Miss Havisham

When I taught Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, I framed Miss Havisham as a villain.  Or, I should say, I thought the novel framed her as a villain.

She's a woman who was jilted on her wedding day by a lover who turned out to have double-crossed her with the help of her brother.  In the aftermath of her heartbreak, she becomes angry, bitter, and hateful.  She adopts a baby girl, Estella, and raises her to have no understanding of love, purposely training her to break men's hearts.  She toys with Pip, the narrator and hero of the novel, letting him assume that she is his benefactor, that she ultimately wants him to marry Estella.  She is cruel to her family (although, to be fair, all of but one of them are just waiting for her to die).  She is utterly absorbed by her own pain.  She doesn't understand why Estella finally turns away from her, even though she deliberately made Estella the way she is.

We talked about her in class as one of the "monsters" of the novel--an example of what a human being becomes when they allow themselves to get so caught up in their own pain that they come to enjoy inflicting pain on others.  An exaggerated depiction of someone who lets a bitter disappointment infect their entire life, their entire future, and even blight the lives of the next generation.

I never had a lot of sympathy for Miss Havisham.

And now?

Now I feel like I am Miss Havisham.

I understand her in a way I had never expected.  I, too, want to stop all the clocks and refuse to move forward.  I want to wear the same clothes day after day, letting them slowly fall apart.  I want to take the food and flowers that people have sent and leave them sitting on the table, rotting and attracting bugs and spiders.  I want to keep the shades drawn and the room dark.  I want to refuse to see people.  I want to never leave my house.  I want to be like Miss Havisham.


Instead, I make myself take a shower.  I write.  I read.  I do laundry.  I watch TV.  I look at Eliza's pictures and cry.

I don't want to become a monster.  I don't want to become so overwhelmed by my own sadness that I cease to function entirely.

But still.  I don't want to leave the house by myself.  I get dizzy and realize that I've forgotten to breathe.  I put on clean clothes everyday, but then I spend the day curled up on my couch, waiting for David to get home from work. 

I am not Miss Havisham, I tell myself.  I am clinging to the hope that my life is not marked by tragedy forever.  I am holding fast to the possibility that, as a friend wrote to me in an e-mail, this is a great sadness, but not a harbinger of things to come.


Sometimes I believe this.  Sometimes I do not.

Either way, I understand Miss Havisham differently.  Dickens depicts her as a monster, but I know what it feels like to want to be monstrous.  Because sometimes being human is just too hard.