A Solemn Rite of Growth

2017.06.

A Solemn Rite of Growth

On Initiation of Pip in Great Expectations

Set in the nineteenth century England, Great Expectations written by Charles Dickens describes the protagonist Pip’s life experience and psychological change from childhood to adulthood, and reflects the true meaning of life in Victorian Age and Pip’s moral and spiritual reflections after his disillusionment of great expectations. The “dropping” of great expectations opens the door of initiation for Pip.

Great Expectations has been well received of the world. And critics have approached this novel from different perspectives. Among the foreign researchers, for example, Francis Bennett looks at Dickens’s attribution of differing values to urban and rural life. These values, however, are essentially unstable. As Bennett says, “Pip’s views of the urban and the rural move from country—bad, town—good, to town—bad, country—a little better. It is this shifting evaluation that mirrors Pip’s shifting evaluation of what it means to be a ‘gentleman’” (8). Marcus examines the self-alienation suffered or avoided by various characters in the novel and explains Pip’s progress toward the achievements of his authentic self. “The concept of self-alienation assumes that all individuals bear within themselves the possibility of achieving a ‘true’ self which is morally committed to furthering its own growth that its capacity for love and creativity and that of others as well” (Marcus 9). Almost all the characters give traces of evidence that they are self-alienated. Thirdly, Kierkegaard believes that all men are in varying conditions of despair (the sinkness unto death) over their failure to achieve (or, better, to move toward) the authentic self. Besides, Chinese critic Zhang Zuotang points out that in Great Expectations Dickens focuses on the values of human nature and moral, which is cautionary and realistic in one’s growth. (Zhang 35)

Based on former studies, this paper centers on the initiation of Great Expectations. According to Eliade, “The term ‘initiation’ in the most general sense denotes a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a radical modification of the religious and social status of the person to be initiated” (44). The term implies a new beginning, as the Latin ‘initium’ suggests. “By means of a rite of passage or transition, a person is separated from one social or religious status and incorporated into another” (47). For Pip, his rite of passage is leaving Kent to London to be a gentleman in upper class. The transition from rural life to urban society reshapes a mature Pip. In the light of initiation, 这句话你觉得要放去尾部吗，虽然老师是上次说的这个位置by going through three stages the protagonist Pip changes from an innocent child to a mature adult. Though what Pip undergoes in London causes the birth of a snobbish man, finally he returns to his true self.