Christopher Ricks asks the question, in his essay on Dickens' Great Expectations, "How does Pip [the fictional narrator of the novel] maintain our sympathy?" (Ricks 202). The first of his answers to this central question is: the fact that Pip is "abused by his sister Joe and all the guests in the house" and that Pip "catches" the "contagious contempt for his unrequited lover, Estella", commonality" (Ricks 202). By responding in this way, Ricks immediately presupposes a dichotomous contrast between the natural human and the taught (acted upon) human. Ricks is saying that the natural Pip is good and therefore holds the sympathy of the reader while the manipulated Pip is evil and behaves in ways that the reader cannot sympathize with and wants to condemn. The reader takes the side of the basic Pip and blames not him, but his circumstances and others, for his conduct problematic. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The abbreviated childhood narratives given by many characters in the novel support this nature/nurture divide, where nature is the base and education is the distorted corruption of that base. The reader sympathizes with and is intrigued by the stories the characters tell about their childhood because the stories easily explain why these people behave the way they do and provide them with excuses when they act maliciously. Children act as they were raised to make up for and rebalance the past, and their underlying good nature only reemerges after this task is completed. Miss Havisham, the schadenfreud terrorist of the novel, "was a spoiled child. Her mother died when she was little, and her father denied her nothing" (Dickens 165). So when she grows to want a particular man and doesn't get it, she is, quite literally, stuck in that moment (nine minutes to twenty) until she balances the scales by "breaking" Pip's "heart" with his adopted daughter, Estella. Miss Havisham's brother, Arthur, raised in similar circumstances (dead mother, same father) "proved rebellious, extravagant, undutiful - altogether bad" (Dickens 166). He's so used to getting everything he wants that when his father denies him a large inheritance, he essentially steals it from his sister with the help of her ill-intentioned boyfriend, Compeyson. Young Estella also falls into this mold. When Miss Havisham asks her for love, Estella responds, “if you ask me to give you what you never gave me, my gratitude and duty cannot do impossible things” (Dickens 279). She cannot love because Miss Havisham denied it to her in raising her, and so poor Estella enters into a loveless relationship with Drummle which makes her suffer. Only then will he be able to begin to commit himself with a true heart. Characters residing at the other end of the economic spectrum surrender to the same model. Magwitch explains that he was “brought up to be… a warm one” by his indifferent environment (Dickens 301). He doesn't remember ever having adults who cared for him and so he had to steal to preserve his life. Like Miss Havisham, she changes when she balances the scales by giving Pip the money and help he never had, and getting love in return. We don't know how or by whom Orlick, Mrs. Joe's attacker and Pip's potential killer, was raised, and the lack of this knowledge is what allows the reader to see him as such an utterly evil character. the adult human being does not only apply to the novel's antagonists, but can also be applied to its protagonists. Joe diplomatically recounts his youth to Pip by the fire near the beginning of the book. He tells us that his father “hashammered my mother very mercifully... [and] hammered me with a wig only to be matched by the wig he didn't hammer his anvil with" (Dickens 44). To balance things out in his adult life, he intentionally enters into a relationship in which the woman abuses the man. Her relationship with Pip's sister is the complement to her parents' relationship, just as Pip's relationship with Estella concludes Miss Havisham's relationship with Compeyson. whom we do not see much, we know that "she was brought up from the cradle... as one who must espouse a title, and who must be protected from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge." perfectly helpless and useless" (Dickens 174). It is "perfect" because it is exactly what was intended and the only fitting ending to such a beginning. The natural appearance of each character is good, while cultivated manipulation is bad. The way the narrator uses the words "natural" and "unnatural" in his descriptions of people supports this. He constantly describes his best friend, Herbert Pocket (173), Herbert's girlfriend, Clara (343), his helpful guardian , Mr. Pocket ( 173), and Joe (259) as "natural." those of Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham (Dickens 173). Accordingly, he describes those he dislikes using the word “unnatural.” All the actors in the production of Hamlet, for example, fall into this category, including the Jewish theater man who takes Pip to see Wopsle and Wopsle himself (235). Collaborating with this feeling that nature is good is the novel's narrator himself's completely misuse of the notion of "bad nature" by Pip in relation to Biddy. “It's a bad side of human nature,” he tells her (Dickens 139) when he projects onto her that she is jealous that he leaves her and Joe behind to fulfill