as Pip's relationship with Estella concludes Miss Havisham's relationship with Compeyson. Even Mrs. Pocket, whom we don't see much, we know was "brought up from her cradle... as one who must marry a title and who must be protected from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge." As a result, she “had grown very ornamental, but perfectly powerless and useless” (Dickens 174). It is “perfectly” because it is exactly what was intended, and the only fitting end to such a beginning. The natural look of each character is good, while heavy manipulation is bad. The way the narrator uses the words “natural” and “unnatural” in his descriptions of people confirms this. He consistently describes his best friend, Herbert Pocket (173), Herbert's fiancée, Clara (343), his helpful guardian, Mr. Pocket (173), and Joe (259) as "natural." “I use the word “natural,” he tells us, “in the sense that it is not affected” -- “unaffected,” that is, by corrupt hands, like those of Mme. Joe and Miss Havisham (Dickens 173). As a result, he describes those he doesn't like using the word "unnatural." All the actors in the production of Hamlet, for example, fall into this category, including the Jewish theater. the man who takes Pip to see Wopsle and Wopsle himself (235). Collaborating with this sense that nature is good is the downright inappropriate use of the notion of “bad nature” by the same narrator of the novel. The only time such a thing is mentioned is. by Pip about Biddy. “It’s a bad side of human nature,” he tells her (Dickens 139) when he projects onto her that she is jealous that he is leaving her and Joe behind to go to his “great expectations.” "It's immediately clear that Pip is not right to accuse him of having these feelings, and when he comes back and talks to him about it again, saying, "It's a really bad side of human nature! " (Dickens 261), it is even more obvious that he is completely out of line. Ultimately, his melodramatic apology for his disloyalty shows that he too understands that this phrase was inappropriate. The fact that it is the only time where the concept appears, although it seems relevant to truly evil characters like Orlick, Compeyson and Drummle, shows that Dickens rejects its validity as a concept. However, even so he leaves us with the notion of good nature. it explicitly seems that good lies in nature, evil in unbalanced upbringing, Dickens' underlying message is more complicated. There is a Darwinian undercurrent to the development of our main heroes. Evolution. , of course, natural, but it is simultaneously implemented by the nurturers: it is both The critic John Schad says that Dickens describes Pip's unknown boss, the convict Abel Magwitch, who is the originator of the. Pip's evolution from blacksmith to gentleman like "Nature" itself: Pip is visited by a man [Magwitch], or rather a nature - "hardened", as he is, "by exposure to bad weather", whose voice is indistinguishable from wind and rain, and as loathsome "as a snake" or a "terrible beast" - which is later revealed to know itself in exactly the same way that he knows the outside world: “Iknew my name was Magwitch.... How did I know that? Just like I knew the names of the birds in the hedges. (Schad 66) Similarly, Schad states that Pip, upon visiting Magwitch on this same revelatory occasion, discovers to his horror that it is this "dunghound...beast...[or] snake" who has “makes a gentleman.” " of him, that it is - as Pip declares - a "creature which created [me]" and that therefore he has, so to speak, a natural history... [an] animal genealogy in which he is that the last generation (Schad 73) Pip is a product of literary evolution (that is to say of the process acted in a singular life. He accesses a higher layer of society thanks to an act of). personified nature, and then is knocked down to another stratum by the same personification. In this scene alone, the reader sees how nature itself, in Magwitch's body, brings him both into and out of his new life as a gentleman. of this life. Jaggers indicates that there is also an evolving tension in Estella's life. This time, like Magwitch with Pip, he plays Nature When Pip tells Mr. Jaggers of Estella's strange parentage. responds with his story of placing Estella in Miss Havisham's care, speaking of himself in the third person “Explain that,” Jaggers begins, “he [Mr. Jaggers] lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was that they were being generated in great numbers for certain destruction... State the hypothesis here was a pretty little child [ Estella] out of the ordinary who could be saved” (Dickens 377). Jaggers here describes a landscape of children competing with each other and with their living environment. Jaggers himself is the natural selection that saves one and leaves others to perish, perhaps even because of his "prettyness." After Pip undergoes his two evolutions: from laborer to gentleman, and from white-collar gentleman, he emerges, like his burned arm, “disfigured, but quite serviceable” (Dickens 380). It would be ridiculous to say that fire is less a part of nature than the arm itself, and it is a physical metaphor for the influences that others have had on Pip. Education (others, fire) is an element of nature, it is not separate from it. This is why Dickens uses evolutionary language to describe the changes that Pip and Estella undergo: evolution itself is an integral part of nature, change is an integral part of essence. Human nature is not stagnant. The scene in which Estella finally rejects Pip embodies this. Speaking of her lack of feeling, Estella states: “It [the lack] is in the nature formed in me” (331, emphasis added). We normally think of nature as something set in stone from birth, immutable and unchanging. However, Dickens's work highlights the artificiality of separating human behavior from the larger plan of nature. This is not a binary system operating on Pip in Great Expectations, it is singularly natural. Estella and others are not born with a certain nature, but grow into it, much like in the evolutionary process apes transformed into humans over time. Additionally, the aspects of evil (or evil) that Dickens gives to some of his characters are appealing. to the reader because they are complicated and interesting. We're curious about why Orlick commits heinous acts, but we're not curious about why Biddy is kind. Dickens hereby indicates that the purely good characters he portrays may not be the best after all. It conveys this deeper message not through the common Victorian pedantic means in which good characters gain happiness. As his contemporary George Eliot does in his novels Silas Marner and, 1992.