Great Expectations Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Get out the flashlight, because Great Expectations mostly takes place in the dark. When Pip first describes the marshes, they're "a long black horizontal line … and the sky was just a row of long...

Mists are good for (1) getting things wet and (2) making it very difficult to see things, so it's not surprising that they're around when Pip meets the convict in the cemetery, when Pip leaves tow...

So, we know that there is a lot of criminality in our novel (check out the "Themes: Criminality" section), and wherever there are crimes, there are criminals; and wherever there are criminals, ther...

Miss Havisham doesn't exactly have a green thumb, because her garden is, well, a hot mess. It's "rank" and "overgrown with tangled weeds" (8.98); it's "miserable" (11.4) and "quite a wildernes...

Someone get the Raid, because there are lots of creepy crawlies in Great Expectations—like the spider community that lives in the twenty-five-year-old wedding cake in Miss Havisham's dining room,...

Whenever Pip kisses Estella’s cheek (and there are two occasions by our calculations), said cheek feels like that of statue. What are statues? They are representations of humans, animals, or even...

Great Expectations Forecast: Monday—rainy and dark. Tuesday—rainy and windy. Wednesday—rainy and rainy. Thursday—stormy. Friday—misty (thick fog warning). Saturday—heavy mist with light...

Shadows always abound when Estella is around. (Whoa. We’re poets, and we didn’t know it.) Pip often notices a shadow passing across Estella’s face. When she arrives in London for the fir...

Growing up may be hard to do, but it's a lot better than the alternative: slowly rotting away in a room full of stopped clocks. Most obviously, these stopped clocks symbolize Miss Havisham's refusa...