Date Published:
10 June, 2011
Abstract:
The article focuses on the aggressor-victim paradigms upon which Dickens builds three of his female characters in Great Expectations: Mrs. Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Molly. Usually described as monstrous, the three characters are here discussed in terms of the hidden motives of their strange behavior, one of the sources of uneasy pleasures in the reading process. Viewed from the feminist standpoint, the representation of the three characters is associated with Victorian views concerning the treatment of women, sexuality, crime, and marriage; viewed in psychological terms, all the three display symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, wit the roles of victim and aggressor shifting over time.
June 2011: Adina Ciugureanu is Professor of English and American literature and culture at Ovidius University Constanta. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Director of the Research Center for Cross-Cultural Studies and editor of the Annals of Ovidius University (the Philology Series). She is President of the Romanian Association for American Studies (RAAS), affiliated to the European Association for American Studies (EAAS), and member of the Romanian-German Academy. Her major publications include Modernism and the Idea of Modernity (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2004, reprinted 2008), Victorian Selves (Constanta: Ovidius University Press, 2005, reprinted 2008), Post-War Anxieties (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2006), The Boomerang Effect (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2002, translated into Romanian and republished in 2008, Iashi: Institutul European) and numerous articles. |
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