Great Expectations (Reading Between The Lines)

     Great Expectations; a movie that revolves around the main character Pip, who was an orphan raised by his sister and her husband, and was eventually going to be a blacksmith, and Estella (the girl he fell in love with) who was an orphan too, adopted by Miss Havisham and being raised as a lady. The original story on which this movie is based on was written during an era in which women’s rights were being stepped on and they were suffering because of that. Evidently, Miss Havisham was one of those women and she wasn’t willing to fold her hands, forget about it and do nothing. During the first few minutes of the movie we hear Miss Havisham (Estella’s adoptive mother) utter the following words “Well, you can break his heart.” By hearing these words, and seeing her in a thorn, old bridal gown, we immediately come to the conclusion that her heart was once broken, and she daily lives with that hurt and has the urge for revenge in her heart, which she wants to get through Estella. Usually implicit meanings are hard to see and understand, but in this movie, the body language along with the conversation, brings the implicit meaning to the surface and shows what exactly is going on.  By this scene, we somehow get a head start on the future scenes of the movie and know what potentially is going to happen.

   It’s usually known that boys are stronger and have a higher self-esteem than girls. As Martin and Gentry have mentioned in their “Stuck in the Model Trap” passage, during adolescence, girls’ self-esteem goes down, whereas that of the boys goes up, because all girls think of are ways to improve their look and be as skinnier as possible, whereas boys don’t have that issue. Here, in this movie, the situation is totally the opposite than that of what usually is the case.  Why is it so? Most probably, because Estella, was already beautiful and had nothing to worry about and she was grown up in an environment where she was forced to be strong and have a higher self-esteem than boys, taking into consideration the situation Miss Havisham has been in years ago. If Estella has a high self-esteem, than why does Pip suffer from low self-esteem? Taking into consideration that Pip comes from a poor family, he had no idea about the world that existed outside his house and the lands surrounding it. Thus, when he found himself in a huge mansion, with high class citizens, he felt unworthy. Therefore, Martin and Gentry’s point of view is not necessarily true and somehow stereotypic, because as we can see, the environment a person has lived and grown up in determines the personality of a person.

   What came to my mind other than Martin and Gentry’s idea is that of Deborah Tannen. In her book; “The Power of Talk” she talks about how women exercise authority indirectly, and that girls are the ones who build reports/relations.  In the above mentioned scene, we realize that Miss Havisham, along with Estella (by influencing on her), somehow try to be in control over Pip. Tannen’s point of view is totally correct, however, such acts are usually implicit, because if you don’t know the past of the people involved in the act, you won’t know what’s on their mind and what they may be capable of.

     According to Austin, there are two types of acts; performances and performatives. In this scene, we don’t see much performance; however the presence of a performative is crystal clear. Austin thinks that designated people (in this case Miss Havisham) achieve performatives, because they are linked to the situation. In the mentioned scene, Miss Havisham was the perfect candidate to effect Estella with her words (performatives), due to the fact that she was in a been there felt that situation. She had experienced love and loss, and she knew exactly what to say and how to act in order to somehow brainwash Estella and get revenge through her.  The word “Performatives” here stands for words that do things. Sometimes words have more effect on our daily lives than we can ever imagine. For instance, in Great Expectations, “Well, you can break his heart.” Says it all and puts everything on the table.

      After getting deep in the scene, reading between the lines and connecting the conversation with three of the thinkers, I understood much more than I originally knew when I first started writing this essay. I came to the conclusion that oral communication, body language and settings, if not connected, can’t communicate implicit meanings. Plus, I realized that implicit meaning have much more effect, and are more important than explicit ones, because that’s where the true story and the true events occur. Thus, by combining these three thinkers, we get the ultimate effect the writer/director is seeking to transfer to the viewers.

References

·         Austin. Lecture II.

·         Tannen, D. (1995). The power of talk.

·         Martin & Gentry. Stuck in the model trap.

                             Dickens, C. (Writer) (2013). Great expectations [DVD]. Available from http://www.megashare.info/watch-great-expectations-online-TmpJNE9BPT0