Miss Havisham & Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth
1. immediately reacts with a plan to kill King Duncan after hearing the prophecy. She starts off on fantasies and delusions of her husband ruling the country.
2. She summons mythological spirits to give her the strength to murder Duncan.
  1. 'Come, you spirits/that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/and fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full/Of direst cruelty (I.v.40-43)
3. She suffers from visual hallucinations - the blood on her hands is symbolic for the inescapable guilt.
  1. "Here's the smell of blood still. All the/Perfumes of Arabis will not sweeten this little hand" - the significance of this episode is that it's her descent into insanity, eliminating any chance of her return.
4. She has an extreme thirst for power - over the events taking place in her life and over Macbeth himself
5. She's manipulative and can do whatever it takes if it means she eventually gets what she craves.
6. She pays for her rightful deed - she was a lot more ambitious which means she suffered of stronger guilt than Macbeth.
7. She has a very supernatural quality about her like the witches; she's sly and has a lot of character parallels coexisting within her.
  1. male/female - earthly/supernatural, genius/madness
8. The guilt eats away at her and she sees just how much her husband has changed because of her.
Miss Havisham
1. She was jilted on her wedding day and since then stopped all the clocks and sits in her yellowing wedding dress.
2. She essentially employs Pip to play with Estella and enjoys watching her mock and shame him.
3. She especially loves the fact that he later falls for Estella because then she can taunt him that he'll never be good enough to her.
  1. "Miss Havisham repeated, 'If she tears your heart to pieces - love her, love her , love her"
4. She gets too close to the fire and is burned - in the 19th century, readers would have seen this as God's punishment.
5. He wanted to create a psychologically damaged character. This makes her a character for whom we have sympathy.
  1. Wanted to create a character who was 'distant' and emotionally 'out of touch'. He never got on with his mother, and it is possible he is imagining a parallel between himself and Pip - as children who needed a loving mother but only got a heartless user.
6. Cautious with everything and hasn't seen the daylight in so long.
  1. "An immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion"
7. Many initially jump to the conclusion that she - in adopting Estella and raising her in that way, she's simply seeking revenge on all men. Yet many seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that perhaps she seeks to protect that little girl from the hurt she herself has suffered. Even though that degrades into scarring both herself and Estella.
  1. "Believe this: when she first came, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first, I meat no more. But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place."
  2. Where appearances are deceptive, her adoption of Estella may not have been an act of love and could imply that Miss Havisham deliberately turned her into a cruel, heartless instrument to break people's hearts so they cant break hers.
8. Her main focus is her own suffering and need for revenge which makes the reader think she's just self-centred when in fact, her actions could be easily justified by her share of shock.
Compare the presentation of Lady Macbeth and Miss Havisham. Explore how Shakespeare and Dickens present them as disturbed women in order to engage the audience:
Deterioration: Both characters are seen in positions of authority at some point in the story/play whether it's feigned authority and confidence or actual self-confidence.
1. Their death remains a mystery to us which shows just how irrelevant they become when they're weak.
  1. Just as they repent, they are punished for their actions.
    1. They give off this image of being completely in control of their lives when in fact they're losing all control of themselves and spiraling into insanity.
      1. They were both not thinking clearly at the start of their story. Driven by negative motives. And always have some sort of justification despite being vague or simply implied.

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Miss Havisham & Lady Macbeth

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