Magwitch in Charles Dickens' Great Research Paper

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In an article titled The Superego, Narcissism and Great Expectations Ingham writes "As [Pip] forlornly gazes at his parent's headstone he is suddenly accosted by an escaped convict, Magwitch, who threatens dreadful consequences unless Pip steals a file and food. Magwitch seems to emerge from the parental grave and to embody primitive menace, dire and horrifying punishments -- the 'ghost' of the lost parents, infused with the abandoned child's own rage and hatred, his omnipotent and sadistic phantasies" (755).

The psychoanalytic theories put forth by Freud assert that the superego acts as the voice of reason over the less mature and more impulsive id and ego. Thus in applying these conceptions to the characters of Pip and Magwitch, Ingham is essentially substituting the characters' actual personas with the process of personality development. Thus, unlike earlier critics that based the majority of their arguments on societal conceptions of morality and their affects on the shaping of the character, Ingham is more concerned with the internally-based process that molded the characters' development.

The changing focus from societal to psychological interpretations, i.e. from external distresses to internal ones, is also evident in Athena Vrettos article Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition. For example, the author writes: "In a striking parallel to the psychological narratives of James and Andrews (among many others), Dickens delineates the overwhelming power of habit to shape both body and mind. Magwitch (and by extension Pip) is unable to erase the pervasive behavioral markers of his origins" (410).

These behaviors to which Vrettos is referring are a product of Magwitch's horrid upbringing and his subsequent disappointing life experiences. These experiences shaped Magwitch's psyche in such a way that he that when he is first introduced to the reader, he is only able to express his most basic wants and needs in the most primal and barbaric ways. As the character evolves, however, his gentler side is exposed.

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The inner-person that the reader is made privy to as the novel progresses is deemed far more important than his external appearance. As Vrettos insightfully illustrates, "Pip's dismay at his inability to disguise the convict as a respectable citizen seems to contain a residual sense of relief that clothing alone does not make the man, that the physical and psychological markers of origin and identity cannot be effaced by a mere change of dress" (410).

Conclusion

No period of time exclusively defines the focus of literary criticism, however there are certainly indications of proclivities for particular theoretical constructs based on the era in which the analyses are penned. As has been demonstrated here, critical responses to the character of Abel Magwitch in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations have tended to follow a chronological path that begins with the societal -- and morality-based interpretations of structuralism, post-structuralism and Marxism, and evolves into issues of self-identity associated with psychoanalysis.

Notably, critical theory in literature has expanded beyond the issues that once constituted "formalism" and has come to focus more closely in recent years on discourse regarding what a text is, what it conceals, and/or the type of relationship that forms between the text and the reader. In the case of Great Expectations, and in particular, character analyses of Magwitch, one can see that that some perceptions seem to distance the character from reality, while others seek to bring the reader closer to truth.

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