Sample Essay

Marshscape

by Tina Blue

We first meet Pip in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations among his family's gravestones "on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening" (3). As the wan light of an afternoon in late December drains away from "the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard" (3), Pip sees the river as a "low leaden line" beyond that wilderness, and hears the wind rushing from the sea as from a "distant savage lair" (3).  How cold and comfortless, how bleak must it be for a seven-year-old boy to spend so much time in such a place, under such conditions.  And yet his home life, ruled as it is by his brutal, bitter sister, must offer even less warmth and comfort--at least emotionally--if the child would choose to pass his time (on Christmas Eve, yet!) in this churchyard where his parents "were dead and buried" (3) and where his five brothers who did not live past infancy "were also dead and buried" (3).  (Years later in town, Pip accepts the company of the obnoxious Wopsle and the even more obnoxious Pumblechook simply because, as he explains matter-of-factly, ". . . I knew it would be miserable at home" (117).

Magwitch first appears to Pip under just these conditions.  Like Pip, he has fled even "worse" circumstances and found refuge in the marshes.  From the novel's opening pages, then, both Pip and Magwitch are defined as belonging to a world containing so little of what a human being needs to thrive that even the damp, cold wasteland of the Cooling Marshes seems preferable to that other world.

As Magwitch makes his way out of the churchyard after first accosting Pip, he "hugged his shuddering body in both his arms--clasping himself, as if to hold himself together. . . . presently I looked over my shoulder and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms . . . " (6-7).  This man is so perfectly alone in life, so isolated and alienated by society, that he must hug himself to keep warm, not only physically but psychologically as well.  We get the feeling that in a sense that is just what Pip is doing in the graveyard--hugging himself to keep warm.  Both of these characters belong there on the marshes at this point in the novel, because for both Magwitch and Pip the fog-shrouded nightmare landscape is an external manifestation of their psychological, emotional, and moral alienation.

For Magwitch, however, the marshes become more than just the reflection of his own bleak inner landscape.  It is there on the marshes that young Pip, "Pitying his desolation [emphasis mine]" (19) tells the wretched man, "I am glad you enjoy it" (19).  For the first time in his life, ever since he was a small abandoned child, "a thieving turnips for . . . [his] living" after "[s]ummun had run away from . . . [him] . . . [and] took the fire with him and left . . . [him] wery cold" (346), Magwitch is receiving food as a gift, rather than stealing it as a criminal act.  Although the food was extorted from Pip under fear of death, Pip's compassion for the man's misery causes him to transform it into an offering to a fellow human being.  Later, when Magwitch confesses to stealing food from the blacksmith Joe unwittingly echoes Pip's sentiments, as well as insisting on the convict's right to be considered a part of the family of man, by telling Magwitch, "God knows your welcome to it--so far as it was ever mine. . . . We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur" (40).  The simple expression of compassion, of "fellow-feeling," the mere recognition that he is a human being with the right to eat to survive, so moves Magwitch that from that moment he is transformed.  Although he is transported to Australia for life, and though his life there is lonely and often hard and lived in harsh settings, Magwitch is no longer so fearfully alone as when he hugged himself for comfort on the marshes.  Henceforth he carries within him a light and a warmth that transforms the least promising circumstances: "When I was hired-out a shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces was like, I see yourn. . . . I see you there many a times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes" (320).  After, as he sees it, "Pip stood . . . [his] friend" (346), Magwitch's internal landscape is no longer desolate, no matter where he might find himself, or under what circumstances--even after he is imprisoned once again and knows himself to be dying.

But for Pip escape from the comfortless isolation represented by the marshes is far from easy.  He likens the rimy dampness of the marshscape on that Christmas morning to "a coarser sort of spiders' webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade.  On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy" (16).  The "marsh mist was so thick" (16) that it becomes a palpable fog:  "The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that . . . everything seemed to run at me.   This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind" (17).  He feels "the damp cold . . . riveted" to his feet "as the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet" (17).  Thus does the marshscape come also to represent both the web woven by Miss Havisham to entrap Pip's heart and hopes, and the chains of his own guilt and the false perceptions what imprison him as he grows to young manhood.

Considering how cold, damp, dark, and fog-shrouded Pip's poor psyche is, it is small wonder that he seeks light and warmth wherever he thinks he might find it.  Estella, as her name suggests, seems to him a brilliant point of light, a star to navigate by.  In reality, of course, she is a will o' the wisp, one of those tricky fairy lights that lead travelers astray--and often to their deaths--in swamps and marshes.  When he first encounters Estella she bears a set of keys, which may seem to the desperate, confused boy to be a promise of freedom, though they are in fact the emblem of the new and more bitter imprisonment foreshadowed by the spiderweb and leg-iron imagery associated with the marshes.  She also holds the only candle to light their way through the dark passages of Satis House, but "scornfully she walked away, and--what was worse--took the candle with her (57), just as "[summun]" had "run away" from the child Magwitch "and took . . . the fire with him" (346).

Frightened by the sudden darkness, Pip enters Miss Havisham's dressing room, which is "well-lighted with wax candles" (57).  Like the "light" Estella represents, the light cast by these candles is a deceptive and unwholesome substitute for the light of the sun: "No glimpse of the daylight was to be seen in . . . [the] dressing room" (57), and Pip has "often thought since, that she must have looked as if the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust" (60). When he is let out of the house and onto the grounds "the rush of daylight quite confound[s]" him (62), as the light of truth will confound him one day when he is metaphorically "let out of" his belief that the root of his fortune is in Satis House.

