Why does the reader of Charles Dickens Great Expectations forgive Ms. Havishams actions?
I wouldn’t say the reader feels “alright” about Miss Havisham’s behavior towards Pip and Estella, but we do understand what drove her to such cruelty. At the end, she recognizes that she did wrong and she asks for Pip’s forgiveness. I think this fact, as well as her tragic past, make her a compelling character, and touched me as a reader; how she is a woman completely immersed in her misery that she forces it upon others, and, yet, eventually summons the will to repent. Miss Havisham is supposed to be an unreal character living in an unreal world where time stands still, but I don’t think she is so much a warning against turning grief into theatricality (maybe to a certain extent) but rather against the all-consuming nature of revenge/the past. Dickens suggests through Miss Havisham that grief/pain/revenge can be cyclical (she passes her mentality of pain on to Estella, who passes it on to Pip, etc). Yes, Miss Havisham is a very fantastical creation, but her obsessions with the past an
