New Life, Old Love in Charles Dickens Great Expectations
Zoe Ripple '05, English 156, Brown University, 2004
This is Part III of the author's "The Endings of Victorian and Modern Works: Domesticity Preserved, the Family Resurrected, Domesticity Destroyed, the Family Denigrated."
n the tradition of Jane Eyre, Great Expectations also ends with the fulfillment of unrequited love and key changes in the lives of the protagonists. Indeed it is at the very end of the novel -- the last sentence in fact -- in which Dickens assures the reader that Pip and Estella will ride off into the proverbial sunset together. While for the course of the novel Pip is characterized by extreme selfishness and self-aggrandizement, by the end of the novel he comes to see the errors of his ways and rectifies the wrongs he has done, cleansing himself of the egocentricity that accompanied his fortuitous rise to wealth. Other characters, like Joe, also evolve and come in to their own happiness by the end of the novel. At the end of Great Expectations, as in Jane Eyre, new children are brought into the world, new relationships and marriages are cemented, as Dickens forms his characters into more kind, self-aware and fulfilled people. The endings of both Jane Eyre and Great Expectations chart the road from sickness to health, from decrepitude to renewal, and physical as well as spiritual rebirth.
One of the driving themes in the ending of Great Expectations is reconciliation, which inherently improves relationship and sets them on a new path. As he does not want to be "misremembered after death," (Dickens, 380) Pip reconciles with his benefactor, Magwitch, Joe and finally, Estella. In the cases of Joe and Magwitch, Pip wants to show them he is aware of and has washed himself of his wealth-and-fortune-induced selfishness, an affliction which made him look down upon Joe's simplicity and rarely to consider the identity of his benefactor. For Magwitch, Pip makes daily visits as he festers in prison, unwilling to desert his benefactor as he feels he has in the past. Magwitch's death scene ends with a prayer, as Pip asks the Lord to forgive Magwitch for his sins. Interestingly, Jane Eyre also ends with a prayer: both endings speak to the fervent religiosity of the Victorian period. After reconciling with Magwitch, Pip becomes ill, spending many nights that teem with "anxiety and horror" (412): it is both a physical and existential illness and crisis. It is Joe who cares for and revives Pip. Acknowledging his "ingratitude" of years past, Pip goes on to reestablish a relationship with Joe and Biddy. The new, more humble. Pip is best exemplified on page 428 when he shows his gratitude to Joe and Biddy for taking care of his debts and his health, profusely offering to repay them and acknowledging that no payback will ever be great enough. Indeed, Pip is greatly changed from the young man who is deeply "ashamed of the dear good" (91) Joe.
Closely mirroring the scene in Jane Eyre when Jane brings Rochester out from Ferndean and into the open air of the English countryside, Joe and Pip have their own symbolic adventure in nature. Tenderly carrying the weak Pip to his carriage, Joe and Pip drive "away together into the country" (417), as if moving onwards from their from their old selves and experiences. At this point in the novel, both are new men: Pip, more humble and now accustomed to working for a living, Joe, literate and in love. On this Sunday afternoon, Pip is overcome by the "rich summer growthŠon the trees and on the grass, and sweet summer scentsŠfilled the air" (417). Gazing at the landscape, Pip thinks of how it has "grown and changed, and how the little flowers had been forming, and the voices of the birds had been strengthening" (418). He seems to be describing himself, as someone who has "grown and changed" and who has strengthened himself as he recovers from sickness, but as someone who has also strengthened his sense of humility. As the landscape in Jane Eyre reflects Rochester's rebirth and the growth of Jane and Rochester's love, so the outside world reflects Pip's physical and emotional rebirth in Great Expectations.
As reconciliations abound, there are several romantic relationships that blossom as the novel concludes. First among them is Joe and Biddy's romance: as Jane and Rochester are deeply in love, so are Biddy and Joe "in love and charity with all mankind" (428). Complementing and improving each other as lovers do, Biddy teaches Joe to write (415), a simple yet empowering skill; able to sign his name -- indeed his identity -- comes to have a renewed sense of self worth and has a sense of "unbounded satisfaction" as he wields his pen. Also like Rochester and Jane in their Victorian love story, Biddy and Joe are blessed by the birth of a baby boy, who they call Pip and who is the spitting image of Pip senior. In a novel the comes to be about Pip's growth and the paths and evolution of relationships, it does not seem accidental that Dickens chose to "rewrite" Pip as a young child, perhaps allowing him another life in which to correct the mistakes of old. Theirs is a simple and wholesome domestic bliss.
Finally, there is Pip and Estella. Like Jane for Rochester, Pip enters back into Estella's life at the very right moment, as she has led "a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renownedŠ" (431). In the tradition of the great ending of Jane Eyre, the hardship and tragedy in Estella's life will be rectified on the last pages of the novel. In keeping with the theme of miracles , or at least highly fortuitous circumstances in Victorian novels, Estella and Pip meet again after having been separated by marriage, time, children and Pip's self-imposed isolation. Visiting Miss Havisham's old home for the last time, the mysterious figure of a woman appears: moving slowly towards the figure, Pip soon understands that the apparition is Estella, his childhood love. They make no pretenses. "I am greatly changed," says Estella to Pip, and indeed, she is: her coldness has melted away, the "proud eyes" have "softened" and the "once insensible hand" is graced with a "friendly touch" (432). She has grown from a cold girl into a warm woman and mother, perhaps humbled by her cruel husband. And Pip admits to her, "I have been bent and broken, but -- I hope -- into a better shape." Meeting in the place where their relationship first began, Pip's final description of the landscape serves as a symbolic representation of the beginning of their new lives in their new selves. As the novel concludes, Dickens again establishes the landscape as a symbol of what is happening between or to the characters. In the highly romanticized finale, Pip describes how he and Estella "went out of the ruined place," emblematic of their moving on from their old relationship into a new, more mature one. Moving from ruin, they focus on "the broad expanse of tranquil light" (433), which contrasts with the "stranded and still landscape" (392) that has up until this point defined Pip's life. The new light is dazzling, as their future shall be, and tranquil, as the new couple is. Grasping her hand, Pip sees "no shadow" of parting from Estella, and with this confirms that together they will remain.
