. . . Miss Havisham to Estella on introducing her new playmate, Pip.
This character from Dickens’ Great Expectations is at the same time implausible and believable. Rather than forgetting her tragic rejection (leaving it behind, and moving on—what a boring plot device that would have been, not Dickinsonian at all), Havisham wallows in grief. Floating restlessly through her mansion, time-frozen at the moment of her betrayal, living for decades amid the rotting wedding feast and dusty decorations she never allowed to be cleared, all the clocks of her life stopped at the tragic moment her fiancé abandoned her at the alter, Havisham’s obsession finds its expression in proxy revenge.
Estella was the only new thing, the only growing thing in those decaying rooms. Estella was raised to wreak Havisham’s vengeance on all men, cultivated to be a heartbreaker, to leave others at the alter as Havisham had been left. Estella was purposed and trained for vengeance without a thought given to her own joy, happiness, or fulfillment.
Eventually, after nurture in Havisham’s shrine to regret, even Estella becomes as frozen in time as the dusty wedding relics cluttering the mansion. She becomes a two dimensional prop, raised for a single purpose, kept shallow, not allowed to deepen and develop. She is frozen at the point of freshly ripened beauty when hearts are stopped at her very presence, before a hint of anything but compliant bliss is allowed to edge into her personality. Wide-eyed and worshipful in a way no woman could ever be, beneath her bosom where her heart should have been is a cold throbbing ice water pump. Cold steel forcing ice water through her veins as she first enthralls then devastates the men she encounters.
At maturity, Estella realizes the trap she is in and is briefly rueful, but ultimately is incapable of feeling the pain of her own cold simulacra of life. She has no hope for change, but only knows her life is not one anyone would choose. She became a beauty trained to break hearts, raised to revenge, Havisham’s proxy revenge.
Revenge by proxy, frequently using innocent and helpless children, is a regular theme in literature and, unfortunately, in our society. Anyone who has experienced first hand or watched helplessly as those full of hurt and anger try to fill a child’s mind with poison knows this to be true. It may be that the horrors of proxy revenge presented in literature are a way we distance ourselves from the emotional horrors committed by us.
In the Robinson Jeffers’ version of the Greek tragedy Medea, there is a moment when the inescapable fall towards destruction pauses, all action gasps to a stop when Medea, after howling in agony through most the play about her husband's betrayal, after sending vengeful wedding gifts to her husband's new wife that burst into flames and reduce her to a charred smoking lump, ends her tirade against Jason, Creon, and the world to look into the face of one of her sons and say: “Would you say that this child has Jason’s eyes?” and then, “tenderly but hopelessly,” says, “They are his cubs. They have his blood. As long as they live I shall be mixed with him.”
These are some of the most chilling words in all literature. They are followed by Medea’s Nurse begging her to flee from the "horror of horrors,” but Medea doesn’t flee. She commits bloody slaughter, killing her sons, saying it is necessary because it is the only vengeance against her husband that equals his betrayal.
A convention of Greek tragedy is that a highborn person is brought to total destruction by hubris. There is, perhaps, no place lower than murderer of your own children, and perhaps there is no hubris greater than to believe your children should die for your revenge. However, I believe the real horror of all horrors, beyond bloody slaughter, is to poison a child’s mind with hurt and anger. That horror can stretch into eternity.