Although it differs on the surface from the misty marshscape that so dominates Pip's psyche, this new setting is as much a wasteland as the old.  Both the sarcophagal horror of the interior of Satis House and its corpse-like doyenne and the rank, weed-infested decay of its garden suggest a more gruesome graveyard than the relatively innocent one where Pip's family are interred.  Where Pip imagined "the hands of the dead people stretching up cautiously out of their graves" (6-7) in an unsuccessful attempt to drag Magwitch down to join them, we might well imagine Miss Havisham's bony claw reaching out of her own self-created tomb to drag Pip, as she has already dragged Estella, into the rotting prison of her own bitter soul.

The unfortunate effect of the absence of sunlight and all it represents is precisely manifested in the image of the "most miserable corner of the neglected garden" (80) at Satis House.  Although the light snow that has fallen overnight "lay nowhere else . . . it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of garden" (80).  Similarly, the cold shadow cast by Miss Havisham's heartless monomania traps both Estella and Pip in a wintry corner of existence, denying them, as she has denied herself, the wholesome influence of the sun's light and warmth. Later, the novel makes explicit the connection between daylight and love when as a young woman Estella uses the idea of a child shut away from sunshine to symbolize the way she has been raised to be incapable of love.

What warmth and comfort the fire at his home might have provided for Pip is destroyed by the cold resentment of his sister's manner of bringing him up--the source, after all, of the alienation that traps Pip in the marshscape of his own lonely soul.  The fire at Miss Havisham's place, though Pip mistakes it for something better, is actually something worse.  Like the wax candles, it substitutes for the light of day and the warmth of human feeling.  It becomes the external representation of Miss Havisham's vindictive passion, a hellfire of her own making that ultimately burns her from without as it has so long consumed her from within.

When Pip competes with Bentley Drummle over the warmth from the fireplace at the Blue Boar, it is as if the young fools are using that fire as a substitute for Estella's attention (since one cannot use the word affection in discussing what Estella has to offer).  Pip is drawn to Estella like a moth to a flame, and is nearly consumed by his own obsession as Miss Havisham is by hers.

Of course, by the time Pip is told that he has expectations, his home is no longer the comfortless, alienating place it was under the rule of his Rampaging sister.  Quite the contrary: Mrs. Joe has become as gentle and biddable as she is enfeebled; Biddy and Joe are loving friends to Pip; even the marshes by the river are viewed under bright daylight in the warmth of a summer day and in the sweet company of Biddy, who clearly cares for Pip.  The fireplace in the kitchen is quite comfortable, but by this time Pip has been so caught in Miss Havisham's web that he is no longer capable of appreciating his home once it actually becomes a true home, or his "family" once he actually has one.  A part of him, to be sure, sees the value in Joe and Biddy, in the simple life and in simple pleasures, but rather than being swayed by those perceptions, Pip works overtime to repress that better part of himself.

Loneliness has gotten into Pip, and he will be lonely, even when he has the means not to be: "[I felt it] very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known" (146).  The next morning Pip "stroll[s] out alone, purposing to finish off the marshes at once, and get them done with" (147).  But of course Pip cannot yet escape the marshes, for the marshscape--at least in its bleak, misty manifestation--is still so much a part of him.  Like Estella, he has been brought up badly, in a barren environment, and like Estella, he must suffer before he will be able to listen to the honest promptings of his own heart.

Like Magwitch before him, Pip goes into exile, and there through hard work, love, and repentance expiates his guilt and returns at last, after eleven years, to the hearth he once spurned.  There he finds his old spot by the hearthfire occupied by his replacement, Joe's son Pip.  Though he can now appreciate the true warmth represented by this fire, he is now merely a visitor to the home and family of Joe and Biddy.  The fact that he cannot really return to the home of his youth, which has become for him a lost paradise, is suggested by the phrasing of the novel's final paragraph, "I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now . . ." (484), which so closely echoes the ending of Milton's Paradise Lost:

The cherubim descended; on the ground

Gliding meteorous, as evening mist

Risen from a river o'er the marish glides,

And gathers fast at the labourer's heel

Homeward returning. . . .

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide,

They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.  

(Paradise Lost, XII, 628-32; 646-49)

As elegiac as the novel's final passage is, it is not without hope, for the cold marsh mists that have haunted Pip throughout his life, and which have become so thoroughly identified with his very essence that he carries their clamminess with him wherever he goes, have at last begun to dissipate.  When he finally returns to view the ruined garden, he is very much aware of the "cold shivery mist [that] had veiled the afternoon" (482), but he can see the stars (now Estella's true emblem rather than her false mask) "shining behind the mist" (4820, and he can tell that "the moon was coming," and therefore "the evening was not dark" (482).  Some of the old ivy, which had been uprooted and had withered, has "struck root anew, and was growing green on the low quiet mounds of ruin" (482).  As the mist is "touched with the first rays of the moonlight" (483) it turns 'silvery," and as he and Estella speak, he learns that "[the ground] is to be built on . . . [a]t last" (483).

The subtle hints--the shining stars, the rising moon, the evening mist turning silver and then dissipating, the fresh growth of the ivy, and the intention to build again at last on the ground that Estella has refused to relinquish--suggest that "the broad expanse of tranquil light" (484) revealed by the risen mists truly is not marred by the shadow of another parting from Estella.  They will come together at last, perhaps, though if they do it will be in exile, for Pip still works and lives abroad.  Like Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden, they will make their way hand-in-hand into the wide world.  They have sinned and they have suffered, and although they have lost their tenure in Paradise, they have found their way to a quiet redemption, and to each other. 

The image that defines Pip's psyche at the novel's end is not the dark, misty marshscape, nor the bright flames that attracted and entrapped him at Satis House--the unwholesome glare of the wax candles that usurp the role of the sun's light, the ravenous flames of Miss Havisham's fire--but that "broad expanse of tranquil light" that the moon and the stars cast over Pip and Estella as they make their way hand-in-hand "out of the ruined place" (484).