Wide Sargasso Sea and the blossoming of hate
The endings of Waterland and Wide Sargasso Sea, are not as optimistic and romantic as their Victorian forbearers. Whereas in the Victorian novels love is realized and families and homes are built, the modern texts focus on the destruction of these entities. The domestic is destructive, and is destroyed. Over the course of Wide Sargasso Sea's ending, Antoinette and Rochester's relationship and sanity slowly unravels, and they suffer as a couple and as individuals. While on a micro level the book details the way a marriage and two human beings come apart, it is also a postcolonial novel condemning the colonization of places like the Caribbean or Africa: Antoinette's angst seems to reflect that of her home as a colonized nation, Rochester's coldness and infidelity a symbol of England's cruelty in its colonies. The final pages of the novel press on with a sense of despair, detailing the destruction of a couple's home and focusing on each character's conceptions and experiences of hatred and sadness.
Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette's identity remains in flux. The question of her identity also addresses questions inherent in any discussion of colonization: for example, how the colonizer (her husband) confuses and destroys the identities of the colonized (Antoinette/Bertha), and how empire dislocates and depersonalizes both place and people. Unlike in the Victorian novels where domesticity (or its promise) and spouses come to be a comfort and source of joy, Antoinette's husband is the source of her pain rather than a source of comfort: the domestic sphere comes to destroy her rather than enrich her. While her husband calls her Bertha, she calls herself Antoinette: in one passage, she says to Rochester "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another nameŠ" (Rhys, 147). Whereas Jane and Pip, even Estella, come to affect positive changes within themselves and to better understand who they are, Antoinette is not afforded this luxury. In two passages, Antoinette is so removed from herself that she is unable to recognize her face: "There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like nowŠWhat am I doing in this place and who am I?" (180). Knowing not her place in the world, nor who she is, she asks desperate questions with no answer. As the novel concludes, Antoinette acknowledges that "Sometimes I looked to the right or to the left but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see that ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place" (187). She is the ghost that haunts, and is paradoxically afraid of and unable to recognize herself. Rather then having a clear sense of identity or purpose, as Jane has as she evolves into caretaker, wife and mother, Antoinette is demonized by her inability to create a sense of self.
One of the most simple and profound aspects of Antoinette and Rochester's marriage is that it is a loveless one. Unlike Pip and Estella or Jane and Rochester, who are able to create histories together and who love each other profoundly, there is no tenderness between Antoinette and Rochester. More than once, Rochester thinks to himself that he simply does not "want" (165) his wife, which he confirms by sleeping with another woman, an act he deliberately wants his wife to hear so as to hurt and alienate her. By the end of the novel, there is "no warmth, no sweetness" (171) left in either of them. In one particularly poignant passage, Antoinette emerges from her room looking and acting like the ruined woman she is: "her hair uncombed and dullŠher eyesŠinflamed and staringŠher face Šflushed and looked swollen," she is drunk and looking for more liqiour to soothe her. The couple's interaction is alive with hate: while Rochester grows angrier with every word, Antoinette smashes "another bottle against the wall and stood with the broken glass in her hand and murder in her eyes" (148). "Don't you love me at all?" she asks Rochester. "No, I do not," he replies (148). Inflamed like her eyes, Antoinette attacks her husband with her teeth: domestic violence, rather than domestic bliss, reigns. Cursing each other and unable to bear each other, Rochester considers her only a "red-eyed wild-haired stranger" (149), a mad woman who he can no longer bear. Their marriage completely undone, Rochester thinks to himself he is "tied to a lunatic for life -- a drunken, lying lunatic" (164), which contrasts sharply with the domestic bliss (or its promise) in the Victorian novels. Their marriage and their home come apart with ease as the foundation of their relationship comes to be built on solid hate.
The word and the expression of "hate" between Antoinette and Rochester come to define the end of Wide Sargasso Sea, standing in contrast to the love and light-filled endings of the Victorian texts. Hate comes to essentialize the end of the novel, which is consumed by people consumed with hatred: "ŠI hate you and before I die I will show you how much I hate you" (147) Antoinette says to Rochester. At the very end of the novel, she calls her husband not by his name, but rather knows him as "the man who hated me" (189). Rochester is also consumed with hate: "You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best. But first, But first, I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you'll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing. I did it too, I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost. A ghost in the grey daylight. Nothing left but hopelessness" (170) thinks Antoinette's husband as he reflects on his mad eyed wife. The home, their lives, are destroyed. This stilting language that marks his last section of Wide Sargasso Sea contributes to the sense of tragedy that marks the end of the novel, for its fractured nature marks Rochester's emotionally and spiritually splintered mind: "Words rush through my head (deeds too)ŠPity like a naked new born babe striding in the blastŠI hate poets now and poetry. As I hate the music which I loved once" (164). He goes on, "I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever color, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. And had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before we found it" (172). Rather than the sense of fulfillment that marks the end of the Victorian texts, which comes largely from love and the home (or the promise of marriage and a home), Wide Sargasso Sea is marked by the characters' desperation and emptiness. This creshendoing condemnation and expression of pure hatred ends with an ominous sense of "NothingŠ" a single, powerful word that will reappear Waterland, which professes an equally dark view of human kind, and of life itself.