his “high expectations.” " It is immediately clear that Pip is not right in accusing her of having these feelings, and when he comes back and tells her about it again, saying, "This is a very bad side of human nature indeed!" (Dickens 261), it is even more obvious which is completely off base. Ultimately, his melodramatic apology for his disloyalty shows that he too understands that the phrase was inappropriate. This is the only time the concept comes up, although it seems relevant to actual characters as malevolent as Orlick, Compeyson, and Drummle, shows that Dickens is rejecting its validity as a concept. It leaves us with only the notion of good nature. However, while it seems explicitly that good lies in nature, evil in an unbalanced upbringing, the Dickens's underlying message is more complicated. There is a Darwinian undercurrent in the development of our prime blossoming heroes. Evolution is, of course, natural, but it is simultaneously enacted by those who nurture: it is both. Critic John Schad states that Dickens describes Pip's unknown patron, the convict Abel Magwitch, who instigates Pip's evolution from blacksmith to gentleman as "Nature" itself: Pip is visited by a man [Magwitch], or rather of a nature - 'hardened', as he is, 'by exposure to the elements', indistinguishable in voice from wind and rain, and repugnant 'as... a serpent' or 'terrible beast' - which he later proves to know himself in exactly the same form as he knows the outside world: "I knew my name was Magwitch....How did I know?" As far as I knew, the names of the birds in the hedgerows. (Schad 66) Similarly, Schad states that Pip, when visited by Magwitch on this same revelatory occasion, discovers to his horror that it is this"dunghill dog... beast... [or] serpent" who has "made a gentleman" of him, who is - as Pip declares - a "creature who [made] me" and who therefore has, so to speak, a natural history... [an] animal genealogy within which he is only the latest generation. (Schad 73)Pip is a product of literary evolution (i.e., the process enacted in a single life). It is moved to a higher stratum in society by an act of personified nature, and then is brought down to another stratum by the same personification. In this scene, the reader sees how Nature itself, in Magwitch's body, brings him both into his new life as a gentleman and out of that life. Jaggers indicates that there is an evolutionary tension in Estella's life as well. This time he, like Magwitch with Pip, plays Nature. When Pip tells Mr. Jaggers about Estella's strange parents. Jaggers responds with his story of placing Estella in Miss Havisham's care, speaking of himself in the third person. "Suppose that," Jaggers begins, "he [Mr. Jaggers] lived in an evil atmosphere, and that all he saw of children was their being produced in great numbers for certain destruction... Let us assume that here she was a pretty little girl [Estella] out of the bunch who could have been saved” (Dickens 377). Here Jaggers describes a landscape of children competing with each other and the environment in which they live. Jaggers himself is natural selection that saves one and lets the others perish, perhaps, even, because of his "beauty." After Pip experiences his two evolutions: from workman to gentleman, and from white-collar gentleman, he emerges, like his burned arm, "disfigured, but quite repairable" (Dickens 380). It would be ridiculous to say that fire is less a part of nature than the arm itself, and this is a physical metaphor for the influences others have had on Pip. Education (others, fire) is an element of nature, it is not separate from it. This is why Dickens uses evolutionary language to describe the changes undergone by Pip and Estella: evolution itself is an integral part of nature, change is an integral part of essence. Human nature is not stagnant. The scene where Estella finally rejects Pip exemplifies this. Speaking about her lack of feeling, Estella states, "[The lack] is in the nature that has formed within me" (331, emphasis added). Normally we think of nature as something carved in stone from birth, immobile and immutable. However, Dickens's work emphasizes the artificiality of separating human behavior from the larger plan of nature. It's not a binary system that operates on Pip in Great Expectations, it's singularly natural. Estella and others are not born with a certain nature, but rather grow into it, just as in the evolutionary process apes transformed into humans over time. Furthermore, the evil (or evil) aspects that Dickens gives to some of his characters are attractive. to the reader because they are complicated and interesting. We are curious to know the reasons why Orlick commits heinous acts, but we are not curious to know why Biddy is kind. Dickens hereby conveys that the purely good characters he plays are perhaps not the best after all. It conveys this deeper message not through the common pedantic Victorian means in which good characters achieve happiness. As his contemporary George Eliot does in his novels Silas Marner and Adam Bede, Dickens uses a final wedding for his steadfast goodies Biddy and Joe. But, beyond that, it reveals a deeper flaw in their seemingly perfect attitude towards the reader, making them bored. As Ricks says, "Joe and Biddy, for all their occasional liveliness, remain dreary characters, 1992.