I was responsible for grading most of the essays answering the tricky question about the effectiveness of the two endings of Great Expectations. In the course of grading these essays I’ve seen a few analytical weaknesses you might work to correct as you draft future essays—particularly Essay 4, in which you must write at further length about the ending of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake.
1. Realism
Many essays anchor their critiques of the effectiveness of Dickens’s two endings on their comparative realism. Writers often point to the original ending—in which Estella and Pip remain romantically if not emotionally estranged—as the more realistic of the two, on the basis of several arguments. For example, it seems somewhat unlikely that Pip and Estella would run into each other in the ruins of Satis House. This is a novelistic coincidence, though, on which more anon. The two strongest arguments against the realism of the published ending are likely these:
- Estella’s character seems unlikely to change after one bad marriage;
- Pip seems unlikely to retain a fiery passion for a girl he fell in love with after three decades of rejection
However, if we were to throw out all the elements of GE that are unrealistic, we’d have little left. Consider:
- Magwitch’s fidelity to a small boy with whom he exchanges some dozen words over twelve hours—the man is a criminal, but he is loyal to a boy?
- Miss Havisham. Is a woman with so strong a will likely to be so easily crushed by a man she scarcely knows?
- Pip sitting in a coach behind Magwitch’s convict-courier.
- A good half-dozen of the characters, who seem drawn from no world I recognize. Have you ever met a Mrs Joe? An Uncle Pumblechook?
The list could go on.
Larry suggested in lecture that GE is generally thought of as a work of Realism, but Dickens’s Realism differs markedly from the idea of realism that we have today.
Most nineteenth-century novels lean on coincidence: Jane Eyre, to give one example, would be quite a different novel were Jane not to accidentally land in the company of her estranged cousins. To a nineteenth-century writer, coincidence and unrealism were simply marks of the divine: God—or the author—would necessarily arrange things so that they reached a meaningful conclusion.
Would we argue that Swan Lake is unrealistic? We would argue, instead, that the themes of Matthew Bourne’s choreography do not loyally represent our experience of the world. (Though that would be a hard argument to make.)
2. Tone
Several essays argue for the effectiveness of endings on the basis of the appropriate tone of one (typically the unpublished ending) and the inappropriate tone of the other.
Many of these arguments observe that the tone of GE is generally “pessimistic.”
Here is why this argument does not move me.
First, the assignment asks writers to base their analysis on the organic logic of the novel. Although the tone of the novel is certainly significant, its tone is not clearly connected to its logic. To make the connection you would need to argue that the tone is connected to the themes and structure of the novel.
Second, “tone” is such a vague concept that it cannot be written about clearly. What is tone? How is it conveyed? Will every reader experience the same tone in the novel? And then there are problems of description. For example, what does it mean to suggest that GE has a “pessimistic tone”? What does pessimism mean, and how does Dickens’s pessimism differ from the general? Writing about the tone of a novel is perhaps as vague as writing about the tone of a symphony: both works clearly have a tone, but writing about that tone requires an admirable specificity of expression.
3. The reader’s pleasure
Several essays remarked on the varied pleasures a good ending can afford a reader. In particular, two versions of this argument have appeared with some regularity:
- The reader would like an ending that is pleasurable or satisfying, either because the ending fits the cliché of a comfortable genre (e.g. romance) or because the ending is interesting in that it rejects the cliché.
- The reader who is faced with an ambiguous ending has the pleasure of imagining an ending that is appropriate or interesting.
The writer, I suppose, must confront this question of how best to satisfy the reader who is paying in time and money for the experience of the book. As a literary scholar, however, you must eschew the simple pleasures of the cliché for a far richer pleasure: why, of all the satisfying or unsatisfying endings Dickens could have written, did he choose this one?
It is a bit of a cheat, I fear, to write simply that an ambiguous ending lets the reader fill in the blanks as she or he will. The reductio of this argument goes something like this: if we wanted the pleasure of filling in blanks we would write our own novels.
Instead, ambiguity is an intent. Why would Dickens craft an ending that leaves his themes unresolved and his characters’ arcs incomplete? Another way of thinking of this question goes something like this: is ambiguity itself a theme of GE? After all, the source of Pip’s wealth is ambiguous for several hundred pages; the reason for his love of Estella remains ambiguous throughout the novel.
Next: what is closure? Who decides whether a text achieves closure? What does closure come from? Is closure anything more than a cliché? Do we say that a narrative achieves closure when it has resolved the story in the way such texts historically have resolved such stories? What does it mean for a story to be resolved? We know that Wemmick marries Miss Skiffins and Herbert, Clara, and Joe, Biddy; but we also know that marriages are often miserable failures: consider the Pockets—the whole lot of them; consider Mrs Joe. How does a marriage provide any more closure than a character’s uncertain singleness?
Tags: 2009, Charles Dickens, Essay stuff, Great Expectations, Midterm
