“Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” This quote, often attributed to Einstein, is actually said by many physicists and writers – the oldest confirmed being Ray Cummings in a short story. However, Dickens' novels redefined the interpretation of this quote by allowing characters to (attempt to) manipulate and condense time and recognize it in atypical ways. While many Dickens characters obsessively check their pocket watches, deliberately monitoring the passage of time and feeling the need to move forward, characters such as Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam, and Mrs. Skewton function as epitomic cruxes that evade this desire to move with ever-passing time: these women strive to maintain a stasis, manipulating time in a metaphor of a disappointed future, marked by rot and decay. This stasis only disintegrates once these women are removed from the domains they control. In Dickens, time serves as a controlled function that is not only arrested by the aforementioned characters, but becomes their development entirely arrested in their downfall. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham openly attempts to freeze time in her dreary and deliberately unchanging home. This attempt at temporal manipulation speaks volumes about her character, painting her as an already dead specter sealed in her tomb until she actually dies. Unlike other characters who are always in motion and express an urgency about time, Miss Havisham approaches temporality with a kind of dread and prefers to suspend her life in a single, life-changing moment. Miss Havisham says in one passage: “On this day of the year, long before you were born, this pile of decay,' striking with the stick the crutch the pile of cobwebs on the table but without touching it, 'was brought here . He and I were consumed together. The mice gnawed it, and teeth sharper than those of mice gnawed me.” (“Great” 89) He refers to the “heap of decay” as having been brought to his house many years ago, and although this seems insignificant, the mention of it implies that this old age, this decay and decrepitude, has always been the ​​how they were brought to his home many years ago. they are – temporarily trapped in their existence and will continue to exist in this state. Old age has always been old, or at least Miss Havisham believes it always has been, and this seems to translate into the belief that she has always been stuck in this moment and always will be. Miss Havisham also makes a strange acknowledgment of time in this passage by saying that "he and I have worn ourselves out together." Some time must have passed for something to wear out, and this is made even more complicated by his earlier sentence about the decay pile that seems to have always existed. Miss Havisham, therefore, is completely aware of time and its passing, which further leads to the idea that she willfully manipulates time into a metaphor for the future she will never have and that she would rather be essentially a pitiful woman destroyed by her past (or what has become its perpetual present). It is also significant to note the day and time Miss Havisham attempted to temporarily trap her house. Time stops on her birthday, which is typically celebrated as the beginning of one's time, but Miss Havisham hates this day. Although this is the only day he has guests, none of them are even allowedmention that it is her birthday, and she explicitly mentions it when she says “they come here on that day, but they dare not mention it” (“Great” 89). Furthermore, her birthday is also the day of her (could be) wedding, and yet every clock is stopped at twenty to nine in a strange stasis of the moment in which her future husband abandoned her. She remains confined in a moment of desperation, refusing to move forward both for fear of the future and in an attempt to remember the pain of the past. and she didn't even bother to take off her wedding clothes. In a sense, she condemned herself to this pivotal moment in her life by never turning away from it, and because she seems to believe that the house and its artifacts have always been out of date, she has convinced herself that her life is destined to be frozen in time forever. She tells Pip: "When the ruin is complete ...and they will lay me dead, in my wedding dress, on the bride's table - which will be done, and which will be the end of the curse on him - so much the better if it is done. on this day!” (“Great” 89). What is strange, though, is that she uses the word “complete” as if there is a process to this forced stasis that must run its course, which could imply that she recognizes the futility of actually manipulating time but you stubbornly refuse to move forward to express your point of view. . It's also interesting that she uses the phrase "curse upon him" because, in her attempt at temporal manipulation, she appears to be the one under a curse, and it's a curse bestowed upon her by her own hands. However, through it all, her birth/death cycle will include her own imprisonment in the moment that changed her life, conveying the idea that she is literally born and will die from this prolonged torturous moment. In relation to physical temporality, Miss Havisham's manipulation of time is similar to that of a black hole because her internal condensation of time into a single moment has extended to the Satis House itself. In his description of the house, Pip observes: The shabby old house was so unchanging, the yellow light in the dark room, the faded specter in the chair by the glass of the dressing table, that I felt as if the clocks had stopped. stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, as I and everything else outside it grew old, it stopped. Daylight