Dickens’s Great Expectations illustrates the realization of castration anxiety. Each of the central female characters in this novel thwart Pip’s expectations. While the novel’s plot seems to focus on the Pip’s economic desires (and how they relate to his social ones), it is also clear that Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and Estella stunt his narrative progress. As Kathleen Sell argues, Pip’s narrative is a narrative of shame, which “stems from his desire to abandon the world of masculine bonding and labor at the forge” and, thus, his “desires for class mobility and for Estella involve a shift from homosocial to heterosexual bonds” (204). As Sell continues to argue in “The Narrator’s Shame: Masculine Identity in Great Expectations” “it is through Estella that his failure of identity is connected to the failure of the feminine in the novel that threatens to undermine the possibility of the masculine identity” (211). If the feminine failure threatens (or, more accurately, in the case of Pip fulfills this threat) to undermine Victorian masculine identity, then the threat is a threat of castration by the feminine hand. The women in Great Expectations, those that are most central to the plot (Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and Estella) pervert the
traditional locus of castration anxiety in that they work to castrate their femininity in order to gain traditional masculine power. Once they have obtained this power (the point at which Pip introduces the reader to them) they levy the threat of castration upon Pip, thus thwarting his expectations of masculine identity. Each of these characters must be tamed, punished, or annihilated.
Mrs. Joe stands in for Pip’s dead mother. Pip’s growth process is initially stunted by his domestic atmosphere—an atmosphere wholly dictated by Mrs. Joe’s ram-pages and by her
“tickler.” In the earliest descriptions of Mrs. Joe, Pip says she “almost always wore a course 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” (8). Dickens presents the maternal figure as
“impregnable” and further depicts her understanding of motherhood as a burden. The pins stuck in bosom are a representation of her sadomasochism. The pins remind her of the “pain” she must suffer as a domestic servant while they also indicate to others her ability to master pain in order to rule the home. Mrs. Joe is “destructive primarily because [she denies] motherhood, and since Dickens equates motherhood with feminine identity, this denial becomes an irreparable breach, a violation of self and gender that eventually results in disaster (Hartog 248). Furthermore, Mrs.
Joe appropriates the phallus and levies harsh punishment to all of those who stand in opposition to her will. Pip documents her physical abuse toward himself and toward her emasculated husband, Joe: “By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him” (11-12). Her rampaging often leads to Pip’s punishment with tar-water or, worse even, beatings administered by Mrs. Joe’s phallic possession, the Tickler. Pip’s fear of Mrs. Joe sends him to search for a maternal figure, which he finds in Joe. Mrs. Joe’s threat of castration effectually castrates Joe and makes him the maternal source for Pip’s expectation of nurture. In order for Pip’s narrative to move past the forge in order to escape the eventual castration awaiting him by the hand of his sister, Mrs. Joe must be punished. The textual punishment, as I have argued, is severe. Orlick attacks Mrs. Joe, leaving her unable to speak, use Tickler, and “destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was wife of Joe” (117).
Miss Havisham’s threat to Pip’s textual productive desire (his masculine desire to secure financial stability in order to marry and fulfill the Victorian ego-image) may be less physical, but
remains more central to the text’s plot. As Pip’s earliest “benefactor,” she lures him to her house of ruin in order to set the stage for Estella’s repeated rebuke. Another sadomasochist, Havisham enjoys the scene she sets in her ill-lit drawing room. As she positions shiny jewelry on Estella’s bosom, Pip fixes her as the pinnacle of masculine desire. In addition to her desire for Estella to break men’s hearts, Miss Havisham represents the tainted mother. Both Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham lack biological children, which in part makes up for their aberrant feminine sexuality.
However, in the case of Miss Havisham, she is a “mother;” she adopts Estella because she wants to “save her from misery like [her] own. At first [she] meant no more” (395). However, her desire to have someone to love turned into a craving to “take an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride’ could use to quench her desire for vengeance. (394). Dickens reminds the reader of the taint of aberrant female sexuality: her yellow wedding gown, her tattered stockings, the beetle-infested cake, and her “diseased mind” (394). Miss Havisham must be annihilated from the text in order for Pip to prosper as the narrator of his identity.
