Between Women by Sharon Marcus

Author:Sharon Marcus [Marcus, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780691128351
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2007-08-14T05:00:00+00:00

touch” (477) that signifies her acceptance of the sentimental standard that will always award Pip precedence in any competition between them.

The adoption of sentimental reciprocity as a new basis for the bond between Estella and Pip only adds to the melancholy of the novel’s conclusion:

“Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.

“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella. (478–79) Estella and Pip rise together “as” one, and in “rising and bending over her,” Pip balances a gesture of mastery with one of subservience. Their exchange enacts the symmetry to which friendship aspires, as they trade the word “friend” back and forth without the contradictions and qualifi-cations that characterized their former exchanges. When Pip asserts, “We are friends,” he echoes Estella, whose final utterance mirrors his repetition of hers and extends his present claim into the future. As a fragment that begins with a conjunction, the phrase “And will continue friends apart” embodies Estella’s continuity with Pip, and though her words threaten separation, they also allude to friendship’s independence from physical embodiment. The narrator’s next words, “I took her hand in mine,” appear to contradict Estella’s and suggest that he is not yet ready to relinquish the play of hands he had so envied in her relationship with Miss Havisham. Yet that unadorned clasp of hands, free of rings, gloves, and watches, in the one scene between Pip and Estella to make no mention of what either one wears, only adds to the conclusion’s pathos. By the end of the novel, Pip has allied himself with both members of the primal female dyad—through sentiment rather than fashion. But to deprive Miss Havisham and Estella of their trappings in the primal scene is also to acknowledge his failure to assume them himself. Whether Pip’s heartfelt grasp of Estella’s hand means that Pip and Estella marry or separate, remain friends together or apart, their ultimately neutral embrace cannot be disentangled from the ruin of his greatest expectation, that he will join the female dyad by commanding their recognition of his successful transformation into a fashionable female accessory.

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