Abstract
This paper aims at presenting and discussing one of Martha Nussbaum’s main contributions to contemporary moral philosophy: her idea that literature is indispensable to philosophy and more precisely moral philosophy. This view, that novels, and the works of tragic poets, embody ethical reflection is in fact related to Nussbaum’s other main philosophical contributions, in particular her approach to justice based on “capabilities,” her analysis of emotions as essentially grounded on beliefs, her views on public life in relation to the concept of “poetic justice,” and the importance she attaches to the humanities for education and public policies. I reconstruct this overall systematicity of Martha Nussbaum’s positions in moral and political philosophy, and in her early contributions in the history of ancient philosophy, before concentrating on her thesis that certain novels are works of moral philosophy because they take in charge “the original Socratic question ‘How should one live?’” After explaining this assertion from Nussbaum’s point of view, I argue that such novels might rather be works of moral psychology, i.e. works of moral philosophy viewed as a (primarily) descriptive rather than a (primarily) normative task. I try to prove my point while adopting the approach often favoured by Martha Nussbaum, namely by interpreting a particular novel: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. I discover in this novel a psychological analysis of the lucid inconsistency of love and a subtle description of (social) shame by the internalisation of the gaze of the upper-class. I also maintain that the hero’s progress or regeneration which appears in this novel is not in his control: Dickens’s narration rather shows it as the necessary result of a chain of external events. Now if it is because of circumstances that Pip has become (or rather has become again) a better human being, as Dickens’s insistence on necessity shows according to me, I deny that readers might draw from his adventure a lesson to live better lives. Nonetheless, I find Dickens’s analysis of love, shame, and their effects on morality deeply instructive and relevant on the descriptive level, which in my view is their rightful position: the level of moral psychology, which, I find no less relevant in terms of moral philosophy than the normative “How should one live?” question.
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Notes
- 1.
Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 4. Hereafter LK.
- 2.
LK, p. 5.
- 3.
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 13. Hereafter FG.
- 4.
Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 20. Hereafter CC.
- 5.
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 31. Hereafter UT.
- 6.
FG, p. 383–386.
- 7.
UT, p. 32.
- 8.
LK, Preface, p. ix.
- 9.
FG, p. 318–319.
- 10.
Compare FG, p. 303: “[According to Aristotle] the person of practical wisdom must be prepared to meet the new with responsiveness and imagination, cultivating the sort of flexibility and perceptiveness that will permit him (as Thucydides appropriately articulates a shared Athenian ideal) to ‘improvise what is required’ (cf. EN, Chap. 6, § IV)” and LK, p. 74 (“An Aristotelian Conception or Rationality”): “good deliberation is like theatrical or musical improvisation, where what counts is flexibility, responsiveness, and openness to the external.” See also LK p. 96–97, the section entitled “Improvising when to improvise” and, p. 138, about the moral progress of one of Henry James’s heroines: “James repeatedly (…) holds up to us [the picture] of an actress who finds, suddenly, that her script is not written in advance and that she must “quite heroically” improvise her role.”
- 11.
FG, p. 319.
- 12.
CC, p. 127–128.
- 13.
CC, p. 126. The innate (or “basic”) capabilities correspond, according to Nussbaum, to “the innate faculties of the person [i.e. “personality traits, intellectual and emotional capacities, states of bodily fitness and health, internalized learning, skills of perception and movement”: cf. CC, p. 21] that make later development and training possible.” (CC, p. 24) By “developed internal capabilities,” Nussbaum means those “trained (…) traits and abilities, developed, in most cases, in interaction with the social, familial, economic and political environment.” (CC, p. 21) Finally, “combined capabilities” correspond to “internal capabilities plus the social/political/economic conditions in which functioning can actually be chosen.” (CC, p. 22).
- 14.
“Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think and reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way (…). Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth.” (CC, p. 33).
- 15.
CC, p. 34. Here Nussbaum only mentions the emotions we have about real people, but elsewhere, and especially in Love’s Knowledge, she maintains that “a relationship with a literary work (…) is a kind of friendship” (LK, p. 231). Nussbaum explicitly agrees with Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and, before him, with Charles Dickens when he wrote that his alter ego David Copperfield was in his childhood “reading for life” (LK, p. 231–232). However, Nussbaum also insists that even though “the fantasy interactions promoted by reading are a valuable preparation for loving relationships in life, books may also promote self-absorption and hinder mutuality. One needs real people too (…)” (p. 230–240). In other words, one also needs the “human association” that she considers as a condition of the functioning of the fifth Central Capability, namely our emotions.
