How does Dickens present Miss Havisham In his novel Great Expectations?

This extract uses the first-person perspective to align the reader with Pip during his first experience meeting Miss Havisham to establish the latter as strange and eccentric. Miss Havisham’s strangeness as a character relies partially on the mystery surrounding her. Dickens does not explicitly tell the reader that Miss Havisham is wearing a wedding dress, instead he slowly pieces together her wedding outfit by describing her ‘rich materials-satins, and lace, and silks’, ‘long white veil’ and ‘bridal flowers’ all of which are symbolic of matrimony. Miss Havisham’s strangeness is also developed by the sense of absurdity created in this scene. Lavish ‘bright jewels’ and a ‘splendid’ dress indicating wealth are described amidst the clutter of ‘half-packed trunks’ and ‘her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.’ The juxtaposition of grandeur and mess makes for a bizarre scene.Moreover, Miss Havisham’s state of undress, ‘she had but one shoe on… and her veil was but half arranged’, furthers her strangeness. A modern reader may view Miss Havisham’s struggle to make herself look presentable sympathetically, but it is likely that a contemporary Victorian reader would be appalled by her indecent appearance. However, most readers would be perplexed by Miss Havisham’s half-dressed bridal appearance as Dickens deepens the mystery by physically and metaphorically tainting the colour ‘white’. The connotations of ‘white’ are usually innocence and purity but it quickly takes on a more macabre association with aging the more it is repeated in this extract. When used alongside the coordinating conjunction ‘but’ (‘she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white.’), the colour becomes increasingly more negative. The colour is an indicator of Miss Havisham’s loss of beauty and, perhaps, sanity: ‘everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow’.