I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 5 3though he were a child. In doing so, he becomes, as one critic has
put it, a father to his father. There is also a kind of sibling solidarity
between the two men, since both were ill- used as children, just as
there is between Pip and Joe. If the protagonist is to be redeemed,
the criminal or negligent parent must be forgiven, as Cordelia
pardons Lear, and the wayward child must accept forgiveness in his
turn, in Pip’s case from Joe and Biddy.
In its warmth and affection, the family in early Dickens often
figures as a refuge from a harsh public world, which is true in this
novel of the domestic set- up of Wemmick, Jaggers’s good- hearted
clerk. Yet turning the family into a safe haven is now so arduous a
task that Wemmick’s house actually has a moat around it, and can
be entered only by a drawbridge. This Englishman’s home is almost
literally a castle. Public and domestic spheres are split apart. Only
in this way can the latter be protected from the callousness of the
former. Within the protective walls of the Wemmick household,
there is abundant good feeling between Wemmick himself and his
uproariously comic old father. Pip’s family, by contrast, is morbidly
dysfunctional, with mildly incestuous overtones. There is some
deep sexual and domestic disturbance in the forge, as there is in
Satis House. The word ‘forge’ means a blacksmith’s workshop,
but it also suggests fraudulence and deceit, which brings to mind
both Satis House and Pip’s status as a sham gentleman. Love and
sexuality in Miss Havisham’s diseased world are associated with
violence, cruelty, power, fantasy and duplicity. Love in this novel is
by no means a simple alternative to hatred and domination. It is
intimately interwoven with them.
Pip’s childhood home is physically attached to the forge, which
means that, unlike Wemmick’s mini- castle, the world of work over-
laps with the domestic sphere. The negative aspect of this is that