On the very last pages of the novel, Antoinette becomes resolute and determined in a way that she has not been for the course of the novel: although her determination will lead to tragedy, it also leads to her liberation. In order to "free" Antoinette, Rhys resurrects the famous fire from Jane Eyre, which stands as Antoinette's final act and statement in the book. Walking "as though I were flying," as if free for the first time, Antoinette goes "further than [she] ever had before into the depths of the house" (187) and sets fire to the curtains and eventually, the house entire. She becomes more adventurous, more daring as the novel concludes: it is clearly a moment of liberation for this woman who has been so confined and unloved that she goes mad. The fire is perhaps one of the only things in the novel that is "lovely" to her. As she destroys the home that has destroyed her, Antoinette feels she knows "why I was brought here and what I have to do" (190). Rather than being a wife that builds a home as Jane does, Antoinette literally destroys her home: although destructive, her fire comes to be as important, as liberating and defining for Antoinette as being a nurse and a wife is to Jane, perhaps as illuminating as it is for Pip to hold Estella's hand for the first time as they begin a life together. The destruction of the domestic world that has ruined her allows Antoinette understand herself and her purpose with new clarity.
Waterland: Families Fractured
The ending of Graham Swift's Waterland comes to be about endings themselves: babies, relationships, children and mothers all die away as the novel concludes. The ending of the novel suggests that everything, even the entirety of history, "might amount to nothing" (269). Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Waterland focuses on the ways people damage each other and split apart, and on various forms of human madness, as well as how women are destroyed, and the destruction of lives and loves rather than their creation, unlike the focus of the building of love and lives in the Victorian endings. Describing s series of deaths, Swift comes to illuminate madness and the destruction of the domestic in Fen country.
Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Waterland's nonlinear structure and fractured sentence structure contributes to the its feeling of desolation and madness: as a nonlinear narrative, Waterland weaves back and forth through history and characters' stories, creating a sense of dislocation and an ability to firmly ground oneself at any point in the novel, similar to the way Mary is unable to ground herself in any reality at the end of the novel. As the novel ends, Waterland weaves from the scenes of Tom and Mary as they deal with the child Mary has stolen for herself, but we are never far away from Tom's omnipotent internal dialogues and narrations about himself and the nature of history, as well as memories of his childhood and his brother Dick. Further, sentences are often incomplete, single words become statements and thoughts drift into ellipses and are never finished. With thoughts and structure like "But they're killers. Pike. Fresh-water wolvesŠThe teeth rake backwards towards the gullet, so what goes in, can't -- Killers," (Swift, 316) and "Lash-fluttering consent: It's all right, go ahead. You see, I can't -- Never couldŠ" (321) or "There'll come no answering, gurgling, rescue-me cry. He's on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning. The Ouse flows to the seaŠ" (357), the reader feels that they have entered into a world of lunacy, dislocation and agitated intensity which indeed defines the characters and ending of the novel.
Rather than the optimism and birth of new, solid relationships and beginnings that mark the endings of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, Waterland ends with the "coming of things to their limits, this invasion by Nothing of the fragile islands of life" (341). There is no need for human beings to change or evolve as there is in the Victorian novels, because the concept of a meaningful future is in limbo. Meaning is sucked out of life rather than infused into it: life is invaded by death, the undoing of people and families, leaving no room for anything else. Good fortune is impossible and "miracles don't happen" (341) as they seem to in the Victorian texts. "Nothing" first invades Mary's life, as Tom looks back to the past and remembers their baby's death, an event describes as a thing "which happens outside dreams which should only happen in them" (308). As the baby is aborted, so begins Mary's psychosis that will last for the remainder of her life, culminating when she steals a baby from a Safeways grocery store in an attempt to recreate her child. Mary, traumatized by the abortion she underwent as a young girl, is delusional and desperate, and insists that God has told her to take the child, and that insists the baby is hers (268). Like Antoinette and Rochester, this tragic figure presents us with another portrait of modern madness, as well as another way to imagine the coming apart of family and normalcy. As Mary sees it, the baby is a kind of Jesus, "sent by God. Who will save us all" (329). To modern ears, this sounds decidedly like the rant of a crazy woman. In Wide Sargasso Sea Mary blames God for telling her and allowing her to kidnap the child: rather than God (and religion itself) being salvific, as He is in Jane Eyre, God becomes equated with modern madness.
The death of Tom's mother allows the reader to further examine the elements of nihilism and nothingness that pervade Waterland. When she dies, his mother becomes a Gone woman and Tom, Dick and their father enter into their "terrible January dawn." (283) With no mother, no wife -- with the destruction of the pinnacle of the domestic sphere -- the family comes apart: the culmination of their fracture will be Dick's death. Their mother's absence is never explained, her death never confirmed: she is in limbo as Gone, leaving her sons to consider that she might someday return to them. Whether Gone or Dead, the mother's death leaves all the "men" in her life in limbo as well, wondering if she just might return home: as Tom tries to absorb the spirit of his dead mother while his father stands about the graveyard(286), their fractured family exists only in a state of futile wonder and pathetic half hope.