never entered the house in my thoughts and memories, just as it never entered the reality of the facts. (“Great” 125) First, it is important to note that “spectre” is the descriptor of Miss Havisham, portraying her as a ghost – something already dead and literally temporarily encased in time, unchanging in their environments or tombs (be they tombs royals or Casa Satis). It is also worth noting that "Time" is capitalized as if she were a named person who can be controlled in the same way Miss Havisham controls and manipulates Estella. Time, then, is not just the metaphor for Miss Havisham's downfall, but is simply a tool she uses to perpetuate the pain of the past and saturate the present (and future) with it. Grammatically, "and" is retained in the first sentence of the aforementioned passage, making it more direct and all the same in the moment of time passed, and the sentence "Time... stopped" is a dead metaphor, generating a perfect parallel to within the context of the apparently dead Miss Havisham and Satis House. Mass and gravity have a direct relationship, and that relationship is that the greater the mass of an object, the greater its gravitational force. Because black holes have an enormous amount of both mass and gravity, time essentially slows downuntil it almost stops near a black hole. To an observer outside the black hole, time would stand still, and in this case, Miss Havisham would be the singularity causing this with her mass of wedding dresses, mounds of decay, and grand house. With all her accumulated mass and immobile density of vengeful betrayal, Miss Havisham creates a strange gravity of her own, allowing her to control time and space similar to that of a black hole. According to the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicals, “Einstein's theory of gravity seems to predict that time itself is destroyed at the center of the hole: there, time ends abruptly. For this reason, a black hole is sometimes described as 'the obverse of creation'.” Miss HavishamThe inverse of creation lies both in her manipulation of time, stopping it altogether, and in the emotional dismantling of other characters (e.g. Pip) through the controlled use of Estella. It is also worth noting that daylight has never entered the house, as Pip mentions, and, to an outside observer, light appears to never enter or exist even in a black hole. “Daylight never entered” Satis House, and Miss Havisham has trapped herself in a very tomb-like room, and it is in this tomb that she ultimately meets her death. Even in his death there is a sort of lamination of time in the dressing of the wounds. Pip says: “though every trace of her dress was burnt away, as I was told, she still had something of her old, hideous bridal look; for they had covered her to the throat with a white cotton ball, and as she lay with a white sheet over that, the phantom air of something that had been and had changed, was still upon her" ("Great" 403) Even in all of Pip's visions of her hanging from a beam – literally suspended in a moment of doom – she is imprisoned by her own will and the manipulation of time and space, she is perpetually in death. Speaking of wounds, literal wounds that Miss Havisham's acquisitions ultimately appear to reflect her internal and emotional wounds from past wrongs done to her. Martin Price says in a chapter titled “Dickens: Selves and Systems” in his book that: Miss Havisham has suffered a cruel wrong, although the event was partly created by his own will; more important is what he has done with his suffering. He stops time to live in a constant state of betrayal; Furthermore, he turns Estella into his tool to repeatedly repeat the wrong at the expense of others' feelings. He has transformed his suffering into the cycle of one wrong avenging another; and it never enters his imagination that Estella would feel anything but gratification while sustaining the cycle. (Price 118) The event "created by her own will" recalls the curse she would cast and which actually became a curse on herself and others. This becomes complicated because, although she is temporarily in stasis, the cycle of revenge continues because of this – an extension of Miss Havisham's preferred temporal binding in vanity and desperation. This cyclical behavior goes along with Peter Brooks' discussion of the return of the repressed, which will be addressed in the following paragraphs. Price also has Pip point out Miss Havisham to himself when she is on her deathbed, after being consumed by fire. note also that black holes are theoretically extremely hot due to their axial rotation speed): And could I look at her without pity, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was in, in her profound unsuitability for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of pain which has become master mania, like the vanity of penance, the vanity ofremorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and the other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world? (“Great” 399) Besides being a revealing reflection on Pip's part, there are many fascinating things about this passage. Firstly, this resonates well with characters from other Dickens novels who also exemplify extreme vanity, and this appears to be the first time that Miss Havisham's behavior is explicitly depicted in relation to vanity, narrowing the focus of her actions to an inherent reaction that many women those who have been wronged in Dickens's novels demonstrate. Aside from Miss Havisham, there is another impressionable character in Dickens's novels who attempts to manipulate time by stopping it or perhaps even reversing it out of a warped vanity. In Dombey and Son, Mrs. Skewton, aka Cleopatra, makes great efforts to appear