I was sixteen, and in school we
were being taken through Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights side by side.
For obvious reasons, many of us girls had sided with the frost and fire of the
latter. Pip to me had remained the little orphan boy, the lost lover, the ungrateful child... someone who was intriguing, undeniably,
but not enough to lose your sleep over.
It was not just that,
perhaps, too. Somehow, at some phase in our formative years, you are taught to
fear passion in a way so disguised that today you cannot even look back and
point your finger. If you have been endlessly in love, something – I don’t know
what – teaches you to not be so. They teach you vulnerability is bad, they
teach you that putting your entire life, entire happiness on the hinge of one
man’s whim is unwise; dangerous, even.
And you learn! So did I.
When I read
Great Expectations, as I look back now, I suppose I too had learned more from
Miss Havisham’s sufferings than from Pip’s incredible, innocent longing. I had
since then, many times over, quoted how Miss Havisham spoke of love:
“I'll tell
you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real
love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter
submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world,
giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!”
