Throughout life, people go through experiences which change them in profound ways, shaping their character. We are both allowed and forced to grow and change as a result of the experiences we go through. Such is the case for the main characters and narrators of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Dickens' main character, Pip, is attracted his whole life to two things: money and a girl whose name is Estella, an icy beauty whose lonely life eventually changes her to a kinder and gentle soul. "I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me." (Dickens, 512). Pip's change is greater, even, than Estella's turnaround; through his life he grows hard and selfish, but at the conclusion of the novel, he finds the person he once was, innocent, kind, and forgiving. "[Great Expectations] is an extremely effective structural irony and pathos...[which] finds Pip sadly and searchingly watching." (Sucksmith, 2). This wanting and sense of loss throughout Pip's adult life cause him to return to the loving kindness of his childhood self. Pip's whole story of growth over his entire life shows how growth and change can alter the personality of a person who yearns for more than they have. For example, when Pip first meets Estella, he is taken aback by her beauty, intelligence, and also insulting nature.
"'What do you think of her?'...said Miss Havisham.
'I think she is very proud...very pretty...very insulting.' I replied, in a whisper." (Dickens, 68).
By the end of Pip's story, he and Estella can be acquainted as equals and even friends. "'I have been bent and broken, but-I hope-into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were and tell me that we are friends,' [said Estella].
'We are friends,' said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.
'And will continue friends apart,' said Estella." (Dickens, 513-4).
Walker's Celie, her narrator and main character, grows from a sad, down-trodden girl to a strong and independent woman. "What Celie [endures]-the degradation, abuse, dehumanization-is...morally repulsive." (Harris, 159). Celie's life is horrifyingly lonely and sad. "[He say] You gonna do what your mammy wouldn't. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it." (Walker, 11). But after much encouragement from those in her life who truly care about her, Celie finds happiness. "I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. Amen" (Walker, 251). Celie's life is never easy, but somehow she manages to cling to hope and emerges a stronger, healthier person for all the negativity that surrounds her very birth and indeed, everything after. Walker's main theme of growth and the effects it has on a person is beautifully illustrated in this "medium of remarkable expressiveness, color, and poignancy." (Towers, 36). In each of these novels, it is important to examine their most important aspects in order, starting with character development and moving on to theme as it is shown in the characters.
Great Expectations is considered by many to be a prime example of Victorian novels by their foremost and most prominent author, Charles Dickens. "[Dickens] is not only the most famous of the Victorian novelists, he is the most typical. If we are to see the distinguishing virtues and defects of his school at their dearest, we must examine Dickens." (Cecil, 37). One very important aspect of Great Expectations is the use of character development throughout the novel. While the novel is based on Pip's life, as it continues not only Pip, but those around him, mature significantly in both Pip's eyes and those of the reader. This could easily have come from Dickens' own life; for example, his first views of his mother were those of an adoring son, but when she tried to force him to continue working long hard hours in a factory against his will at age 12, he began to regard her as cruel and selfish. He never forgave his mother; he regarded this desire to keep him working as utter rejection and neglect of his needs on her part. (Nadel, 92-3). A perfect example of Pip's view of change in other characters is the way he regards Uncle Pumblechook, who originally appears annoying, but by hurting Pip, he is changed in the boy's eyes to a seedy character, a false and deceitful man.
"The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by a devouring curiosity to be informed of all that I had seen and heard, came gaping over to the chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details divulged to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth open, his sandy hair inquisitvely on end, and his waistcoat heaving with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my reticence." (Dickens, 74).
Pip's sister, who raised him "by hand", as he is so often reminded, Mrs. Joe, also changes but her change is as a direct result of the story line, and so she changes more in the reader's eyes than Pip's.
"...I became aware of my sister-lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by some tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire-destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was wife of Joe." (Dickens, 130).
As a result of her attack, Mrs. Joe becomes docile and mild, replacing her former frothingly angry and fierce personality. As a reader, I found myself much more sympathetic to her character after her attack than I was before it. Pip's growth and change is another important issue when discussing character development in Great Expectations. At the beginning of the novel, Pip is kind and innocent, very much happy with his life. But as he grows, he, somewhat knowingly, changes to a selfish and greedy man. When sadness and loss plague his life as a gentleman, he finds himself returned to the sweet and unjaded boy he once was and he is much happier that way, making it all the more curious that he changed in the first place. "In no other of [Dickens'] romances has the author succeeded so perfectly in at once stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers." (DISCovering Authors). Pip's changes keep the reader following his story because they are the alterations we all make in ourselves in an effort to attain happiness. When Pip saw the rich lifestyle that Estella lead, he was drawn to money, but when he saw how much he had given up in
other areas, he turned back to his family and friends for happiness. For Pip, this was where it was most easily found, and that is why his personality returns at the end of the novel to the way that it was in his youth. "...that poor dream [money], as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!" (Dickens, 511).