young even though she is aging miserably. She actively tries to prevent time from advancing in her desire to remain suspended in a rendezvous before time becomes merciless on her face and figure, and the vanity of this old crone is emphasized throughout the novel and particularly during her introduction: The discrepancy between Mrs. Skewton's fresh enthusiasm for words and the desolate and faded manner, was no less seventy, and her dress, which would have been youthful for twenty-seven. Her attitude in the wheelchair (which never varied) was that in which she had been carried in a carriage, some fifty years before, by a then fashionable artist who had added the name of Cleopatra to his published sketch: consequently of a discovery made by critics of the time, that she looked exactly like that princess as she lay aboard her galley. Mrs. Skewton was a beauty then, and scores of bucks threw glasses of wine at their heads in her honor. The beauty and the buggy had both passed, but she still retained the attitude, and for this reason she expressly kept the wheelchair and the spanked page: there was nothing, except the attitude, that prevented her from walking. (“Dombey” 319) This overly elaborate description of Mrs. Skewton parallels well her vanity, her obsessive desire to control time regarding herself. Another character (who we'll talk about in more depth later) is Mrs. Clennam, whose warped vanity makes her determined to enact revenge on those who have harmed her in the past, all while temporarily imprisoned in her room. Second, in the passage about Miss Havisham, referring to Miss Havisham as a ruin reiterates the link established between her house and oneself: the ruined house (the ruin as a metaphor for arrested development) is an extension of Miss Havisham and of Time (a metaphor for the disappointed future) that he controls. This also begins to raise the question of whether the house is actually a ruin when it is imprisoned in time or when it is a literal ruin, and the answer seems to be both: the temporal ruin frozen in time as the ruin becomes at the end of the novel when the house is allowed to catch up with real time and falls apart. Third, Pip's claim that Miss Havisham is “profoundly unfit for this earth” resembles the idea that Miss Havisham behaves like a black hole – another profoundly unfit thing for the earth that would eventually destroy it if it got too close. . It is also strange that Pip mentions that Miss Havisham was "placed" on earth, which may suggest that this is another (or first) wrong done against Miss Havisham. “Positioned” implies that it was not necessarily his will or desire to exist on earth when it was fit for elsewhere. Fourth, the aforementioned irony ofMiss Havisham's "curse" comes into question here, as Pip distinctly realizes that the curse placed by Miss Havisham is actually on herself in the form of vanity and, like a black hole, is a "monstrous" one that influences everything he comes into contact with, especially Pip and Estella. The name of the house, Satis House, which translates to "quite a house", is also rich in meaning. Satis is a play on multiple words, and the first that comes to mind is stasis which implies that the house is locked temporally as well as physically in its immobility from the moment it is perpetually suspended, and this links directly to another interpretation , stagnant , implying the same thing while conveying the connotation that the house is deteriorating and rotting in Miss Havisham's languishing. Another play on the name of the house is "status", which could indirectly imply the social need to maintain a high regard from society, and this pushes the direction of the other interpretation of satis, being "satisfaction", which seems more ironic than anything else because Miss Havisham is far less than satisfied. Or perhaps, in some masochistic way, she is very satisfied with making a strange statement by keeping her home temporarily locked down, even as the world outside continues to change and move as she attempts to stay in one moment. With the stasis of the house, it is understood that a character like Miss Havisham may have a satisfactory home that she can control, but she may not have a satisfactory time or amount of time, which she cannot control despite all attempts. In Peter Brooks's article "Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and Plot Study," Brooks discusses the cyclical return of the repressed throughout the novel, typically regarding Pip, but also paying close attention to Miss Havisham and Satis House . He says, “The madness and morbidity of Satis House rest on desire fixed and turned sadistic, on a deviant eroticism that literally turned off the lights, stopped the clocks, and made the advancement of the plot impossible” (Brooks 508). The return of the repressed for Miss Havisham is held hostage in her temporal manipulation and is complicated by its manifestation as stasis – it is a continuous return of the repressed, a return that could perhaps be described as condensed in suspension like that of a black hole , whose power extends beyond himself (or Miss Havisham) and affects everything around him (Satis House herself, Pip, Estella, etc.). It seems that there will be no resolution to this repression, as Brooks talks about the plots he typically tends towards, and Miss Havisham's past is not repressed at all as she actively chooses to live in it, aware of the time she nevertheless rejects. The only way to get closure or resolution of any kind in his case is through death. Brooks indirectly addresses this notion of his death as a resolution of this stasis too when he says that the novel, in fact, towards its end records a generalized breakdown of plots: none of the schemes