I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 6 1may have welcomed the prospect at the time. Nor did Magwitch
consult him on the matter. He did it for Pip’s sake, but also for his
own gratification. He even speaks proudly of ‘owning’ his protégé.
There is a quiet allusion to Frankenstein and his monster. As a
prisoner, Magwitch is not in command of his own existence, and
he ends up by putting his beloved Pip in much the same position.
In a similar way, Estella is the puppet of Miss Havisham. In the end,
she turns wrathfully on her creator, and Pip does the same with
Magwitch when he first returns to London. It is irresponsible of
the felon to grant an almost complete stranger a share of his wealth
and then simply stand back and admire his handiwork. To do so is
not only to overlook the misery that wealth can bring. It is also to
exercise a form of power over his spiritual adoptee. This is also
glaringly true of Miss Havisham and Estella. Power lurks beneath
many a relationship in this work.
There are several literary modes at work in Great Expectations.
There is realism, but also fantasy. Miss Havisham is hardly the kind
of character one might bump into in the local shopping mall,
though Magwitch might make a passable security guard in such a
place. Nor are the book’s many contrived coincidences in the least
lifelike. The novel also draws on the literary form known as the
Bildungsroman, a tale about the education or spiritual progress of
its protagonist. And there are strong elements of fable, romance,
myth and fairy tale. Here, however, the novel differs from some of
Dickens’s earlier works. We have seen already that novels some-
times use fairy- tale devices to pull off happy endings which from a
realist viewpoint seem out of reach. Jane Eyre, for example, reunites
Jane with her stricken master by allowing her to hear his voice
crying on the wind from a long way off. The early Dickens is
himself a dab hand at such stratagems. Great Expectations, however,