Miss Havisham Symbol Analysis

Miss Havisham, a character from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, represents Aunt Mary’s inability to move on from her past. When reading to her nephew, the young protagonist, Mary often chooses to read the passage from Great Expectations when Pip meets Miss Havisham. Left at the altar on her wedding day, Miss Havisham has since become a recluse in her decaying mansion, unable to move on from her the heartbreak of her youth. By drawing this parallel to Dickens’s archetypical jilted bride, the story hints that Mary is similarly mired in grief over past heartbreak.

Both Mary and Miss Havisham live most of their lives alone. After her groom left her at the altar, Miss Havisham retreated into her mansion for the rest of her life. Similarly, Mary’s heartbreak causes her to mirror her ex-lover, Brother Benignus’s, lifestyle after he breaks up with her to become a monk, spending most of her time alone in her secluded rooms and seeming only to venture out of the house to go to Catholic religious services. The two characters also share some physical resemblance, as both are associated with the color white. Like Miss Havisham’s faded wedding dress, which she has not removed since her doomed wedding day, Mary’s grandmother’s cameo ring is white and “worn through,” and her hair is “white and waved.” The whiteness of Mary’s appearance, like Miss Havisham’s, suggest that her grief has frozen her in time. Similarly, Miss Havisham traps herself in the moment her groom left her, stopping all the clocks in her house at ten minutes to nine. Finally, when Mary asks the protagonist whether he thinks the picture of herself as a girl is beautiful, she demonstrates that, like Miss Havisham, she is stuck in the past, seeking male approval of her girlhood beauty. In this way, Mary’s similarities to Miss Havisham symbolize her inability to move on from her heartbreak.

However, Mary’s dignity differentiates her from Miss Havisham. While Miss Havisham behaves with dramatized self-pity, performing her grief loudly, Mary hides her pain both from her family and from herself. And while Miss Havisham plots to avenge herself against the man who left her, Mary maintains a lifelong friendship with Brother Benignus despite the heartbreak he caused her. Therefore, while the two characters are similarly frozen in the past, this imperfect comparison also reveals the dignity in Mary’s grief.