concocted by the characters seem to achieve their goals. The evidence to the contrary could be the "too successful" result of Miss Havisham's plot, which transformed Estella into a creature so heartless that she was unable to even experience the emotional recognition of her benefactress. His plot was a mechanical success but an intentional failure. (Brooks 520) The collapse of the plot as well as the literal collapse of Satis House comes with the death of Miss Havisham, and even Estella at the end of the novel seems to have the potential for some sort of change once freed from the gravitational and manipulative influence. understanding of Miss Havisham, particularly in her last meeting with Pip which impliesthat there could be a potential friendship or relationship of some kind. This makes it important to focus on Miss Havisham's final words and her death as it represents the dismantling of her manipulated stasis. Around midnight, he began to wander in his speech, and thereafter gradually began to say countless times in a low, solemn voice: "What have I done!" And then: "When she first came, I intended to save her from a misery like mine." And then: "Take the pencil and write under my name: 'I forgive you!'". He never changed the order of these three sentences, but sometimes left out a word in one or the other; never insert another word, but always leave a blank space and move on to the next word. (“Great” 403) Brooks says “The cycle of three statements suggests a metonymy seeking arrest, a plot that can never find a satisfactory resolution, that unresolved must play on its insistent repetitions, until it is silenced from death" (Brooks 520). And it is, in fact, only in death that Satis House can catch up with real time and collapse, become a literal ruin, and see its many parts sold at auction (“Great” 473). When Miss Havisham's black hole is removed from the house, the stasis disintegrates and resolution and reinitiation in the natural order of time can begin. This stasis, then, is a form of continuous return of the repressed until the condensing repressor is removed from the situation and the disappointed metaphorical future can be realized or dissolved. Miss Havisham is not the only character who attempts to manipulate time.into a frozen metaphor for a disappointed future. Little Dorrit's Mrs. Clennam does exactly the same thing, and her temporal control has extended to her environment and home as well, influencing other characters such as Affery and Jeremiah Flintwinch, Amy (to some extent), and Arthur. She lives in a state of ruin, confined to a wheelchair in an immutable room, arrested in development and saturated with the vanity of her own revenge against the wrongs she has suffered. Confined as such, her stasis of time appears to be a suspended waiting game for her death (similar to Miss Havisham as she awaits the day of her birth/death/unmarriage) or perhaps for her revenge. Similar to Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam is entirely aware of the passage of time, but recognizes that time essentially stands still for her in her conscious, mummified state. In a conversation about the seasons and the passage of time that affects them, he says, “all seasons are the same to me…I know nothing about summer and winter, closed here. The Lord was pleased to put me beyond all this” (“Small” 49-50). Although she is confined both physically and seemingly temporally, she is aware that time is passing and claims to have no will or control over her confined situation, even though she appears to be the one truly manipulating time, space, and even people. around her. Mrs. Clennam also explicitly defines her situation as confinement, but seems almost content with this as a means of "not forgetting," which she would otherwise do if she were not physically and temporally bound to her room. This complicates her situation in the same way Miss Havisham's situation is complicated and has great similarities to Miss Havisham's character as well. Miss Havisham is forcing the clocks to stop at a certain time, remaining in her wedding dress, leaving all the furnishings for a wedding such as the cake and the bride's table, and even her wish to die that same day implies that she has fully intend to do so. to “not forget” the crucial moment in his life from which he claims he cannot move on. Mrs Clennam,on the other hand, she is similarly trapped in a room tomb, ignoring the seasons and changes in the outside world as she continually looks at the clock next to her on the table in an attempt not to forget. Both women, therefore, actively choose to manipulate their world into stasis, recognizing that time exists and passes, but choosing to remain suspended in their doom, revenge, and vanity-filled pursuits of making others suffer for wrongs. that have been done. to them. Martin Price notes that “the arrest of movement, of action, of mind appears throughout Little Dorrit's novel,” and this includes Mrs. Clennam's “denial of time” (Price 131). Although he denies time when he considers the room and the seasons to be immutable, his phrase "Forget not" is a suspension of time that eschews real time in favor of continually remaining in time in a stasis. He says, “'Don't forget.' It spoke to me like a voice from an angry cloud. Do not forget the mortal sin, do not forget the designated discovery, do not forget the designated suffering. I haven't forgotten. Was it my mistake to remember? My! I was nothing but a servant and a minister” (“Little” 808). In the same way that Miss Havisham does not forget her past, Mrs. Clennam does exactly the same, perhaps more explicitly. These women wallow in the stasis of their own misery, freezing time so as not to “forget” the transgressions