- 16.
LK, p. 3.
- 17.
FG, p. 290.
- 18.
FG, p. 313.
- 19.
LK, p. 54.
- 20.
LK, p. 104.
- 21.
LK, p. 261.
- 22.
LK, p. 266.
- 23.
LK, p. 266–67.
- 24.
LK, p. 6.
- 25.
LK, p. 6–7.
- 26.
Nussbaum gives those two examples in LK, p. 7–8.
- 27.
FG, p. 394.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
UT, p. 19–22.
- 30.
LK, p. 88. See LK, p. 149: “Any pretense that we could paraphrase this scene without losing its moral quality would belie the argument that I am about to make. I presuppose, then, the quotation of Book Fifth, Chapter III of The Golden Bowl. (…) I presuppose the quotation of the entire novel.” Examples of practical deliberations in The Golden Bowl, followed by Nussbaum’s comments, can be found in LK, p. 85–93, p. 149–157.
- 31.
LK, p. 30.
- 32.
Cf. LK, p. 335. Nussbaum comments: “[her] paragraph as a whole is in the spirit of the novel, and contains many paraphrases and allusions [to David Copperfield].” (fn. 1, p. 335)
- 33.
LK, p. 20.
- 34.
LK, p. 6.
- 35.
See LK, p. 50–52. Note that Nussbaum’s final claim that “love and ethical concerns (…) support and inform each other” is in fact, as she admits, illustrated in some examples of merciful love which can be found in James (LK, p. 53). One might wonder, then, whether Nussbaum’s reading of James as adopting the “Aristotelian scheme” (LK, p. 52) does not in a way lead her to neglect some other of James’s descriptions of our emotional and moral lives that do not fit into “the question of how a human being ought to live (…) whether the appropriate acts and feelings are being chosen.” (LK, p. 53) As my knowledge of Henry James is too limited to verify this point, and as it would be perilous (not to say reckless) to demonstrate that James does not primarily illustrate the Aristotelian and Jamesian scheme, my own discussion of Nussbaum’s claim that novels actually provide answers to the question “How should one live?” will rely on Great Expectations, generally considered to be one of Dickens’s Bildungsromans.
- 36.
LK, p. 53. At this point, Martha Nussbaum contrasts David Copperfield’s truly non-judgmental love with the conviction of Strether (the central character of James’s novel The Ambassadors) that love “looks like a bad way to be; bad both because it impedes the subject’s moral vision of the whole and because it asks not to be included as an object of that vision” (LK, p. 189).
- 37.
LK, p. 148.
- 38.
LK, p. 171. Nussbaum names Bernard Williams as having brought this Socratic question (to be found in Plato, Republic, 352d, quoted by Nussbaum in LK, p. 23) to the forefront of ethical enquiry (LK, p. 25, 173). See Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Routledge, London and New York: 2006, and in particular Chap. 1 (“Socrates’ question”). According to Williams, “Socrates’ question is the best place for moral philosophy to start. It is better than “what is our duty?” or “how may we be good?” or even “how can we be happy?”” (p. 4). Williams argues that unlike the above questions, the Socratic question “does not take too much for granted.” However, it does have some implications. “[A first] implication is that something relevant or useful can be said to anyone, in general, and this implies that something general can be said, something that embraces or shapes the individual ambitions each person may bring to the question “how should I live?”. Secondly, the question “is not immediate; it is not about what I should do now, or next. It is about a manner of life.” (p. 5)
- 39.
FG, p. 14.
- 40.
LK, Preface, p. x. Nussbaum also explains that her essay “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy” was “the first piece of writing [she] did in [her] literary/philosophical project (apart from its development in [her] work on ancient Greek philosophy),” and that she wrote it “in the middle of the drafting of Fragility.” (LK, p. 145–146). As we noticed earlier, she mentions this essay “Flawed Crystals” in FG, as a paper in which she shows that Henry James’s novels exemplify Aristotelian perception as “non-scientific deliberation.” (FG, p. 313 and n. 58, p. 493).
- 41.
LK, p. 26–27.
- 42.
FG, p. 14.
- 43.
LK, p. 47.
- 44.
LK, p. 14.
- 45.
LK, p 26.
- 46.