The final death in Waterland -- the final ending of the ending -- occurs at the place where the book begins, on the graceful and mysterious Fens. Dick, somewhat mad and able to communicate more effectively with his motorcycle than with his father or brother, drowns himself in the Fens. From Dick, "There'll come no answering, no gurgling, rescue-me cry. He's on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning. The Ouse flows to the seaŠ" (357). His death is finite, as he returns to the waters which are perhaps the only constant in the book. Dick "punctures the waterŠAnd is gone. GoneŠ" (357). Like his mother, he becomes another person lost in the book, the final Gone person. Crying for Dick is an "empty" endeavor, like life itself, as is his father's desperate "hailing" (365). As the book concludes, Swift confirms that human action against death, against Nothingness, is entirely useless: nothingness ultimately pervades and conquers. Yet another pieces of the family is lost. The deaths in Waterland are the micro examples of the overarching the notion of perpetual nothingness, and of the inability of people or the world to truly progress. Inevitably, the world slips away (336) from itself, as life slips away from people with madness and death. Portraying a family with marked by tragedies that include death, incest and abortion, Swift shows how a family's history, and history itself, repeat with only tragedy as their trademarks. There is no gift of light for Tom or his father, no scenes of nature symbolizing renewal, no rebuilding of the family, as happens in the Victorian texts. Whereas its Victorian counterpart "looks uphill," Waterland looks decidedly downwards.
Conclusion
The endings of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations establish the world as a steady place, one ripe with possibilities and new beginnings. Their modern day rewritings, however, establish the world as a void, a place in which lives are undone rather than (re)built. As love and families are established, Brontë and Dickens use religion, natural symbolism and highly idealized language and scenes in which characters' proverbial stars align perfectly in order to end their novels with the promise that fortuitous futures exist for their respective characters, and that the world itself is an ultimately benevolent place. Rhys and Swift, however, are not so sanguine. By portraying the undoing of wives (and in the case of Waterland children) -- both signifiers of the domestic and domestic bliss -- through death and/or madness, Swift and Rhys show how else in life unravels as well. Generally, with their tone and language each modern author creates a world where catastrophe reigns. The family, domesticity and indeed the perpetuation of life become impossible. While the Victorian texts are ultimately about human beings' ability to move onwards and upwards, and about the possibilities of love, their modern re-workings contradict such hope, portraying life as an ultimately doom-filled endeavor. Each set of books takes the crucial, omnipotent concepts of love and family, indeed the meaning of life itself, and come to very different conclusions about the possibility and point of living at all: for Brontë and Dickens, endings become beginnings, marking the point when life truly blooms, while for Rhys and Swift, endings come to function as a way to illustrate the ways in which both body and soul inevitably wither and die.
Introduction to Endings of Victorian and Modern Works: Domesticity Preserved, the Family Resurrected, Domesticity Destroyed, the Family Denigrated
Introduction
Zoe Ripple '05, English 156, Brown University, 2004
This is the Part I of the author's "The Endings of Victorian and Modern Works: Domesticity Preserved, the Family Resurrected, Domesticity Destroyed, the Family Denigrated."
he endings of novels are perhaps their most crucial points, when both themes and characters diverge or converge, when expectations are fulfilled or crushed, when the novel comes together to leave no questions or to create new ones. The endings of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Charles Dickens Great Expectations and Graham Swift'sWaterland are all superb. Jane Eyre and Great Expectations served as the inspirations for Wide Sargasso Sea and Waterland, respectively, and within each pair, the endings of the modern texts bear more similarities to each other than they do to their Victorian counterparts. Jane Eyre and Great Expectations end on more hopeful and exuberant literary notes than their modern day rewritings: in the two Victorian endings, love is confirmed, miracles are worked, dreams are fulfilled, children are born and new familial bonds are established. Further, both Brontë and Dickens place emphasis on the human capacity to change, as both authors' characters mature morally and spiritually by the novels' endings. The modern re-workings of these texts are not so finitely optimistic. Both Wide Sargasso Sea and Waterland end on unique notes of despair: madness, death, hate and suicide come to clearly define these modern endings. Any hope of plesant domesticity is destroyed, as couples are separated by hate or death, as mothers and children perish and in so doing destroy the families of which they are a part. Ultimately, the Victorian texts come to frame and prize traditional the promise of traditional domesticity, while the modern texts focus on the undoing and ultimate impossibility and destructiveness of family and home.
The Endings of Victorian and Modern Works
Last updated 20 May 2004
Jane Eyre: Victorian Ideals and God's Triumph
Jane Eyre: Victorian Ideals and God's Triumph
Zoe Ripple '05, English 156, Brown University, 2004
This is Part II of the author's "The Endings of Victorian and Modern Works: Domesticity Preserved, the Family Resurrected, Domesticity Destroyed, the Family Denigrated."
he ending of Jane Eyre is perhaps the most obvious "happy" ending of the four books analyzed in this essay. The ending, which I classify as beginning when Rochester and Jane are reunited at the manor-house at Ferndean (Brontë, 366), details the manifold ways in which Jane and Mr. Rochester's lives and souls evolve and change after their reunion, through their own work and by the hand of God. They mature as individuals, but also grow exceptionally close as a couple, coming to work together with "perfect concord" (Brontë, 384.) As the novel concludes, miracles are worked, love and sight are restored, a child is born and a new haven of domestic bliss is established in Jane and Rochester's home. Emerging as an ideal Victorian companion, wife and mother, Jane stands as the perfect woman that Bertha, the mad woman in the attic and Mr. Rochester's first wife, could never be. She and Rochester establish the domestic bliss that could not found with Bertha, and come to prize it above all else but God.
The end of Jane Eyre begins with a beginning: Jane, who calls Rochester "master," and Rochester, who calls Jane "darling," come together once more, and this time for good. Seeing him for the first time in years, Jane is in "rapture" (367), although she initially keeps her presence concealed from the infirm Rochester. When she finally presents herself to Rochester, the couple is ecstatic to be together once more, fawning over each other and confirming each other's returned presence: "You are all together a human being, JaneŠ? " (372), Rochester asks her. It is an ideal reunion. With her return, Rochester's life is instantly changed: whereas Rochester was "desolate and abandonedŠmy heart famished and my soul never to be fedŠ" (370) without his darling, life is infused back into his "withered heart" (__) with her return. Rochester's heart renewed, the couple goes on to define themselves anew as companions, and then lovers.