against them. Miss Wade is also an example of a Dickensian woman who refuses to forget her past and the wrongs done to her, vengeful towards everyone and influencing her environment. Furthermore, Mrs. Clennam shares other qualities with Miss Wade and Miss Havisham. Price says, “One principle in contrast to arrest is growth toward fulfillment. So energetic is the vitality of normal growth that the arrest must become a strenuous pressure, a violence committed on oneself or on others” (Price 132). We see this in Miss Havisham, Mrs Clennam, Mrs Skewton and even (now) Miss Wade. Price goes on to say that Miss Wade has "learned to interpret every experience as resentment" and Mrs. Clennam thrives on self-punishment that has "created a 'monstrous idol' of her 'vengeful pride and anger,'" giving them manipulated stasis. a strange vanity as they essentially transformed themselves into martyrs (Price 132). Price also notes that “both women cling to their mistakes, Mrs. Clennam with severe self-punishment, Miss Wade with bitter retaliation. Neither can give up his torment” (Price 132). Like Miss Havisham, these women seem particularly attached to the idea of ​​suspending themselves in their mistakes, of arresting time itself to stay there, and it seems that all these women, not just Miss Havisham, have placed a curse on themselves – a curse that it seems to connect closely to a kind of distorted vanity until something moves and the temporal structure can dissolve into a resolution. However, it may seem that Miss Wade never gives up on her revenge and remains in stasis, doomed to be stuck in the "return of the repressed" cycle forever, but Tattycoram seems to solve this problem as Tattycoram displays similar feelings as Miss Wade towards the Meagles - a sort of unbearable resentment towards them. Within Miss Wade's realm of vengeful stasis (or on the threshold of her theoretical black hole), Miss Wade can manipulate ("missuade") Tattycoram (Tatty even admits this once he joins the Meagles), but once Tattycoram finds the courage to escape. from the capture of Miss Wade, the revenge he had on the Meagles and Tattycoram dissolves. AlthoughIt may shock modern readers that Tatty returns to the Meagles because of their (mis)treatment of her, reinforces the ongoing pattern of Dickensian women functioning as manipulative black holes, arrested in their own development and disappointed futures based on past wrongsSimilar to Miss Havisham, Mrs Clennam's time arrest disintegrates once she, the manipulator of this time link, is removed from the house itself. “Before his ghostly figure, so long unaccustomed to his upright attitude, and so stiffened, Rigaud fell backwards and lowered his voice. It was, for all three, almost as if a dead woman had been resurrected” (“Piccola” 817). The description of Mrs. Clennam as resembling a ghost or a dead woman is similar to Miss Havisham being described as a “spectre” (in fact, Mrs. Clennam is also described as a “ghostly woman” on page 819). Both women are buried in a stasis that extends to their environment, and it is in the moments when they become most alive that this stasis disintegrates. Upon Mrs. Clennam's return to her home, “it rose up, rose outward, opened in fifty places, collapsed and fell,” and Mrs. Clennam “fell upon the stones; and from that moment he never lifted a finger, nor had the power to utter a word” noting that “he lived and died like a statue” (“Piccola” 827). Price also notes this moment, saying that once Mrs. Clennam abandons her repeated torment/stasis, "her house falls as if it had been the edifice of her will, and she survives in just three years of paralysis and 'rigid silence'" (Price 132). By abandoning her vain vengeance and temporal control over the house (and herself), real time can catch up with both of them, causing them to finally crumble out of existence. It is also useful to note other versions of female arrested development found in Dickens's novels. , although they do not have the black hole power that other female characters, such as Miss Havisham, Miss Wade, and Mrs. Clennam have. These characters apparently have no control over their stasis and are unwittingly temporarily imprisoned. One of these characters, and perhaps the most notable for this example, is Maggie of Little Dorrit. Little Dorrit tells Arthur Maggie's tragic story, saying “When Maggie was ten…she had a bad fever, sir, and she hasn't aged since” (“Little”116). Maggie even nods her head in agreement, truly believing that she is only ten despite her actual age being 28. Interestingly, however, although Maggie is temporarily trapped at ten, she appears to be a character less concerned with time . . She is ruled against her will by the stasis of her existence, but pays no attention to the racing world around her while the other characters are constantly and willingly made aware (by others or themselves) of time and its passage. Another character who exemplifies a unique form of arrested development is Flora Finching, who appears to be temporarily imprisoned twenty years ago when she was Arthur Clennam's love. Price notices this too, pointing out how Arthur has noticed the change, but Flora hopes that time hasn't changed her or Arthur. “She is a large woman, a little drunk, locked in a cutesy and breathless monologue. Under his protection she can believe what he says... She has moments of cunning that she cannot support and perhaps hides from herself. He buries them in a torrent of childish and 'literary' talk” (Price 132). Flora tries to remain (in vain) the little girl she was years before, believing she can continue to be that young figure, testing her ability to charm others with her speeches, even though they are more comical and a little 519).