Alienation and Progression in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861)

In this talk, Angel Qian shares her new ideas on an all-time classic novel by Charles Dickens. The paper draws on research for her PhD thesis. In the talk, she aims to show the implication in Great Expectations that alienation, though usually seen as a self-evidently negative term, potentially leads to progress. The paper raises the following questions and attempts to answer them by engaging with philosophical theorisations of alienation: what is the difference between Pip’s and John Wemmick’s self-division, and how does this difference help distinguish alienation from division in a simple sense? To what extent is Pip’s alienation attributed to the social malaise and to his personal fallacy? Apart from facilitating narrative progression, what does Pip’s growth after the reunion with his foster father(s) reveal about Dickens’s literary solution to alienation? Answering these questions helps us understand better alienation and reconciliation as compelling narrative concerns in nineteenth-century fiction. The analysis will be a critical intervention in both literary criticism and philosophical inquiry on alienation.

Angel QIAN RUI is a PhD candidate in English at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University.