Thus, in Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum enumerates four features of the sense of life which is expressed by novels, tragic moral conflicts being a subcategory of the first feature. The features are: (1) Noncommensurability of the valuable things (1a. Pervasiveness of conflicting attachments and obligations). (2) The priority of perceptions (priority of the particular). (3) Ethical value of the emotions. (4) Ethical relevance of uncontrolled happenings. See LK, p. 34–44.
- 47.
LK, p. 37–40.
- 48.
LK, p. 43. Concerning Proust, Nussbaum might have in mind the profound effect on Marcel of Françoise’s announcement: “Mademoiselle Albertine a disparu.”
- 49.
LK, p. 135.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
LK, p. 41. Upheavals of Thought sets out to reveal this “cognitive dimension” (or “intelligence”) of the emotions. In this book, Nussbaum draws extensively on literature: Dante, Emily Brontë, Walt Whitman, Joyce and Proust illustrate different accounts of erotic love. More generally, she shows that some literary genres are especially “rich in emotionally expressive contents” (UT, p. 239), namely “tragedy, romance, melodrama, the realist novel and some types of comedy,” all of which “relate to the audience’s concern with the shape of human possibility.” (UT, p. 248)
- 52.
UT, p. 707.
- 53.
UT, p. 709.
- 54.
UT, p. 479–480. These normative aspects are linked to Nussbaum’s promotion of love as “likely to be supportive of the goals of a liberal democratic society.” (UT, p. 479) Nussbaum has developed her views on love, compassion and (shared) grief as providing “powerful guidance toward social justice” (UT, p. 713) in Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. This continuity is part of the picture of Nussbaum’s systematicity that I sketched out in my Introduction.
- 55.
UT, p. 480. See UT, p. 459–463 for a description of Marcel’s love for Albertine as partial, needy, jealous and aggressive.
- 56.
LK, p. 42.
- 57.
LK, p. 25.
- 58.
LK, p. 26.
- 59.
LK, p. 36.
- 60.
LK, p. 82–83.
- 61.
LK, p. 43–44.
- 62.
FG, p. 317.
- 63.
LK, p. 47.
- 64.
LK, p. 47–48.
- 65.
LK, p. 97.
- 66.
LK, p. 104.
- 67.
LK, p. 53.
- 68.
“She’s a Tartar,” his friend Herbert affirms to Pip. “That girl’s hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree (…)” (Great Expectations, Chap. 22, London: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 176–177). Hereafter GE.
- 69.
“She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace.” (GE, Chap. 8, p. 62)
- 70.
As pointed out by Edgar Johnson, Dickens’s first love, Maria Beadnell, belittled him by calling him “a boy” on his 21st birthday (Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols., London, Victor Gollancz, 1953, Vol. 1, p. 73).
- 71.
GE, Chap. 17, p. 129, my italics.
- 72.
GE, Chap. 27, p. 218, my italics.
- 73.
GE, Chap. 47, p. 381–382. In the Preface to his French translation of Great Expectations, Sylvère Monod quotes this passage, but he interprets it as a way, for Dickens, to make his readers understand Pip and “make us accept him, in his mediocrity, as a fellow man and a friend” [my translation] (Les grandes espérances, transl. S. Monod, Paris: Gallimard, Folio classique, 1999, p. 18).
- 74.
Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, V. 6, Paris: Vrin, éd. J.-C. Bardout, 2006, p. 180.
- 75.
GE, Chap. 29, p. 232.
- 76.
Jon Elster, “Interpretation and rational choice.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 1, no. 1 (October 15, 2009) [http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/23], p. 7.
- 77.
David Paroissien comments on this passage: “A sense of torture and misery originating from Maria Beadnell’s coolness later in the relationship characterizes letters Dickens wrote when he spoke of the ‘utter desolation and wretchedness’ he felt receiving ‘so many displays of heartless indifference’ during their meetings of late (Letters 1.17). (The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline)” (The Companion to Great Expectations, ed. Paroissien, Mountfield: Helm Information, 2000, p. 254).
- 78.
Didier Eribon, Retour à Reims, Paris: Fayard, 2009. English translation: Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims. Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press, 2013.
- 79.
Dickens, David Copperfield, London: Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, 1999, Chap. 11, p. 157, my italics. This sentence is borrowed from the autobiographical fragment that Forster has reproduced in his Life of Dickens. See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, London: Chapman, Hall, 1911, Vol. I, p. 28.
- 80.
David Copperfield, Chap. 11, p. 161–162.
- 81.
