Literature and Human Equality

Chapter 4: Great Expectations: “Absolute Equality”

4 Great Expectations: “Absolute Equality” Not only does Great Expectations pose a powerful critique of inequality, but it subjects the reader, the hero, and everyone else in its world to the same condition of ignorance and error. Democracy of Ignorance The Greek romance, of which Callirhoe is one, has been called “a latter-day epic for Everyman,” the expression of an “equalitarian” age and outlook—and this in the derogatory sense that it adapted itself to “all kinds of values high and low” (as might be said of the mass media today) and addressed itself to readers reduced to an equal degree of insignificance.1 But for whatever reason—perhaps romance’s receptivity to values high and low—more sophisticated fiction has long felt a paradoxical attraction to romance as both its own origin and its favorite object of parody. Beginning with Heliodorus, author of the Ethiopian Story, and his ironic play on Chariton, a tradition of parody has shadowed romance like a double.2 The pinnacle of the tradition is Don Quixote with its ridicule of romance, yet the energy of parody also runs through Fielding and Austen, Flaubert and Joyce, as if it were really inseparable from the novel itself. Each of the moderns discussed at length here composed antiromances . In the case of Tolstoy we leave aside the anti-romance of Anna Karenina (its heroine like Callirhoe in the impossible position of being “married” to two men at once) to concentrate on two other works, one of which really is a latter-day epic, the other about a man of no apparent significance whatever. Both Great Expectations and The Brothers Karamazov are novels in which someone erroneously imagines himself a hero of romance and which draw power from fictions exposed as fictions. It is to the first of these anti-romances that this chapter addresses itself. Romantic visions bring forth in Pip, the hero of GreatExpectations, the fraudulence, luxury, and loss of independence that Rousseau traces to inequality. Instead of anatomizing some 48 institution like the law courts or the bureaucracy as in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Dickens in Great Expectations investigates this original evil. Not only the content, however, but important compositional features of Great Expectations—in particular, its denial of privileged knowledge to anyone, including the reader—reflect the ideal of human equality. If in the original romance, the Odyssey, knowledge is distributed unequally like a privilege (with the hero enjoying the patronage of a goddess who “know[s] all things” [13.417]), the anti-romance of Great Expectations institutes a kind of democracy of ignorance. Late in the novel, as the sun slants in on a group of condemned prisoners as well as the man who sentenced them, Pip remarks that both the judged and the judge “were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err” (56.465). No one in Great Expectations knows all. Everyone seems in the dark on some critical point. Miss Havisham doesn’t know where her ward Estella came from; Jaggers, otherwise so knowing, doesn’t know the identity of Estella’s father. (He “knew nothing” of Miss Havisham’s design to use Pip as a plaything, either [44.363].) Estella herself knows nothing of either parent. Magwitch doesn’t know of his daughter’s existence.3 Of Magwitch, Miss Havisham seems to know only the identity of his lawyer (44.363) and the sole condition attached to Pip’s legacy, that he keep his name (19.160); of Miss Havisham, Magwitch knows nothing. Neither knows they have a common betrayer. Magwitch, on his return to England, “had no perception of the possibility of [Pip’s] finding any fault with [his] good fortune” (41.343), and dies without realizing that his property, his life’s work, is forfeited to the crown. Herbert knows the story of Miss Havisham only in part and doesn’t know that Pip, and later Miss Havisham, have underwritten him. Asked to relate the story of Jaggers’s housekeeper, Wemmick answers, “I don’t know her story—that is, I don’t know all of it” (48.398). Joe doesn’t know Pip’s history with Magwitch or, later, his feeling for Biddy. As befits the hero of such a tale of blindness, Pip himself is a sort of concentrated essence of ignorance, unaware of the identity of his patron, unable to fathom Miss Havisham’s campaign against a world that made her suffer (“she was...