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    Intertextuality Mr. Pip

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    Julieta Abraham
    1) The novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens influences the character Matilda in Mister Pip. It provides her an escape from the wartime environment and lessons about morality. 2) However, some characters like Dolores view the ideas in Great Expectations as threatening to traditional beliefs on Bougainville Island. 3) The Bible is presented as a counterpoint to Great Expectations. For Dolores, morality is inherently rooted in religion and the Bible, though her beliefs also incorporate local island traditions, representing a hybridity of cultures.

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    Intertextuality Mr. Pip

    Uploaded by

    Julieta Abraham
    147 views1 page
    1) The novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens influences the character Matilda in Mister Pip. It provides her an escape from the wartime environment and lessons about morality. 2) However, some characters like Dolores view the ideas in Great Expectations as threatening to traditional beliefs on Bougainville Island. 3) The Bible is presented as a counterpoint to Great Expectations. For Dolores, morality is inherently rooted in religion and the Bible, though her beliefs also incorporate local island traditions, representing a hybridity of cultures.

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    Intertextuality in Mr. Pip

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    1) The novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens influences the character Matilda in Mister Pip. It provides her an escape from the wartime environment and lessons about morality. 2) However, some characters like Dolores view the ideas in Great Expectations as threatening to traditional beliefs on Bougainville Island. 3) The Bible is presented as a counterpoint to Great Expectations. For Dolores, morality is inherently rooted in religion and the Bible, though her beliefs also incorporate local island traditions, representing a hybridity of cultures.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    147 views1 page

    Intertextuality Mr. Pip

    Uploaded by

    Julieta Abraham
    1) The novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens influences the character Matilda in Mister Pip. It provides her an escape from the wartime environment and lessons about morality. 2) However, some characters like Dolores view the ideas in Great Expectations as threatening to traditional beliefs on Bougainville Island. 3) The Bible is presented as a counterpoint to Great Expectations. For Dolores, morality is inherently rooted in religion and the Bible, though her beliefs also incorporate local island traditions, representing a hybridity of cultures.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 1

    INTERTEXTUALITY (Mr.

    Pip)

     Great Expectations:

    Great Expectations is a novel written in the nineteenth-century by Charles Dickens. It tells the story of
    Pip, an English orphan who lives with his oppressive older sister and kindhearted uncle in southeast England.
    Pip eventually becomes a blacksmith before an anonymous benefactor gives him a large amount of money
    and tells him to move to London to learn how to be a gentleman. This coming-of-age tale resonates deeply
    with Matilda, who relates to Pip because—among other things—she has been estranged from her father
    and is frequently at odds with her mother. She sees the book as representative of the fact that change can
    happen to anybody, and that disagreeable circumstances can take an unexpected turn for the better. As Pip
    evolves as a character, Matilda considers what it means to be a gentleman, a thought process Mr. Watts
    furthers when he tells his class that a gentleman always does the right thing. In this way, Great Expectations
    comes to embody a sense of morality for morality’s sake, a philosophy that promotes the intrinsic goodness
    of being an upstanding person. As Matilda ventures more deeply into these ideas, she finds herself capable
    of escaping the turbulent wartime environment in which she lives, turning Great Expectations into a window
    through which she can access a foreign world that sheds new light on her current reality. Unfortunately, she
    also discovers that the secular commitment to goodness that Great Expectations champions is at odds with
    her mother’s Biblical beliefs, which uphold that morality should be rooted in religion. The presence of
    Dickens’s novel in the village ultimately creates incredible tension, as people like Dolores view its remote
    ideas as threatening to Bougainville’s traditional beliefs. As such, Great Expectations symbolizes both the
    positive aspects of embracing foreign stories and the danger of introducing new narratives into volatile
    communities.

     The Bible:

    The Bible appears in Mister Pip as a counterpoint to Great Expectations and its secular framing of
    what it means to be a moral person. Suspicious of ideas that threaten the stability of her traditional beliefs,
    Dolores invests herself in the Bible (which she calls the “Good Book”), calling upon it to support her ideas
    about right and wrong. For her, morality is inherently rooted in religion, and a strong familiarity with the
    Bible ensures a person’s goodness. Interestingly enough, though, her commitment to scripture also
    symbolizes the notion of hybridity, since her foundational beliefs are a mixture of old Bougainvillean island
    lore and the Biblical teachings of Christian missionaries who visited the village before she was born. As a
    result, she is just as likely to refer to “the wisdom of crabs” as she is to quote the opening lines of Genesis.
    For her, these two traditions are one and the same. For example, to explain why women in her community
    have always braided their hair, Dolores upholds that “when you bring two strands of hair together and tease
    them into rope you begin to understand the idea of partnership…and you understand how God and the devil
    know each other.” This assertion combines the customs of Bougainvillean women with the concept of right
    and wrong—a concept that draws upon the Bible’s depiction of God and the devil. As a result, Dolores uses
    the Bible to resist the outside influence of Great Expectations even as the Bible itself represents the cultural
    hybridity at play in her own personality and culture.

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