“Bildungsroman [beel-doo ngks-raw-mah-nuh] 1. a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist” (dictionary.com).
In our case, the novel is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and our young protagonists are Pip and Estella. Well, I’m not actually sure that Estella counts as a protagonist, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
First, Pip has clearly developed morally, physically, and mentally throughout the novel. In the beginning, we see Pip in the churchyard in the marshes, described as “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry… I was at the time undersized for my years, and not strong” (Dickens 4). Soon after, he meets the convict, who he refers to as “sir”. He is humble, shy, and scared. He has no money, and lives with his sister and her husband, a blacksmith named Joe Gargery. Pip does as he’s told and is often criticized by the adults around him, simply for being young. “What is detestable in a pig,” Mr. Wopsle notes, “is more detestable in a boy” (Dickens 26). Later in his life, Pip is summoned to the Satis House of Miss Havisham. There he meets Estella, is influenced by the grandness of the estate and Miss Havisham’s riches, and starts to feel ashamed of his own humble beginnings. When he gets his “expectations” from who we now know as Magwitch, Pip’s life is transformed and he grows ambitious, arrogant, rich, spoiled, and, at a lack for a better word, quite snooty. He even talks to his friend and former mentor, Biddy, “in a virtuously self-asserting manner” (Dickens 275). Now that Pip is in debt, he continues to be arrogant and is trying to find other places to put the blame besides himself. He tells Miss Havisham about that he is “tired of the life I have led, which has very few charms for me” (Dickens 351), as if he has had no control over it whatsoever. Pip has gone from a cute little blacksmith’s boy to a “man”, if you may, that I can only think of as a Victorian-era Tom Riddle (aka Voldemort, the main antagonist of the Harry Potter series, for you muggles out there. Look up his scene with Slughorn, his professor, in The Half-Blood Prince). Yikes, right?
Estella, on the other hand, has always known riches and high status in growing up with Miss Havisham. She has always been arrogant, and since her time in France, “she was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly, in all things winning admiration had made such wonderful advance” (Dickens 226). Pip sees her as “perfection”, even though she is cold and rejecting of his affections. Even though the two grew up in almost opposite conditions, they both grew in the wrong directions once they started. Pip, in his arrogance, and Estella, in her cold, calculating nature. And I say “wrong directions” because I believe both are ultimately good at heart; maybe we’ll see that side of them more in the third stage of Pip’s expectations.
Rachel's Reflections 