Do you think Mrs. Joe Gargery (Great Expectations- Charles Dickens) develops as a character?
I don’t personally think Mrs Joe develops a great deal as a character – Dickens seems to portray her as fairly two-dimensional. She raises Pip ‘by hand’ and her main behaviour seems to involve violence and fits of temper. She also is snobbish and tries to appear very well-to-do in front of the village’s higher status people (ie Pumblechook). She also constantly claims Pip’s success to be due to her upbringing of him, when he fears and dislikes her. She is like this consistently through the novel until she is struck over the head during a robbery and can no longer speak / move much until she dies. This is a way of stopping her behaviour but doesn’t really develop her as a character, although she does make some sort of conciliatory gesture about Pip to Joe before she dies, to perhaps show she regrets how she once was. Mrs Joe could have a link to Miss Havisham’s character, despite seeming very different on the surface (ie social status, marital status). Possible similarities could be: –
