Great Expectations (Cliffs Notes)
by Debra A. Bailey
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Book Summary Information
Author: Debra A. BaileyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-06-13
ISBN: 0764585983
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Cliffs Notes
Book Reviews of Great Expectations (Cliffs Notes)
Book Review: Don't Cheat Yourself!
Summary: 1 Stars
It's not my business, dear student, if you cheat on your homework by using Cliff's Notes to prepare for a test or by plagiarizing a review of Great Expectations for your English class. You'll get caught and/or you'll learn nothing. But don't cheat yourself by never reading "Great Expectations"! It's not an easy book for most American readers in the 21st Century. There are all sorts of allusions in it to people and events you won't recognize. There are several chapters that satirize the popular theater of London in the 1860s, that are incomprehensible even for scholars and professors nowadays. It may be true that the book is too difficult for you. In that case, don't fake it! Admit to yourself that you have something to achieve, something worth working toward, and save "Great Expectations" for another year of your life. Don't be 'put off' by the challenge, and don't be smug about your ignorance.
Here's what I think the book is about:
"Great Expectations" is the story of the education of two orphans: the girl Estella, who is adopted by a deranged heiress, Miss Havisham, who expects her to wreak cold-hearted revenge on "men" for her own deception and abandonment at the altar; and the boy Pip, raised by his much older childless sister and her blacksmith husband in clear expectation that the boy will serve an apprenticeship at the forge. Pip is our narrator of his own education in life, from early childhood to hard-earned maturity. Pip's 'expectations' are changed when he is strangely chosen by Miss Havisham as a playmate (and potential romantic victim) of Estella; Pip gratifies the crazed old lady's expectations by falling hopelessly in love with Estella, who both taunts and entices him. After some years, Pip is informed, mysteriously that he has great expectations of an inheritance of vast wealth from an unknown patron, whose only expectation in return is that Pip be educated as a 'gentleman'. The "expectations" cut both ways for both orphans -- what they can expect as well as what is expected of them -- and plainly their expectations must eventually clash.
Pip has other expectations as well. He expects to be punished. The sister who 'raises him by hand' instills that expectation in him in his infancy, both by thrashing him capriciously and by harping on his unworthiness and ingratitude. In the very first scene of the novel, Pip is frightened witless by a fierce escaped felon, who seizes the child in the dusky churchyard, by the graves of his unknown parents, and commands him to steal food and a file from his adoptive home, and to meet him with them the next morning, on pain of a gruesome death if he betrays his hiding place. Pip complies, steals the food and file and suffers pangs of conscience and the dreadful expectation of being discovered as a thief, a fear that will haunt him for the rest of his narrative. Despite Pip's caution, the felon is captured and returned to the prison ship, later to be transported for life to Australia. A thoughtful reader will no doubt expect to hear from him again, and that expectation will be gratified in various odd manners.
"Great Expectations" is an intricately knotted tale of unlikely encounters and implausible coincidences. It was intended as such. Elaborate contrivances were the mainstay of 'literary' entertainment from the comedies of Plautus and Terence to the novels of Fielding and Austen; "Great Expectations" is fantastically contrived, but to fault the writing for its artifice is to miss the whole point that the author was consciously expanding upon the most venerable traditions of fiction. All in one piece, "Great Expectations" conserves the characteristics of 'Bildungsroman' and 'Picaresque', with the same formula of Revealed Parentage used by Shakespeare and Fielding. However, the orphan whose parentage will be revealed is not the orphan most readers will expect! And the revelation will be stunningly unexpected! Preposterous! That defiance of the reader's expectations is, of course, part of the fun.
"Great Expectations" is enormous fun. Funny, sentimental, suspenseful, grotesque! Replete with colorful characters: the shrewish Mrs Joe, the unctuous Uncle Pumblechook, the scrupulous shyster lawyer Jaggers, among many others. But there's a great deal more to this novel than humor and sentiment. "Great Expectations" is profoundly subversive of the conventional values of British society in the 19th Century. I for one have no doubt that Charles Dickens intended his novel to be subversive.
But subversive of what? First, of the expectations of Birth and Class. Pip, a "rough working boy" of the meanest class, is made a 'gentleman' simply by an ample supply of money; Pip is not 'born' a gentleman, and if the readers of Dickens's era allowed themselves to expect that his parentage would eventually be discovered to be genteel, they were in for a surprise. That a convincing 'gentleman' could be made, not born, was indeed a subversive idea in the England of the 1860s.
Then, of the expectations of Virtue and Class. Throughout this novel, virtue is often in inverse proportion to wealth and status. The most virtuous figure in the novel is the illiterate blacksmith Joe, a man of the plainest honesty and loyalty but also of the finest sensitivity. The least virtuous might be Bentley Drummle, the brutish scion of wealth and class who becomes Estella's abusive husband. But the correlation of virtue and class is not simplistic; the subversive notion here is that no such correlation exists.
And then, of the expectation of Justice in a society dominated by Wealth and Class. Whatever one makes of the slyly scrupulous and famously successful legal maneuvers of Lawyer Jagger, it's painfully clear that Justice can be 'gamed' and Innocence purchased. Punishment falls most heavily on those who had least chance of avoiding criminality, those of the lowest class and scantiest means, in this narrative the felon Magwitch, a hardened ruffian who evolves into an almost saintly martyr to his own generosity and to the rigidly unjust society that has never expected anything from him but villainy.
It's possible to forget what a wonderful writer Charles Dickens was if, like me, you read all of his novels years ago. "Great Expectations" was the first unabridged Victorian novel I ever read, in the ninth grade. It seems incredible that I could have handled it at that age -- the syntax is challenging and the allusions are obscure -- but it's indelibly associated with my memories of my first flirtation, with a 'young woman' who was more mature than I, as young women usually are than boys. We self-consciously acted out scenes of the novel, calling each other Pip and Estella, in the orchestra practice rooms of our school. I played French horn at that time and she played cello. Who knows, perhaps we'd both read abridged texts or the Classic Comic version of the novel, but she treated me imperiously and I lapped it up. That was some fifty-six years ago, and I've stalled until now before re-reading it. I'm abashed to find how superb "Great Expectations" truly is.
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