GE, Chap. 8, p. 60, 64. With regard to the shortcomings of his command of language, Pip also endures a so-called lesson of “Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three” from Estella, who explains to him contemptuously the meaning of her house’s name Satis House (GE, Chap. 8, p. 56). A similar point is made by Didier Eribon: “It was also necessary to relearn how to talk, to eliminate incorrect pronunciations and turns of phrase along with regional usages (to stop saying that an apple was “sour” [fitre] and say instead that it was “tart” [acide]), to correct both my northeastern accent and my working-class accent, to learn a more sophisticated vocabulary, to make use of more suitable grammatical constructions, in short, to keep both my language and my delivery of it under constant surveillance.” (Returning to Reims, p. 107, cf. Retour à Reims, p. 108–109).
- 82.
GE, Chap. 9, p. 72.
- 83.
GE, Chap. 8, p. 65.
- 84.
GE, Chap. 14, p. 107.
- 85.
GE, Chap. 14, p. 108.
- 86.
See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I, p. 34 (Dickens’s autobiographical fragment): “we worked, for the light’s sake, near [a] window (…) and we were so brisk at it, that the people used to stop and look in. Sometimes there would be quite a little crowd there” and David Copperfield, Chap. 11, in which David’s working at Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse “in [a] common way, and with (…) common companions, and with [a] sense of unmerited degradation” (p. 161–162) echo Dickens’s “shame”, “misery” and “secret agony,” when he was employed at Warren’s blacking warehouse.
- 87.
Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield. The Identity of Dickens, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 176. I agree with Welsh that “an echo of [Dickens’s] autobiographical fragment can be heard in the early chapters of Great Expectations (…) The blacking warehouse becomes for this purpose the blacksmith’s forge of Pip’s apprenticeship.” (ibid.). However, I do not find Welsh’s overall interpretation of this passage persuasive. Welsh thinks that it sounds “self-critical” inasmuch it would illustrate that Pip’s fears were “needless”. I would argue instead that this passage shows Dickens acknowledging that fantasy and fear increase shame. Thus the passage about Estella’s fancied scorning eyes is followed by those words: “After that, when we went to supper (…) I would feel more ashamed of home than ever, in my own ungracious breast.” (GE, p. 108, my italics). A similar description of the fact that an imaginary apprehension increases self-shame can be found in David Copperfield, with its autobiographical background. David is now back at school with new genteel companions and reflects: “My mind ran upon what they would think, if they knew of my familiar acquaintance with the King’s Bench Prison? Was there anything about me which would reveal my proceedings in connexion with the Micawber family—all those pawnings, and sellings, and suppers—in spite of myself? (…) How would it affect them, who were so innocent of London life, and London streets, to discover how knowing I was (and was ashamed to be) in some of the meanest phases of both? All this ran in my head so much, on that first day at Doctor Strong’s, that I felt distrustful of my slightest look and gesture; shrunk within myself whensoever I was approached by one of my new schoolfellows (…).” (DC, Chap. 16, p. 222–223).
- 88.
“I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages.” (GE, Chap. 8, p. 62).
- 89.
“I thought (…) how common Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings.” (GE, Chap. 9, p. 72).
- 90.
GE, Chap. 10, p. 79. As David Paroissien observes, such remarks sound autobiographical: “Pip’s fear that his humble background and secret connection with convicts would jeopardize his relationship with Estella resembles concerns that troubled Dickens arising from the social disparity between Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker, and himself, the son of a father who had been imprisoned for debt.” (The Companion to Great Expectations, p. 255). See also Edgar Johnson, op. cit., Vol. 1: “[Dickens] well knew, how much his shabby background and his mediocre prospects had to do with his ineligibility as a suitor (…)” (p. 82).
- 91.
GE, Chap. 18, p. 145.
- 92.
GE, Chap. 29, p. 235. The identical terms can also be found in Chap. 11: “I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing.” (p. 93), in Chap. 17, where Pip acknowledges to Biddy: “what would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so!” (p. 128) and finally in Chap. 44, at a later stage in the novel, when Pip declares his love to Estella and she receives it with an “incredulous wonder”: “You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then.” (p. 364).
- 93.
Even after his friend Herbert Pocket has revealed to Pip that Estella’s cruelty to him stems from the fact that Miss Havisham brought her up “to wreak revenge on all the male sex” (GE, Chap. 22, p. 177), this explanation does not lead him to cease judging her insensibility as “not in Nature” (GE, Chap. 44, p. 362). At the very end of the novel, Estella reveals to Pip that finally she has changed, after having suffered from her unhappy marriage to Drummle (cf. GE, Chap. 59, p. 484). But Pip’s love remains powerful before this final meeting, thus remaining, as it was from the very beginning, morally incorrect.
