CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE DICKENS' GIFT OF GARB: CLOTHING AND THEME IN GREAT EXPECTATIONS A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Honors by Linda Louise Break August, 1983 The Thesis of Linda Louise Break is approved: Arthur Lane, Chairman Honors Corrnni ttee California State University, Northridge ii ABSTRACT DICKENS' GIFT OF GARB: CLOTHING AND THEME IN GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Linda Louise Break Bachelor of Arts in English Honors This paper examines the thematic use of clothing in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Emphasis is placed on the subtle and various ways Dickens used his characters' choice of, and attitudes toward clothing to support and con­ vey the themes of the novel. Through Dickens' art, seeming­ ly insignificant articles, such as an apron, a handkerchief, or a watch chain, are used to reveal a character's motiva­ tion and to contribute to the deeper meaning of the work. The major theme discussed is the conflict between appearance and reality. This theme is supported by means of the cloth­ ing/disguise motif. Various characters' clothing is examin­ ed in relation to its thematic significance. iii 1 Any mention of Charles Dickens' work is certain to evoke thoughts of Victorian profusion, elaboration, and in­ tricacy. Dickens is well-known for the host of characters and the vast amount of detail that he incorporates into his novels. But Dickens is no ordinary writer of novels. His extraordinary genius can be seen not only in his enormous creativity, but in the care he lavishes on every character and detail in his writings. In Great Expectations, Dickens disciplined a multitude of elements, bringing them into balance and making them thematic. Clothing is one of these elements and is especially expressive. Even such apparently insignificant articles as an apron, a walking stick, or a watch chain can serve thematic ends. Pip's observation of clothing and his perception of the world is thematically important in Great Expectations. He observes the world with a combination of acuity and blindness. Here is Pip on Joe's holiday clothes and his own: In his working clothes, Joe was a well-knit character­ istic looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore then, fitted him or seemed to belong to him. On the present festive occasion he emerged from his room ... the picture of misery in a full suit of Sunday peniten­ tials. As to me, I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an 2 Accoucheur Policeman and ... delivered over to her to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law .... Even when I was taken to have a new set of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs. 1 Here we see an early evidence of Pip's sense of guilt, and his incipient awareness that clothing may not always accu- rately reflect one's character. Pip's perception of things is often based on outward appearance. Dickens, on the other hand, is interested in the reality beneath, and in the disparity between appearance and reality--a universal perplexity. To find one's identity and place in the world, one must discover the truth about things and persons, and separate false values from true. This is the business of life. Great Expectations is the story of a poor orphan boy's search through a threatening and deceptive world for the truth about things and about himself. As the novel opens, the seven-year old Pip says: I never saw my father or my mother, ... my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreason- ably derived from their tombstones .... My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of 1 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Washington Square Press, 1973), p. 20. Hereafter, all references to Great Expectations are from this edition cited within the text by chapter and page. 3 things, seems to have been gained on a ... raw afternoon towards evening. (1:1) It was a cold, fearful, lonely world that met Pip's dawning consciousness. This is not surprising. Pip is an orphan, a child especially vulnerable to the buffetings of theworl~ and his perception of his world as a bleak, inhospitable place--a "dark flat wilderness"--is not, given his circum­ stances, unjustified (1:2). Yet, Pip admits that his fancies are sometimes unreasonable. A child needs someone to help him recognize the truth and to separate reality from illusion, but on every hand, Pip is surrounded by people who have adopted false and unnatural identities. These disguises are conveyed not only by speeches and actions, but by clothing. Some people are dissatisfied with their natural identities, others use clothing to deceive or manipulate others. Mrs. Joe, not content with her feminine role, wears a prickly, sex-denying apron. Miss Havisham wears her decayed bridal finery. Her appear­ ance is part of her plan to revenge herself for the wrong that has been done to her. Mr. Jaggers wears his clothing as devices to manipulate others. Mr. Wopsle, who is un­ satisfied with his life as an ordinary parish clerk and seeks excitement, takes up a new life as an actor, and wears costumes to verify his fantasies. And Pip, unhappily "common," longs to improve his station in life. He wears the clothing of a gentleman long before he learns what it 4 means to be a gentleman. In the early pages of the novel we meet Pip's elder sister Georgiana Maria, Mrs. Joe Gargery. She is the first of several characters in this work whose clothing is a self­ assumed disguise. Mrs. Joe is a violent woman who dominates and terrorizes the two members of her family--her husband Joe, and her twenty-years-younger brother, Pip, whom she has "brought up by hand" after the death of their parents. Mrs. Joe, a large, bony, ruddy-skinned woman, "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" (2:6). Her apron is as full of significance as it is of pins and needles. Dickens' use of the word "impregnable" is marvelously apt. Mrs. Joe, a cold, shrewish, castrating woman, is a mother only by default and not by nature. She has taken steps to prevent any close personal approach. She has masked and barricaded her sexuality. Her breasts are defended by the bib of her coarse apron thrust full of sharp, touch-me­ not pins and needles, and her nether parts are shielded by the heavy skirt of the apron. Mrs. Joe effectively denies her femininity and asserts her self-proclaimed martyrdom. Because of the death of their mother, Mrs. Joe has had to become a surrogate mother to Pip and considers herself a martyr because of it. So convinced is she of her own martyr­ dom that she has taken her apron as a badge of her suffer­ ing. The apron's course cloth is reminiscent of the habit 5 of one of the penitential orders. Yet Mrs. Joe is far from penitential. "She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore his apron so much," and as Pip says," ... I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all" (2:6). Mrs. Joe apparently considered herself a domestic St. Sebastian, bristling pins and needles. And if Joe and Pip did not constantly acknowledge that fact, Mrs. Joe pressed home her point with their daily 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'' (2:8). In this contrary way, Mrs. Joe masquerades as the suffering martyr, while Pip and Joe are the true sufferers. Pip certainly knew that the treatment he received at the hands of Mrs. Joe was not kind, but he was confused by the constant admonition to "be forever grateful to all friends, but especially to them which brought you up by hand!" (7:49). When Pip was summoned to Satis House by .Miss Havisham, he recalled that Mrs. Joe "pounced on me like an eagle on a lamb." She kneaded, thumped, harrowed, rasp­ ed, and trussed him up in "clean linen of the stiffest character, like . sackcloth ... and delivered [him] over to Mr. Pumblechook who formally received [him] as if he were the Sheriff" (7:49). Given experiences like this, it is not surprising that Pip was in some confusion about his culpability or lack of it, and what role he should 6 rightfully play. Miss Havisham's name alerts one to the fact that she is not what she seems to be. 2 The "sham" or "have a sham" 1n her name indicates that she is an "impostor of a woman" as Estella calls her (33:257). Miss Havisham's masquerade 1s complex and ambiguous. On the morning of her impending wedding, while dressing in her bridal finery, she received the news that her bridegroom-to-be had absconded. Miss Havisham's expectations were destroyed. From that time she preserved everything just as it was at the awful moment when she learned that she had been deserted. She memorial- ized the hour of her humiliation by stopping all the clocks and covering all the windows.