Miss Havisham, Modern Hero

Putting Ice Where The Heart Should Be

A little over a decade ago, I witnessed my classmates humiliate our professor. It was the reproductive unit of our med school biology lectures, and the kind, friendly lecturer was teaching us about pregnancy. He made the fateful decision to teach us the truth about the biological clock – namely, that there is one. I didn’t notice anything controversial at the time; it is no earth-shattering revelation that twenty-somethings have an easier time conceiving than the elderly. Sarah laughed for a reason. My classmates, however, were less familiar with Genesis than with Ms. Magazine. Complaints were filed. You know the rest, it’s the same struggle session it’s always been. The professor’s apology, read by him to the whole class, could not have been more groveling. He was a broken man. I hope the memory of that important victory will be around to hold my bullying classmates’ hands on their deathbeds, since grandchildren sure won’t.

Chesterton wrote that Great Expectations was the only book Dickens crafted without a hero. To be precise, Dickens’ goal is to show that the apparent hero, Pip, is unheroic. As anyone who has read the book (or enjoyed David Lean’s excellent adaptation) can attest, he hit that one out of the park. Pip’s descent into vanity, his snobbish treatment of his true friends, makes you squirm in your seat. Pip, like almost every Dickens’ creation, is so real, so alive on the page, that watching his corruption in real time is acutely painful.

              Yet there is one factor which always prevented me from truly enjoying Great Expectations, one character which I felt to be our greatest novelist’s greatest mistake. Dickens tried and succeeded to give Great Expectations no hero; he failed miserably trying to give it a villain. At least, so I used to believe.

              I never ‘got’ Miss Havisham. For the uninitiated, a quick run-down: Havisham in her youth fell madly in love with a con man who stole her money and left her at the altar. Haunted by her trauma, she becomes a recluse, trying to stay in the past, growing ever more bitter towards all men. So far, so believable. Faulkner likely had this gothic spinster type in mind when writing “A Rose For Emily,” and while the character may be macabre, it is certainly within the normal tragic realm of human experience. Where Dickens lost me, however, is Miss Havisham’s insane plan for revenge. I can buy the bitter old lady. I can certainly buy the bitter old lady’s unhappiness spilling over and inadvertently jaundicing her daughter’s view of the world. But that’s not what happens with Miss Havisham. No, she quite consciously plots to create what I can best describe as some sort of Soviet sleeper agent: a girl child she adopts and meticulously programs in order to seem normal and attractive, but, when activated, to be as heartless and cruel to men as possible. Havisham takes a young girl and grooms her into an evil honeytrap robot on purpose in order to deliberately spread as much misery as possible – not targeted at any one man in particular, but all men in general. In Havisham’s own words, “I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.” Me, I wasn’t buying it. Nobody could be that sinister. Nobody could be willing to work so hard to knowingly spread so much unhappiness.

              Then I grew up and encountered modern culture.

              If your folly, inexperience, or simple bad luck leads you to make choices that you regret to your dying day, and you happen to be a well-adjusted person, you will take it for granted that you ought to warn those you care about so they don’t share your fate. Some of these nuggets of advice might be fairly trivial and self-evident (“Don’t forget to pack an extra pair of socks”), some might be silly and wrong (“Stay away from redheads”), some might be spot-on (“Never get involved in a land war in Asia”).  Whatever their truth, their good intent is undeniable – you are telling your loved ones, “Don’t make the mistakes I made.” It’s what any decent person would strive to teach the next generation. What, then, would you say of a person actively cheering, even hectoring, the young to make the very same choices that made her miserable?

              That indefatigable defender of marriage, Brad Wilcox, informs us that liberal women are significantly less happy with life than their conservative counterparts. Indeed, according to Pew, the majority of young liberal women are mentally ill (!). And as one of my heroes, Nancy Pearcey, explains in her latest book, the highest rate of happiness among any group of American women is found in those married to regularly churchgoing men (more Pearcey: “Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving husbands and more engaged fathers. They have the lowest rate of divorce. And astonishingly, they have the lowest rate of domestic violence of any major group in America”).

              So, if climbing the greasy pole makes you anxious, depressed, unfulfilled, and outright miserable, you’re gonna warn the next generation to stay out of the Godless rat race and find one of those awesome devout Christian men to settle down with, right? Right? Well, about that…. Wilcox again:

“The problem facing liberals, then, is that too many of them have embraced the false narrative that the path to happiness runs counter to marriage and family life, not towards it. They think independence, freedom and work will make them happy, which is why significant portions of the popular media are filled these days with stories celebrating divorce and singleness. […] The secret to happiness, for most men and women, involves marriage and a life based around the family.”

Go back to that doozy of a Ms. Magazine article linked above, read along in real time as the writer tries to convince herself that fostering dogs and fighting global warming provides the same “deep, soul-quenching satisfaction” as having a family. If this were an outlier, a poor deluded soul trying to justify her mistakes by recommending them to others, that would be one thing. But, as Wilcox notes, her kind of advice is everywhere – it is the only advice most women growing up ever hear from their (profoundly unhappy) teachers and mentors and celebrity role models. One unhappy generation is deliberately programming the next to spread as much misery as possible.    

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Miss Havisham is everywhere. My sincere apologies to Dickens. Looking back, his only mistake was that he didn’t go far enough. Our Miss Havishams are not recluses locked away in decaying mansions – they’re running our schools, writing our books, making our movies. If Miss Havisham ever decided to see if she could make it in Hollywood today, well, you couldn’t tell the difference. In fact, for long time readers who remember my Meghan Markle movie rants, you will not be in the least surprised to learn that Markle is now trying to make a TV adaptation of Great Expectations – in which Miss Havisham is the hero. A more fitting show for our time would be hard to find.

That is perhaps an unfair statement – to Miss Havisham. After all, by novel’s end, she finds repentance and asks for forgiveness. Faced with ever-increasing rates of misery in our young adults, will we ever do the same? To paraphrase the woman I used to scoff at, the woman I now realize may in fact be Dickens’ most realistic and most chilling villain: what have we done?

(If you know any young women in your life who could use an antidote to the Havishams of this world, and won’t accept one coming from the male likes of me or Dickens, please get them Peachy Keenan’s fantastic new book, Domestic Extremist!)