In one passage of note, Brontë uses the natural world to symbolize the renewal Jane and Rochester undergo as individuals and as a couple. On page 374, Jane, the companion-cum-renewer, takes Rochester into "cheerful fields" (374), describing the "brilliantly green" grass, the "sparklingly blue sky" (374) under the "open air" of the world. The language is alive and joyful as it describes the life and natural wonder spread before Jane and Rochester. Such descriptions seem to stand as a metaphor for their sparkling new relationship, one in which love provides endless opportunities: the natural world mirrors the perfection of their new, blossoming relationship.
When Jane encounters Rochester at Ferndean, he is deformed and alone, resigned remaining in decrepitude for the rest of his life. When Jane sees him, she decides he is barely human, tells him that "It is time some one undertook to rehumanize you" (371). Animal like, his hair is too long and his fingernails uncut. Jane sees transformation as her task, and undertakes the project with loving kindness and devotion. Treating him as a human being -- simply eating dinner with Rochester and indulging in treasured after dinner conversation -- enlivens both of them. In each other's company, they change and blossom: "in his presence I thoroughly lived, and he in mine," (372) remarks Jane. With her care, Rochester is indeed rehumanized and once again blossoms into a human being, and both come to be happier, more complete individuals.
At first, Jane is content to forgo marriage, willing to live as Rochester's nurse: although it seems she might be sacrificing her own happiness for Rochester's, it is clear that caring for him will indeed complete her happiness rather than detract from it. Almost disturbingly, she delights in Rochester's "avowal of his dependence" (374). Soon, however, being his nurse is not enough, and Jane marries Rochester in a simple ceremony. With this, life is complete. Jane delights in her newfound place in the domestic sphere. Marriage makes her a true woman, and as Jane says to her master-cum-husband, "I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth" (379). At the end of the novel, the pinnacle of Jane's existence comes to be that she is married and able to devote herself to her deformed husband. The changes she undergoes make her into a more complete and ideal woman. Marriage, it seems, infuses Jane with new life, reflected in her effusive proclamations of love and devotion: "I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earthŠI am my husband's life as fully as he is mine" (384). So perfect is their love that as Jane and Rochester become each other's lives, so do they come to merge physically, as Jane becomes Rochester's vision and his right hand (384). With the end of the novel, Jane is only beginning in her role as a true angel.
One of the extreme changes figured into the ending of Jane Eyre is Mr. Rochester's religious conversion. At the end of the text, Rochester turns to God and crediting Him with any and all of life's blessings: "Of late, Jane -- only -- only of late -- I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my room. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray" (380). In the novel's ending of renewals, Rochester is born anew as a Christian man, frequently referencing his merciful God, and thanking Him for Jane and all other subsequent blessings. Also, he entreats "my redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto" (382) -- which again emphasizes the importance of personal change and growth.
While their child is one of the miracles that graces Jane and Rochester's new life, the gift of sight is also bestowed upon Rochester on the second to last page of the novel. Again, Rochester considers his sight an endowment from God: "On that occasion he again, with a full heart, acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy" (385). Of course, the first thing Rochester sees with his restored sight is the perfect Jane, in her charming necklace and pale blue dress, the picture of feminine elegance. With his sight restored, the world is "no longer a void," to Rochester. Similarly, his previously "void" spiritual life is also filled, as are their lives together. Their lives blissfully changed and filled to the brim with blessings and a new baby boy who can carry his father's name and parent's legacy of happiness into the future, the novel concludes.
Bibliography
Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre New York: W.W. Norton. 1848
The Endings of Victorian and Modern Works
Last updated 20 May 2004
New Life, Old Love in Charles Dickens Great Expectations
In the tradition of Jane Eyre, Great Expectations also ends with the fulfillment of unrequited love and key changes in the lives of the protagonists. Indeed it is at the very end of the novel -- the last sentence in fact -- in which Dickens assures the reader that Pip and Estella will ride off into the proverbial sunset together. While for the course of the novel Pip is characterized by extreme selfishness and self-aggrandizement, by the end of the novel he comes to see the errors of his ways and rectifies the wrongs he has done, cleansing himself of the egocentricity that accompanied his fortuitous rise to wealth. Other characters, like Joe, also evolve and come in to their own happiness by the end of the novel. At the end of Great Expectations, as in Jane Eyre, new children are brought into the world, new relationships and marriages are cemented, as Dickens forms his characters into more kind, self-aware and fulfilled people. The endings of both Jane Eyre and Great Expectations chart the road from sickness to health, from decrepitude to renewal, and physical as well as spiritual rebirth.
One of the driving themes in the ending of Great Expectations is reconciliation, which inherently improves relationship and sets them on a new path. As he does not want to be "misremembered after death," (Dickens, 380) Pip reconciles with his benefactor, Magwitch, Joe and finally, Estella. In the cases of Joe and Magwitch, Pip wants to show them he is aware of and has washed himself of his wealth-and-fortune-induced selfishness, an affliction which made him look down upon Joe's simplicity and rarely to consider the identity of his benefactor. For Magwitch, Pip makes daily visits as he festers in prison, unwilling to desert his benefactor as he feels he has in the past. Magwitch's death scene ends with a prayer, as Pip asks the Lord to forgive Magwitch for his sins. Interestingly, Jane Eyre also ends with a prayer: both endings speak to the fervent religiosity of the Victorian period. After reconciling with Magwitch, Pip becomes ill, spending many nights that teem with "anxiety and horror" (412): it is both a physical and existential illness and crisis. It is Joe who cares for and revives Pip. Acknowledging his "ingratitude" of years past, Pip goes on to reestablish a relationship with Joe and Biddy. The new, more humble. Pip is best exemplified on page 428 when he shows his gratitude to Joe and Biddy for taking care of his debts and his health, profusely offering to repay them and acknowledging that no payback will ever be great enough. Indeed, Pip is greatly changed from the young man who is deeply "ashamed of the dear good" (91) Joe.
