Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
18th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Ankara, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Mayıs 2026, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
Charles Dickens’s heroines, as largely acknowledged, are moulded by the dominant ideology of the Victorian era, feeble and obedient pursuant to the Angel in the House image. In his Great Expectations (1861), yet, Dickens features Miss Havisham, a Wife of Bath-like character, as a rebellious female against male dominance. Abandoned by her lover on their wedding day by a letter received at twenty to nine, she stops the clocks in the house at that hour as if to put an end to her pain. She, after that day, grows into a gothic monster living in her dreary mansion by insisting on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. Created by men, Miss Havisham becomes a chimera living for revenge as Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance. Miss Havisham, “the witch of the place”, in Dickens’s words, lives with her adopted daughter, Estella, who is her puppet to wipe out men. She raises Estella as a cruel and unloving girl to make men suffer. Therefore, Estella turns into a little monster just like her mother. Meeting Miss Havisham in a dark room, little Pip, a young orphan of rural origin trying to realise his great expectations, is startled by her grotesque appearance. Pip falls into Miss Havisham’s and her little monster’s net and becomes the victim of this “mad woman” of the town. Accordingly, this paper aims to read Dickens’s one-of-a-kind character Miss Havisham as a monstrous mother, generated by patriarchy, raising her daughter as relentlessly as possible to revolt against the male hegemony in the Victorian period, as the embodiment of female power.