Havisham Essay Questions

The title is "Havisham," not "Miss Havisham." What could be some reasons for this omission of the speaker's name as taken from Great Expectations?

The speaker in this poem has lost her sense of identity outside of being a jilted woman. This absorption is evident from the title. The missing "Miss" also seems to pertain to the character's marital status. She has never become a Mrs., and this pains her. The title is also reminiscent of the many fragmented sentences in the poem. The speaker has trouble articulating her words; her curses are sounds, and she stumbles over the word "breaks" in the final line. Her language parallels her identity—both are degrading.

Why does the speaker stumble over the word "breaks" in the final line?

The speaker stammers over the word "breaks" in the final line of the poem, "Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks." This use of language seems simultaneously deliberate and spontaneous. On the one hand, the speaker almost seems to be poking fun at the man who left her, threatening him with dark humor. He has broken her heart, but she turns the gesture back on him, warning him vaguely that something else, too, will break. The mention of the male corpse compounds her threatening tone. However, the stammer also represents the speaker's loosening grip on language, which accompanies her fractured sense of self.

How do love and hatred intertwine in this poem?

This poem implicitly claims that love and hatred are practically inseparable. The speaker addresses the man who left her at the altar through a mishmash of loving and hateful descriptions. Objects that usually symbolize happiness and celebration—the balloon, the wedding cake—are marred by gestures of violence. The speaker's knowledge of love, it seems, has not evolved since her ruined wedding. The ambiguous, unusually enjambed line, "Love's/hate behind a white veil," speaks to the narrator's confusion about whether love and hate are usually one disguised as the other or if they are in fact one and the same. The blurring of lines between love and hate may explain why she still feels strongly rooted in the moment when she was abandoned; to some extent she views that action as a gesture of love.

Another reason why love and hate are parallel in this poems is that they are antonymous; the opposite of both love and hatred is indifference, which is precisely the feeling that allowed the speaker's ex-fiancé to leave her at the altar. By contrast, the speaker of this poem is incapable of indifference, but she needs it to release herself from the pain of being spurned and tricked. This is an example of dramatic irony; clearly, she needs to shed the wedding dress and move on with her life, but she is unable to see anything beyond revenge, hatred, and obsession.

How does this speaker regard herself? What does this mean for the poem?

The speaker has lost her sense of identity outside of being a scorned bride. She refers to her reflection in the mirror in the third person; she barely seems to recognize her own reflection. When she says, "the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this/to me?" the word "myself" is placed in a way that suggests she is to blame for her own misfortune. The speaker is also not ashamed of the way her life has been overtaken. She admits to wishing her ex-fiancé were dead every day since she last saw him. Yet she is unwilling to take off the wedding dress, and, as readers of Charles Dickens will remember from Great Expectations, she has stopped all the clocks in her home at the time just before the wedding was supposed to happen. She is unable to move beyond identifying herself as a jilted bride, perhaps because she would then be a woman, a spinster, not a victim of someone's cruelty; she would be alone.