«It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home»: The shame of the origins and the failed Bildung in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

Abstract

This contribution examines the role of shame in Pip’s attempt to rise to the status of gentleman. Since in Victorian culture the term “gentleman” applies not only to the moral sphere, but also to the economic one and that of manners, the two different meanings of shame – as social and moral emotion – in this novel are interdependent. In the social sense, shame allows the reader to evaluate the protagonist’s actions, while in the moral one it explains his unsuccessful Bildung in terms of the loss of dignity and self-respect. Pip’s attempts to get rid of his commonness to become worthy of Estella, indeed, result in his feeling ashamed of his two paternal figures, models of that gentility that he will not be able to achieve. On the structural level, the protagonist’s need to create alternative possible plots and identities for himself and to deny his shame affects the family romance on which the whole plot of the novel is based.