While Estella’s work in the beginning mirrors the desires of her adoptive mother, the second (and published) ending to the text suggests her repentant state, which may indicate a possibility for redemption. Like Molly, Jagger’s housekeeper, Estella can be tamed. Before she is tamed, however, she must suffer on the same level as Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham. Since the
“failure of feminine identity leads inevitably to the failure of masculine identity” (Hartog 253), Pip’s bildungsroman depends upon Estella’s feminine recuperation. However, Estella must first suffer. She must first confront her maker and confront her destiny to lack a capacity of love.
She must marry Bentley Drummel and be physically abused by his hand. It is only after the text
punishes Estella that she can rise from the ashes of Satis House and walk hand in hand with Pip, with “the shadow of no parting from her” (479).
Dickens’s novels present an opportunity to uncover a clear masculine anxiety. The textual production works to allay this fear of castration in order to rebuild society in the visage of the harmonic middle-class domestic ideal. Women play a central role in this image they support the very existence and prosperity of Victorian masculinity. If textual productions offer female authors a way to harness power through a process of self-castration, these same productions open the field to the existence of women who seek to castrate men. Dickensian female characters pervert the locus of castration anxiety from father to mother, they re-write systems of language and confuse fixed signification, and, finally, they seek to destroy the possibility for masculine identity. However threatening these women are to Dickens’s male characters (and to Dickens himself) the text provides the space for reconstruction and social improvement.
Chapter Four
Irresponsible: The Incessant Work of Self-Murder in Margaret Oliphant’s Fiction and Autobiography
I have written because it gave me pleasure, because it came natural to me, because it was like talking or breathing, besides the big fact that it was necessary for me to work for my children. That, however, was not the first motive… (The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant 48)
Margaret Oliphant’s literary production stands in great contrast to that of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. Her inclusion in this dissertation, especially as a final chapter, represents a variant of self-castration crucial to the understanding of this process as a product of Victorian print culture. The theory of self-castration is evident in the more highly-regarded work of the previous three authors, and a discussion of self-castration in conjunction with the “second-class” work of a “general utility writer” such as Oliphant, demonstrates the theory’s persistence in Victorian literary history. While very few of Oliphant’s contemporaries viewed her as an “artist,” and while she remains, despite a recent interest in her work and life, an author absent from the cannon, her literary output alone offers opportunities for critical
investigation. As her autobiography notes, Oliphant’s impetus to write was both pleasure and need, factors that brought both Brontë and Eliot to the table as well. Additionally, she claims writing was like “talking or breathing,” which signifies her understanding of the writing process as part of her – part of her life, part of her body, part of her being. The conflation of “being” and
“writing” is key to the arguments I proffer in the Brontë and Eliot chapters; and in this small way, I use the conflation as a means to tie the three authors together. However, beyond this
meager thread tying the three women together, Oliphant’s oeuvre stands in a looming shadow cast by the other two – a shadow she often recognized and, sometimes, embraced. An
investigation into Oliphant’s public and private life reveals an author who purposely castrates herself from the realm of the “artist.” Her writing rises out of a need to satiate her natural desires to write as well as her domestic obligation to support her family. Oliphant’s Autobiography indicates the writer was aware of her position outside of what was thought of as “artistic” or aesthetic writing. Oliphant’s process of self-castration, one that involves cutting herself from the aesthetics of writing for the more practical efforts to support her domestic sphere, does result in obtaining authority. However removed she was from the likes of Brontë and Eliot, her fiction offers a method of self-castration in which the characters cut themselves out of the line of signification in an effort to articulate that which resists articulation, that which remains
unuttered. Oliphant provides access to the unwritten (the unuttered) as a way to afford access to a Victorian subtext of gender power relations. Oliphant’s texts demonstrate a Victorian female author’s ability to use methods of self-castration to articulate the unuttered, thereby authorizing those bodies, spaces, and notions which are traditionally marginalized by Victorian culture.
I. The Thread That Binds Them and the Line That Divides Them: Oliphant, Brontë, and