Great Expectations

March 13, 2026

I have been having a problem ... I want to be actively updating my site but not at the expense of quality. "Quality." I once made a promise that whenever I sent out anything to the internet, it would be informative or entertaining. No "yesterday I saw a bird" bullshit. I'm realizing now, how vain of a promise that was. Who am I to say that my things are going to be worth something to someone? No matter how silly, funny, cute the things I share are, if I keep myself to an absurd standard, I will always fall short. Because worth is innate and every utterance can become special or something!

I also realized that this part of this site technically isn't visible so anything here goes. Not fixing the core issue but finding a way to bypass the alarms. Lalala.

But this ain't about me.

Great Expectations was part of my high school's English curriculum, though we were encouraged to skip and read only the assigned chapters. Not enough time in those 8 months to teach the entire thing, we gotta move along so we can read Life of Pi. That and there is no way in hell high schoolers are reading all that.

There were lots of complaints along the lines of, "This book is too long and full of fluff because Dickens was paid by the word." No, this is not true, a brief search says. He was actually paid for every installment. (I'm only finding this out right now and what the hell?? So he's just insane?).

I can't remember any opinions other than that and my own. I was a pretty lovesick high schooler so I had a soft spot for Pip and his story, the bits of it that I learned through lectures. I've carried this for years- this is my darkest secret- and when a TV adaptation came out in 2023, I watched it. I couldn't get through it all because it was weird and grotesque. Imagine my fucking surprise when I found out that Pip's sister doesn't have a weird BDSM moment with Joe and actually dies a third of the way through. What the fuck.

I'm not done yet but I'm so surprised at how simple and full of drama the story is. I really shouldn't be. It was a story written for the magazine and the life expectancy at that time was 43 or something. Readers at the time didn't have brainrot, but all humans love dramatics.

Ok, ok- but it is really crazy how simple it is. All symbolism is thought through for the reader by Pip or told outright. During Miss Havisham's first meeting:

"Look at me," said Miss Havisham. "You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?"

I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie comprehended in the answer "No."

"Do you know what I touch here?" she said, laying her hands, one upon the other, on her left side.

"Yes, ma'am." (It made me think of the young man.)

"What do I touch?"

"Your heart."

"Broken!"

A woman who always wears her wedding dress, doesn't leave her room, shuts the light out, keeps the clocks frozen, goes by "Miss"... is heartbroken? Oh, shit. This can be forgiven because of Havisham's prideful personality but it's a constant throughout the novel.

I guess what I was expecting was something similar to Crime & Punishment, something more abstract? The horse in Raskolnikov's dream is representative of himself I guess.... I don't know...... I only chose that example because it was the only part I remembered. Old and a classic doesn't mean it's 3000 layers deep.

This is striking to me because history is a weak point of mine. I have no concept of the earthly timeline. Yet in Great Expectations (old), Pip makes references to Hamlet (old) and The Modern Prometheus (yeah I said it, I mean. Old.). Quotes below because I like both of them.

Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella, and miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert's Clara, or play Hamlet to Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it.

While I complied, he, not comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him between the fingers of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.

Anyhow, the book is quite fun. I've been taking my time with it and it makes me feel like it was I with a life expectancy of 43, looking forward to the next installment. It's your basic rags to riches, zero to hero(?..), bought by One Direction story but I find my heart being warmed by it anyways. Pip is first characterized by his fear and his looking at everything like O_O and he never grows out of it.

More good excerpts:

"Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?"

"Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."

She drew her arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?"

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces— and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper— love her, love her, love her!"

[...]

My guardian lay at the Boar in the next room to mine. Far into the night, Miss Havisham's words, "Love her, love her, love her!" sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, "I love her, I love her, I love her!" hundreds of times.

"It is not easy for even you," said Estella, "to know what satisfaction it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. —I was. You had not your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity what not, that is soft and soothing. —I had. You did not gradually open your round childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up in the night. —I did."

"Or," said Estella, "—which is a nearer case— if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and devour her, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her; —if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?"