Character development also shows its self very clearly in Walker's The Color Purple. Celie begins the novel lonely and lost, but grows to become a confident woman. Nettie, Celie's sister, is the one weak point of this novel; her character is developed very little if at all, but that makes the growth of the other characters, Celie especially, all the more evident. "I got breasts full of milk running down myself. He say Why don't you look decent? Put on something. But what I'm sposed to put on? I don't have nothing." (Walker, 13). Celie's initial despair at her whole life is amplified by the sadness of her abusive husband, Albert, who she refers to throughout most of the novel as "Mr. _______". His real last name is never revealed. When Celie discovers that Albert has been keeping her letters from her sister Nettie to break her spirit, she finds inside her a spark that was near extinguished. She cries with Shug Avery, her lesbian lover, then grows angry. She says to Shug, "' I think I feel better if I kill him...I feels sickish. Numb, now.' " (Walker, 134), to which Shug replies, "'Naw you won't. Nobody feel better for killing nothing. They feel something is all.'" (Walker, 134). Celie's misery is so complete that she has unintentionally cut herself off from her feelings, numbing her soul. "[Celie's] underdeveloped moral sense...leads to inactivity in response to abuse." (Harris, 160). But Shug gives her the strength to fight back, and she eventually bounces back and becomes strong. A problem found by many critics was a lack of development of Nettie's character. "She [Walker] has failed to endow Nettie with her own distinctive voice..." (Towers, 36). Nettie is described in the novel as more intelligent and better educated than Celie, ("I know I'm not as pretty or as smart as Nettie..." (Walker, 19), and Nettie's manner of speech shows this well. However, it appears that Walker was so concerned with discerning their voices that she forgot to give Nettie a specific character. As a reader, I felt almost personally responsible for the abuses Celie suffers, whereas with Nettie I felt no personal attachment whatsoever. Walker's use of character development runs the gamut from clear and well-illustrated to shadowy and incomplete, however, it is still an important writing tool in The Color Purple.
Both Dickens and Walker use character development as their main way of illustrating their common theme: growth and change. Both Celie and Pip eventually make peace with themselves after much soul-searching, fighting for themselves, and of course, growth and the resulting changes in their characters and personalities. "On her way to making Celie happy, Walker portrays her as a victim of many imaginable abuses..." (Wesley, 91). Celie must break away from her abusive husband and father, come to terms with Shug's desire for both men and women, and find a way to deal with the detachment from Nettie which Albert made so complete. Each of these events eventually work somehow to strengthen Celie, which is important because when these first happen to her she feels so weak and numb that she can barely stand on her own. "Plowing a man's fields and letting him use her as a sperm depository leaves Celie so buried away from herself that it is hard to imagine anything stirring her to life..." (Wesley, 91). But somehow Celie does wake from the cold numbness of her life and finds satisfaction and even happiness with Shug and the rest of her family. Great Expectations works in a somewhat different way; instead of Pip being robbed of everything he has he is given everything he could want, only to find that that leaves him wanting. Pip grows numb and empty in much the same way that Celie does, but he, like Celie, is able to find his real home and with it, his real self. When Pip begins feeling alone and empty, it is clearly a mirror of the way that Dickens felt in his own life. Dickens was the second of eight children. (Nadel, 89). At the age of 15, he was being forced by his parents to work in a factory while his older sister Fanny was winning medals at the Royal Academy of Music in England. Young Charles "prayed...to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which [he] was." (Nadel, 92-3). But Pip finally returns home to Biddy and Joe and their son, young Pip, and even meets with Estella again. This gives him the satisfaction that money never could, and he ends up a happy man. Thus, he grows and changes and eventually, like Celie, finds himself.
"[Alice Walker's] The Color Purple has been canonized. I don't think it should have been...To complain about this novel is to commit treason against black women writers, yet there is much in it that deserves complaint..." (Harris, 155). "Great Expectations indicates the confidence of a conscious genius." (DISCovering Authors). While many critics have much to say about both these novels, anyone who has ever read these two books can recognize that the theme of growth and the resulting change is beautifully illustrated in these two rich novels. As shown through their character development, Walker and Dickens write masterfully about the virtues of being given everything and having everything taken away from you, and the results such changes can have on your character.
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