Closely mirroring the scene in Jane Eyre when Jane brings Rochester out from Ferndean and into the open air of the English countryside, Joe and Pip have their own symbolic adventure in nature. Tenderly carrying the weak Pip to his carriage, Joe and Pip drive "away together into the country" (417), as if moving onwards from their from their old selves and experiences. At this point in the novel, both are new men: Pip, more humble and now accustomed to working for a living, Joe, literate and in love. On this Sunday afternoon, Pip is overcome by the "rich summer growthŠon the trees and on the grass, and sweet summer scentsŠfilled the air" (417). Gazing at the landscape, Pip thinks of how it has "grown and changed, and how the little flowers had been forming, and the voices of the birds had been strengthening" (418). He seems to be describing himself, as someone who has "grown and changed" and who has strengthened himself as he recovers from sickness, but as someone who has also strengthened his sense of humility. As the landscape in Jane Eyre reflects Rochester's rebirth and the growth of Jane and Rochester's love, so the outside world reflects Pip's physical and emotional rebirth in Great Expectations.
As reconciliations abound, there are several romantic relationships that blossom as the novel concludes. First among them is Joe and Biddy's romance: as Jane and Rochester are deeply in love, so are Biddy and Joe "in love and charity with all mankind" (428). Complementing and improving each other as lovers do, Biddy teaches Joe to write (415), a simple yet empowering skill; able to sign his name -- indeed his identity -- comes to have a renewed sense of self worth and has a sense of "unbounded satisfaction" as he wields his pen. Also like Rochester and Jane in their Victorian love story, Biddy and Joe are blessed by the birth of a baby boy, who they call Pip and who is the spitting image of Pip senior. In a novel the comes to be about Pip's growth and the paths and evolution of relationships, it does not seem accidental that Dickens chose to "rewrite" Pip as a young child, perhaps allowing him another life in which to correct the mistakes of old. Theirs is a simple and wholesome domestic bliss.
Finally, there is Pip and Estella. Like Jane for Rochester, Pip enters back into Estella's life at the very right moment, as she has led "a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renownedŠ" (431). In the tradition of the great ending of Jane Eyre, the hardship and tragedy in Estella's life will be rectified on the last pages of the novel. In keeping with the theme of miracles , or at least highly fortuitous circumstances in Victorian novels, Estella and Pip meet again after having been separated by marriage, time, children and Pip's self-imposed isolation. Visiting Miss Havisham's old home for the last time, the mysterious figure of a woman appears: moving slowly towards the figure, Pip soon understands that the apparition is Estella, his childhood love. They make no pretenses. "I am greatly changed," says Estella to Pip, and indeed, she is: her coldness has melted away, the "proud eyes" have "softened" and the "once insensible hand" is graced with a "friendly touch" (432). She has grown from a cold girl into a warm woman and mother, perhaps humbled by her cruel husband. And Pip admits to her, "I have been bent and broken, but -- I hope -- into a better shape." Meeting in the place where their relationship first began, Pip's final description of the landscape serves as a symbolic representation of the beginning of their new lives in their new selves. As the novel concludes, Dickens again establishes the landscape as a symbol of what is happening between or to the characters. In the highly romanticized finale, Pip describes how he and Estella "went out of the ruined place," emblematic of their moving on from their old relationship into a new, more mature one. Moving from ruin, they focus on "the broad expanse of tranquil light" (433), which contrasts with the "stranded and still landscape" (392) that has up until this point defined Pip's life. The new light is dazzling, as their future shall be, and tranquil, as the new couple is. Grasping her hand, Pip sees "no shadow" of parting from Estella, and with this confirms that together they will remain.
Wide Sargasso Sea and the blossoming of hate
The endings of Waterland and Wide Sargasso Sea, are not as optimistic and romantic as their Victorian forbearers. Whereas in the Victorian novels love is realized and families and homes are built, the modern texts focus on the destruction of these entities. The domestic is destructive, and is destroyed. Over the course of Wide Sargasso Sea's ending, Antoinette and Rochester's relationship and sanity slowly unravels, and they suffer as a couple and as individuals. While on a micro level the book details the way a marriage and two human beings come apart, it is also a postcolonial novel condemning the colonization of places like the Caribbean or Africa: Antoinette's angst seems to reflect that of her home as a colonized nation, Rochester's coldness and infidelity a symbol of England's cruelty in its colonies. The final pages of the novel press on with a sense of despair, detailing the destruction of a couple's home and focusing on each character's conceptions and experiences of hatred and sadness.
Throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette's identity remains in flux. The question of her identity also addresses questions inherent in any discussion of colonization: for example, how the colonizer (her husband) confuses and destroys the identities of the colonized (Antoinette/Bertha), and how empire dislocates and depersonalizes both place and people. Unlike in the Victorian novels where domesticity (or its promise) and spouses come to be a comfort and source of joy, Antoinette's husband is the source of her pain rather than a source of comfort: the domestic sphere comes to destroy her rather than enrich her. While her husband calls her Bertha, she calls herself Antoinette: in one passage, she says to Rochester "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another nameŠ" (Rhys, 147). Whereas Jane and Pip, even Estella, come to affect positive changes within themselves and to better understand who they are, Antoinette is not afforded this luxury. In two passages, Antoinette is so removed from herself that she is unable to recognize her face: "There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like nowŠWhat am I doing in this place and who am I?" (180). Knowing not her place in the world, nor who she is, she asks desperate questions with no answer. As the novel concludes, Antoinette acknowledges that "Sometimes I looked to the right or to the left but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see that ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place" (187). She is the ghost that haunts, and is paradoxically afraid of and unable to recognize herself. Rather then having a clear sense of identity or purpose, as Jane has as she evolves into caretaker, wife and mother, Antoinette is demonized by her inability to create a sense of self.