- 94.
“The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in my first unhappy time. Then I would say to her, ‘Biddy, I think you once liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since. (…) if you can receive me like a forgiven child (and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier of you than I was,—not much, but a little.’” (GE, Chap. 57, p. 472).
- 95.
See also Sylvère Monod: “As Dickens is irresistibly a moralist, Pip’s example shows that time that is wasted is never quite wasted for everyone. Pip has misspent some years of his youth and he has wasted a great deal of money. But his prodigality has contributed to his formation, he became a better man than he was when hardened in his egoism, and he thus has learned a lesson which he teaches to the readers afterwards. Reading Great Expectations is reading the story of an education, and to be educated thereby” (Sylvère Monod’s Preface to Les Grandes Espérances, op. cit., p. 18: my translation). Monod also writes of a “psychological and moral adventure, with a universal scope, although founded on the attentive self-introspection of the writer.” (Ibid., p. 9). David Trotter pursues the same line of argument when he writes: “In its most immediate aspect, Great Expectations is a story of a moral redemption. The hero, an orphan raised in humble surroundings (…) comes into a fortune, and promptly disavows family and friends. When the fortune (…) evaporates completely, he confronts his own ingratitude, and learns to love the man who both created and destroyed him.” (David Trotter’s Introduction to Great Expectations. London: Penguin Books, 1996, p. vii).
- 96.
Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth, the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974, p. 53.
- 97.
Ibid., p. 58.
- 98.
GE, Chap. 59, p. 482.
- 99.
Jerome Buckley, op. cit., p. 60. Buckley adds: “But Dickens has given us two endings beyond this logical stopping-place, neither, I think, altogether adequate. The first [is] more laconic and surely stronger than the alternative (…).” In fact, the second end even seems to me a correction of the sentence about Pip’s forgotten “poor dream,” inasmuch as Dickens chose to immediately follow it with the words: “Nevertheless, I knew, while I said those words, that I secretly intended to revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone, for her sake. Yes, even so. For Estella’s sake.” (GE, Chap. 59, p. 482)
- 100.
Buckley, op. cit., p. 61. On the much discussed subject of the greater relevance of Great Expectations’ first or second ending, I am persuaded by Jerome Meckier’s defence of the latter as characterized by uncertainty and openness: J. Meckier, “Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: a defence of the second ending,” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 1993), p. 28–58. “The modernity of Dickens’s novel stems from his use of the second ending to outclass his competitors: (…) where they behaved conventionally, he strove to be ambiguous and paradoxical. (…) The third stage of Pip’s maturation would come to an end, yet the sense of the hero’s life still in the making would be preserved, as if this three-stage novel could easily expand to a fourth or fifth stage.” (Meckier, p. 42). “In allowing Pip and Estella the belated possibility for a modest but mutually restorative life together, Dickens reevaluated the permanent separation in his original conclusion, finding it as false to the nature of things as the static felicity that heroes and heroines achieve in the novels of his immediate rivals. He countered such artificiality with a semi-resolution that seems open-ended in comparison, hence, he implied, truer to life.” (p. 44)
- 101.
Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Dickens, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1970, p. 45. Pip, she adds, “is shown subjected to the influences of accident and environment (…) Magwitch is (…) an important agent in the conversion of Pip.” (p. 46)
- 102.
Hardy also insists on Pip’s “passiveness” (B. Hardy, op. cit, p. 54). However, she seems to consider it as an unrealistic defect of Dickens’s treatment of moral change, which is inferior, she thinks, to those of some of his fellow-Victorians. As she writes, “the vital difference between George Eliot’s conversions and most of those in Dickens is that in George Eliot [or Henry James, which Hardy also names on p. 31] the character whose change is central to the action is changed in and by the action he initiates, in the process of recognizing moral causality and responsibility. Dickens’s characters, further removed from this kind of tragic process, are changed less by seeing what they have done than by seeing what they are (…).” (p. 54–55). For my part, I consider that Dickens’s treatment of Pip’s “change of heart” as an accidental result of external events is, on the contrary, a realistic departure from the (conventional) view that moral conversion always lies in the agent’s power (and thus, can provide a lesson for the reader).
- 103.
