Great Expectations is not just about criminality and guilt but also about redemption [redemption: atonement for guilt, deliverance from sin or crime]. Redemption in this novel comes from love; it may be selfless love for a particular individual, like Joe's love for Pip, or compassion for other human beings, like Joe's kind feelings for the convict Magwitch. Redemption should not be confused with happiness; redemption may be the result of disillusionment or may even result in death. The greatest symbol of redemption in Western culture is Christ, who offered human beings the possibility of redemption from original sin by suffering the agonies of crucifixion and sacrificing his life.

A related question is whether Pip fully forgives her. At a conscious level, he certainly is moved by her remorse and seems to forgive her. Is this true at a subconscious level? Is his vision of her hanging caused by resentment and hostility toward her? Are the same feelings suggested in his description of extinguishing the flames engulfing her, in their "struggling like desperate enemies" (page 404)? Or does this reading push psychological interpretation too far and should Pip's description of his last visits to Miss Havisham be taken at face value?

with a trustful look, as if he were confident that I had seen some small redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when I was a little child. As to the rest, he was humble and contrite, and I never knew him to complain (page 461).

Pip's redemption begins with his relationship with Magwitch; he moves from revulsion at Magwitch's appearance, manners, and social status to perceiving his humanity and to finally loving him selflessly.

        For now my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe (page 450).

When Magwitch dies, Pip prays, "O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!" (page 465). This prayer is a misquotation of the New Testament verse, "O Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 13:18). Does Pip's substitution of me for him indicate some remaining condescension and snobbery toward Magwitch? Or has Dickens merely remembered the text incorrectly, so that the misquotation has no significance in our understanding of Pip's growth? Paul Pickering believes "The last stage of Pip's progression is reached when he learns to love the criminal and to accept his own implication in the common guilt." Is Pickering's view of Pip's regeneration accurate, or does Pip still have to come to terms with his rejection of Joe? Is it enough for Pip to wholeheartedly and unreservedly love Magwitch? Must he also be able to love Joe in the same way? He has come to accept Magwitch's love; does he still have to accept Joe's unconditional love?

Pip falls ill with brain fever. His hallucinations express his passivity and his loss of identity or self in becoming a gentleman; his distress at his social elevation and his inability to control or even direct his life comes out in his cries to be released from his place as a brick in the wall or a steel beam whirling over a gulf. Joe nurses him back to health and protects him. Temporarily as helpless as a child, Pip accepts Joe's love and attentions again.

Does Pip's convalesence give Pip the opportunity to give up any remaining false pride and social values in his relationship with Joe, his first father? When he chooses not to tell Joe about his debts, does he want to keep Joe from paying his debts, which the narrator Pip looking back hopes was his motive, and/or is he motivated by pride, a desire not to let Joe see how he has fallen? Realizing that Joe is pulling away as he recovers, he decides to trust Joe completely and share the full truth of his situation–on the next day. Is postponing his confession a valid decision or does it show reluctance to admit his fall? Does the postponement, with the opportunity it gives Joe to leave, foreshadow the fact that it is too late for Pip to return to his old life or any part of his life with Joe? Is this why the adult Pip finds another Pip sitting on his stool before the fire, when he returns to England after eleven years in the East? The fires of his childhood home and the forge have symbolized love, in contrast to the cold light of the stars and Stella.

In Edgar Johnson's view of Pip's redemption, the virtues that ultimately save him are mainly those he unconsciously absorbed from Joe in his childhood, and his return to a life of modest usefulness is a repudiation of the ideal of living off of other people's work. Pip comes to realize that his society and its grandiose material dreams cheapen, distort, and deny human values. Humphrey House raises an interesting point in connection with Pip's snobbery, which is one of Pip's moral and emotional crimes. He denies that Pip is a snob:

The real snobs are the characters blinded to human considerations by the worship of wealth and social position, [they] are Pumblechook and Mrs. Pocket, and Pip sees through them from the start. ...to call him a snob is to suggest that he was wrong to feel discontented with life on the marshes and could have chosen to act otherwise than he did, whereas much of the energy of Dickens's imagination in the early part of the novel goes in showing how mean and limiting that life is, and how helpless Pip himself is in face of the contradictory forces at work on him.

Jaggers sees but cannot accept the cruelty of his society and "the atmosphere of evil" in which he lives (page 416). He makes one compassionate effort to change the fates of a mother and child. In comparison with Joe, does he accept full or limited responsibility? He makes the mother his servant and gives the child up for adoption, whereas Joe marries the sister or mother-figure and accepts full responsibility and suffers all the consequences of trying to save the child, whom he loves. Certainly, there is a difference in their situations, for one mother is a murderess who threatened to destroy her own child and Mrs. Joe's criminality consists of emotional and physical abuse of the child and her husband as well as her self-serving pretense of martyrdom.

Except for his involvement with Estella and her mother, Jaggers refuses to accept responsibility by looking only at the facts, which he can control. This system does not seem to be completely effective; he still needs to dissociate himself from the immorality and viciousness of his surroundings, as is expressed by his washing his hands, using scented soap, and even, upon occasion, gargling and cleaning his fingernails.

His clerk Wemmick leads a divided life; at the office, he is unfeeling efficiency personified, as his mechanical post-office mouth symbolizes. As Jaggers's representative, he walks through Newgate, shaking hands only with the condemned prisoners and accepting gifts of "portable property" from them. At home, however, he is a different man; he loves his father and imaginatively transforms his home into a castle. In his Walworth life, he becomes Pip's friend and confidant. Does his love for his father and Miss Skiffins redeem him? Or does it at least preserve him from the dehumanization and isolation that afflict Jaggers?

The harmony in which Jaggers and Wemmick work is temporarily disrupted when each learns of the softer or feeling side of the other. Their normal impersonal relationship is reestablished when Wemmick ejects a sniveling client from the office, "I'll have no feelings here" (page 418). Dickens uses this incident to do more than characterize Jaggers and Wemmick and their working relationship; he is also attacking the lack of feeling in business and business relationships. T.A. Jackson believes that Jaggers reflected "Dickens's deepening sense that success in business in the bourgeois world can be won only at the expense of everything nobly generous, elevating, sympathetic, and humane."

          The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the judge, linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err (page 462).

DISCUSSION OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS

May 11, 2002