One of the most simple and profound aspects of Antoinette and Rochester's marriage is that it is a loveless one. Unlike Pip and Estella or Jane and Rochester, who are able to create histories together and who love each other profoundly, there is no tenderness between Antoinette and Rochester. More than once, Rochester thinks to himself that he simply does not "want" (165) his wife, which he confirms by sleeping with another woman, an act he deliberately wants his wife to hear so as to hurt and alienate her. By the end of the novel, there is "no warmth, no sweetness" (171) left in either of them. In one particularly poignant passage, Antoinette emerges from her room looking and acting like the ruined woman she is: "her hair uncombed and dullŠher eyesŠinflamed and staringŠher face Šflushed and looked swollen," she is drunk and looking for more liqiour to soothe her. The couple's interaction is alive with hate: while Rochester grows angrier with every word, Antoinette smashes "another bottle against the wall and stood with the broken glass in her hand and murder in her eyes" (148). "Don't you love me at all?" she asks Rochester. "No, I do not," he replies (148). Inflamed like her eyes, Antoinette attacks her husband with her teeth: domestic violence, rather than domestic bliss, reigns. Cursing each other and unable to bear each other, Rochester considers her only a "red-eyed wild-haired stranger" (149), a mad woman who he can no longer bear. Their marriage completely undone, Rochester thinks to himself he is "tied to a lunatic for life -- a drunken, lying lunatic" (164), which contrasts sharply with the domestic bliss (or its promise) in the Victorian novels. Their marriage and their home come apart with ease as the foundation of their relationship comes to be built on solid hate.
The word and the expression of "hate" between Antoinette and Rochester come to define the end of Wide Sargasso Sea, standing in contrast to the love and light-filled endings of the Victorian texts. Hate comes to essentialize the end of the novel, which is consumed by people consumed with hatred: "ŠI hate you and before I die I will show you how much I hate you" (147) Antoinette says to Rochester. At the very end of the novel, she calls her husband not by his name, but rather knows him as "the man who hated me" (189). Rochester is also consumed with hate: "You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best. But first, But first, I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you'll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing. I did it too, I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost. A ghost in the grey daylight. Nothing left but hopelessness" (170) thinks Antoinette's husband as he reflects on his mad eyed wife. The home, their lives, are destroyed. This stilting language that marks his last section of Wide Sargasso Sea contributes to the sense of tragedy that marks the end of the novel, for its fractured nature marks Rochester's emotionally and spiritually splintered mind: "Words rush through my head (deeds too)ŠPity like a naked new born babe striding in the blastŠI hate poets now and poetry. As I hate the music which I loved once" (164). He goes on, "I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever color, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. And had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before we found it" (172). Rather than the sense of fulfillment that marks the end of the Victorian texts, which comes largely from love and the home (or the promise of marriage and a home), Wide Sargasso Sea is marked by the characters' desperation and emptiness. This creshendoing condemnation and expression of pure hatred ends with an ominous sense of "NothingŠ" a single, powerful word that will reappear Waterland, which professes an equally dark view of human kind, and of life itself.
On the very last pages of the novel, Antoinette becomes resolute and determined in a way that she has not been for the course of the novel: although her determination will lead to tragedy, it also leads to her liberation. In order to "free" Antoinette, Rhys resurrects the famous fire from Jane Eyre, which stands as Antoinette's final act and statement in the book. Walking "as though I were flying," as if free for the first time, Antoinette goes "further than [she] ever had before into the depths of the house" (187) and sets fire to the curtains and eventually, the house entire. She becomes more adventurous, more daring as the novel concludes: it is clearly a moment of liberation for this woman who has been so confined and unloved that she goes mad. The fire is perhaps one of the only things in the novel that is "lovely" to her. As she destroys the home that has destroyed her, Antoinette feels she knows "why I was brought here and what I have to do" (190). Rather than being a wife that builds a home as Jane does, Antoinette literally destroys her home: although destructive, her fire comes to be as important, as liberating and defining for Antoinette as being a nurse and a wife is to Jane, perhaps as illuminating as it is for Pip to hold Estella's hand for the first time as they begin a life together. The destruction of the domestic world that has ruined her allows Antoinette understand herself and her purpose with new clarity.
Waterland: Families Fractured
The ending of Graham Swift's Waterland comes to be about endings themselves: babies, relationships, children and mothers all die away as the novel concludes. The ending of the novel suggests that everything, even the entirety of history, "might amount to nothing" (269). Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Waterland focuses on the ways people damage each other and split apart, and on various forms of human madness, as well as how women are destroyed, and the destruction of lives and loves rather than their creation, unlike the focus of the building of love and lives in the Victorian endings. Describing s series of deaths, Swift comes to illuminate madness and the destruction of the domestic in Fen country.
Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Waterland's nonlinear structure and fractured sentence structure contributes to the its feeling of desolation and madness: as a nonlinear narrative, Waterland weaves back and forth through history and characters' stories, creating a sense of dislocation and an ability to firmly ground oneself at any point in the novel, similar to the way Mary is unable to ground herself in any reality at the end of the novel. As the novel ends, Waterland weaves from the scenes of Tom and Mary as they deal with the child Mary has stolen for herself, but we are never far away from Tom's omnipotent internal dialogues and narrations about himself and the nature of history, as well as memories of his childhood and his brother Dick. Further, sentences are often incomplete, single words become statements and thoughts drift into ellipses and are never finished. With thoughts and structure like "But they're killers. Pike. Fresh-water wolvesŠThe teeth rake backwards towards the gullet, so what goes in, can't -- Killers," (Swift, 316) and "Lash-fluttering consent: It's all right, go ahead. You see, I can't -- Never couldŠ" (321) or "There'll come no answering, gurgling, rescue-me cry. He's on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning. The Ouse flows to the seaŠ" (357), the reader feels that they have entered into a world of lunacy, dislocation and agitated intensity which indeed defines the characters and ending of the novel.
Rather than the optimism and birth of new, solid relationships and beginnings that mark the endings of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, Waterland ends with the "coming of things to their limits, this invasion by Nothing of the fragile islands of life" (341). There is no need for human beings to change or evolve as there is in the Victorian novels, because the concept of a meaningful future is in limbo. Meaning is sucked out of life rather than infused into it: life is invaded by death, the undoing of people and families, leaving no room for anything else. Good fortune is impossible and "miracles don't happen" (341) as they seem to in the Victorian texts. "Nothing" first invades Mary's life, as Tom looks back to the past and remembers their baby's death, an event describes as a thing "which happens outside dreams which should only happen in them" (308). As the baby is aborted, so begins Mary's psychosis that will last for the remainder of her life, culminating when she steals a baby from a Safeways grocery store in an attempt to recreate her child. Mary, traumatized by the abortion she underwent as a young girl, is delusional and desperate, and insists that God has told her to take the child, and that insists the baby is hers (268). Like Antoinette and Rochester, this tragic figure presents us with another portrait of modern madness, as well as another way to imagine the coming apart of family and normalcy. As Mary sees it, the baby is a kind of Jesus, "sent by God. Who will save us all" (329). To modern ears, this sounds decidedly like the rant of a crazy woman. In Wide Sargasso Sea Mary blames God for telling her and allowing her to kidnap the child: rather than God (and religion itself) being salvific, as He is in Jane Eyre, God becomes equated with modern madness.
The death of Tom's mother allows the reader to further examine the elements of nihilism and nothingness that pervade Waterland. When she dies, his mother becomes a Gone woman and Tom, Dick and their father enter into their "terrible January dawn." (283) With no mother, no wife -- with the destruction of the pinnacle of the domestic sphere -- the family comes apart: the culmination of their fracture will be Dick's death. Their mother's absence is never explained, her death never confirmed: she is in limbo as Gone, leaving her sons to consider that she might someday return to them. Whether Gone or Dead, the mother's death leaves all the "men" in her life in limbo as well, wondering if she just might return home: as Tom tries to absorb the spirit of his dead mother while his father stands about the graveyard(286), their fractured family exists only in a state of futile wonder and pathetic half hope.
The final death in Waterland -- the final ending of the ending -- occurs at the place where the book begins, on the graceful and mysterious Fens. Dick, somewhat mad and able to communicate more effectively with his motorcycle than with his father or brother, drowns himself in the Fens. From Dick, "There'll come no answering, no gurgling, rescue-me cry. He's on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning. The Ouse flows to the seaŠ" (357). His death is finite, as he returns to the waters which are perhaps the only constant in the book. Dick "punctures the waterŠAnd is gone. GoneŠ" (357). Like his mother, he becomes another person lost in the book, the final Gone person. Crying for Dick is an "empty" endeavor, like life itself, as is his father's desperate "hailing" (365). As the book concludes, Swift confirms that human action against death, against Nothingness, is entirely useless: nothingness ultimately pervades and conquers. Yet another pieces of the family is lost. The deaths in Waterland are the micro examples of the overarching the notion of perpetual nothingness, and of the inability of people or the world to truly progress. Inevitably, the world slips away (336) from itself, as life slips away from people with madness and death. Portraying a family with marked by tragedies that include death, incest and abortion, Swift shows how a family's history, and history itself, repeat with only tragedy as their trademarks. There is no gift of light for Tom or his father, no scenes of nature symbolizing renewal, no rebuilding of the family, as happens in the Victorian texts. Whereas its Victorian counterpart "looks uphill," Waterland looks decidedly downwards.
Conclusion
The endings of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations establish the world as a steady place, one ripe with possibilities and new beginnings. Their modern day rewritings, however, establish the world as a void, a place in which lives are undone rather than (re)built. As love and families are established, Brontë and Dickens use religion, natural symbolism and highly idealized language and scenes in which characters' proverbial stars align perfectly in order to end their novels with the promise that fortuitous futures exist for their respective characters, and that the world itself is an ultimately benevolent place. Rhys and Swift, however, are not so sanguine. By portraying the undoing of wives (and in the case of Waterland children) -- both signifiers of the domestic and domestic bliss -- through death and/or madness, Swift and Rhys show how else in life unravels as well. Generally, with their tone and language each modern author creates a world where catastrophe reigns. The family, domesticity and indeed the perpetuation of life become impossible. While the Victorian texts are ultimately about human beings' ability to move onwards and upwards, and about the possibilities of love, their modern re-workings contradict such hope, portraying life as an ultimately doom-filled endeavor. Each set of books takes the crucial, omnipotent concepts of love and family, indeed the meaning of life itself, and come to very different conclusions about the possibility and point of living at all: for Brontë and Dickens, endings become beginnings, marking the point when life truly blooms, while for Rhys and Swift, endings come to function as a way to illustrate the ways in which both body and soul inevitably wither and die.
Bibliography
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: W.W. Norton. 1848.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: The Modern Library 1861.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1966
Swift, Graham. Waterland. New York: Vintage International, 1983
Last updated 20 May 2004