“The one good thing he did in his prosperity, the only thing that endures and bears good fruit.” (General Mems: 2). Cf. GE, Chap. 52, p. 416, Chap. 57, p. 465–466.
- 104.
G. Kennedy “The Weakened Will Redeemed,” Dickensian, Summer 1983, p. 81, my italics.
- 105.
Pip’s contrition for his ingratitude, his asking for and obtaining of forgiveness are present at the end of the novel, within a scene that is certainly inspired by the parable of the return of the prodigal son (GE, Chap. 58, p. 479–480). They are accompanied by Pip’s resolution to become industrious, frugal and constant in his relationship to Joe and Biddy. Here, the Christian reference is undeniably pertinent. Cf. Jennifer Gribble, “The Bible in Great Expectations,” Dickens Quarterly. Vol. 25, No. 4, December 2008, p. 232–240. However, Pip’s change of vision and behaviour towards Magwitch, and towards Joe, belong to a previous stage of the novel, when Pip accompanies Magwitch during his escape, his trial, and his last days in prison (GE, Chap. 54–56).
- 106.
GE, Chap. 9, p. 72.
- 107.
GE, Chap. 38, p. 312.
- 108.
GE, Chap. 19, p. 160. Sometimes, this consciousness is retrospective and belongs to the narrator, i.e. the mature Pip (cf. GE, Chap 19, p. 150, where Pip attributes to Biddy “a bad side of human nature,” that the narrator, with his further knowledge, “[has] since reason to think” that it truly applied to himself). But at other points in the novel, this consciousness belongs to the young Pip: cf. GE, Chap. 19, p. 160, and Chap. 35, p. 284–285, where the adult narrator “suspects” that even at the time he knew that Biddy was right to think that he would not come back to see Joe, despite his protestations.
- 109.
Didier Eribon, La société comme verdict. Classes, identités, trajectoires, Paris: Fayard, 2013, p. 73. See also Eribon, Returning to Reims: “Every time I would “betray” my own childhood, by sharing in deprecatory opinions, inevitably a nagging bad conscience would make itself felt, if not sooner, then later.” (op. cit., p. 30)
- 110.
The previous quotation from Chap. 19, p. 160 comes from the first stage of the novel. There is however another example from the second stage of the novel (Pip’s life in London, in his new prosperity). At the end of a scene in which Joe visits Pip in London and Pip feels at once exasperated by Joe’s awkwardness and secretly conscious that there is a “dignity” in him, which makes Pip regret his own unkindness, he reflects: “I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity in him. The fashion of his dress [that Pip has just mocked inwardly] could no more come in its way when he spoke these words [a discourse which was full of dignity] than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover myself sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for him in the neighbouring streets; but he was gone.” (GE, Chap. 27, p. 224–225). This is a repetition of the very same failed parting and guilty conscience that concluded the first part of the novel.
- 111.
The disgust for Magwitch, that is partly the result of the internalisation of Estella’s virtual judgment (“Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis [=Magwitch] might be traced to Estella?”: GE, Chap. 43, p. 353), has replaced in Pip the mixture of fear and pity that he had felt, as a child, towards the one whom he called (not without affection I think) “his convict” (“Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon the pie, I made bold to say, ‘I am glad you enjoy it.’” GE, Chap. 3, p. 19). Similarly, an affectionate complicity characterizes the childhood scenes between Pip and Joe before the meeting with Estella.
- 112.
GE, Chap. 41, p. 342, where Pip expresses to Herbert his repugnance to accept new expenses from Magwitch: “‘How can I’ (…) ‘Think of him! Look at him!’ An involuntary shudder passed over both of us,” and p. 344: “‘You feel convinced that you can take no further benefits from him; do you?’. ‘Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?’”. Later in the novel, Pip will learn that, whatever his choice, he could not legally inherit a convict’s fortune: “I had thought about that. (…) Apart from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick’s hint now. I foresaw that, being convicted, his possessions would be forfeited to the Crown.” (Chap. 54, p. 447). I think that those indications contradict David Trotter’s affirmation in his Introduction of Great Expectations, that Pip’s “final refusal to accept money (…) from Magwitch” is a “good deed” (GE, David Trotter’s Introduction, p. viii).
- 113.
GE, Chap. 54, p. 446.
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Le Jallé, É. (2022). Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Relevance of Literature. In: Le Jallé, E., Benoit, A. (eds) Thinking with Women Philosophers. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12662-8_6
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