Chapter 13 To Take a Chance on Love,Not
Constance knew her husband had another reason for reading Great Expectations aloud with his dear James.
The Pennacook Academy faculty were not allowed to teach their own children (or grandchildren) in the classroom.
The English Department had overruled Thomas Winslow’s request to make an exception in Jimmy’s case.
Thomas was generally considered the Dickens man in the department; Constance understood that her Tommy believed he owned the teaching rights to Great Expectations.
“If dear James can hear the novel out loud, Connie, it will help him as a reader,” Thomas told her.
“Just don’t lecture Jimmy to death, Tommy,” was all Constance could say about it. She’d heard his lectures on Great Expectations, all good ones. He believed that Great Expectations was the most empathetic and perfectly plotted novel in the English language.
Constance was exasperated with her husband’s lecturing; he just went on and on.
“You’ll notice how Dickens’s lush language grows thinner as the plot progresses,” Constance overheard him telling Jimmy.
“Both in the lushness of his language, when Dickens means to be lush, and how spare he can be when he simply wants you to follow the story, he is ever conscious of his readers,” Thomas went on.
“And Dickens overpunctuates! He makes long and potentially difficult sentences slower but easier to read; his punctuation is a form of stage direction,” Thomas Winslow was saying; he didn’t know that Honor was listening to him, alongside her mother.
“Fuck Dickens’s punctuation, Daddy!” Honor shouted to her father.
“For pity’s sake, Tommy—just read aloud to each other!” Constance told him.
Because Thomas was reading all the odd-numbered chapters, he was the one who started.
It seemed to Constance and Honor that he gave special emphasis to the second sentence of the second paragraph of that first chapter.
“As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.”
Both Constance and Honor wondered if Thomas was trying to make Jimmy feel better about his own circumstances. (At least the boy had seen photos of Esther and Moses Little Mountain—they weren’t tombstones.)
For similar reasons, Constance and Honor thought, Thomas purposely paused before reading aloud that ominous passage in Chapter Seven when young Pip is contemplating how a man might freeze lying out on the marshes.
“I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.” Was this Thomas Winslow’s way of assuring his grandson that James would never be without help or pity, because the boy came from an adoring family?
(By now, whenever Thomas and James read aloud to each other, they had the whole family for their audience—not just a couple of eavesdroppers in an adjacent room.)
And what a long pause there was, after young James read that most declarative first sentence in Chapter Fourteen.
“It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.” James Winslow was overcome with emotion; the dear boy needed a minute to collect himself before he could continue reading.
It meant the world to all the Winslows that Jimmy didn’t feel ashamed of home; the idea of that was repugnant to them.
It was only when Thomas read aloud that passage near the end of Chapter Nineteen—just before what Dickens calls “THE END OF THE FIRST STAGE OF PIP’S EXPECTATIONS”—that Constance would realize why her Tommy chose to read the odd chapters.
(It was as deliberate a choice as the rest of her husband’s teaching process; he wanted to give voice to those passages that illuminated Dickens’s intention to move readers emotionally.) “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”
Constance and her daughters were not surprised when Thomas histrionically enacted Miss Havisham’s “passionate whisper” in Chapter Twenty-nine, when she tells poor Pip “what real love is.” (In this respect, Constance understood, her husband and Dickens were kindred souls; their hatred of Miss Havisham knew no bounds.) On the subject of “real love,” neither Thomas Winslow nor Miss Havisham held back.
“It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!” Thomas Winslow as Miss Havisham cried.
Honor Winslow was projecting her own fears about “real love” onto her darling Jimmy.
Her father’s rendition of Miss Havisham’s condemnation of love might make James Winslow never take a chance on love, as Honor never did.
Of course Honor couldn’t help projecting her own fears about love onto Jimmy.
(What kind of mother wouldn’t want her child to take a chance on love, even if she herself didn’t?)
Constance knew her husband well, especially his teaching methods.
Constance was waiting for the teaching lesson that remained, concerning the two endings of Great Expectations.
Before Thomas read the last chapter, Chapter Fifty-nine, he asked young James to read Dickens’s original ending—Pip’s final meeting with Estella, his old heartbreaker.
Somehow we’re supposed to believe Pip can see in Estella that “suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching”—it’s even harder to imagine that Estella has a heart!
Pip believes that Estella will somehow “understand what my heart used to be.” (If you know Estella, good luck with that idea!)
Thomas Winslow and his grandson agreed about the original ending.
The tone is self-pitying, hence more modern than Dickens’s romantic revision.
“There is a contemporary detachment in the original ending—even a smugness, and it isn’t like Dickens to be smug,” Thomas told young James.
“What’s worse, Pip is moping, and Dickens didn’t mope!
” Thomas exclaimed. Then he read the last chapter (the revised ending) aloud—reading tearfully when he got to the part about Pip and Estella ending up together.
“I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” These are Pip’s last words, his declaration of eternal love for Estella—his eternal tormentor.
Constance marveled at what her husband had pulled off; he’d praised the new ending as the right one for the novel, while he’d given Jimmy justifiably grave doubts about Estella.
“I don’t have a good feeling about Pip and Estella as a couple,” Jimmy told his granddad after they’d finished reading Great Expectations to each other.
Constance knew where this would go; she’d heard her husband’s lecture before, one of his best ones.
How Pip’s expectations had been dashed before; how we’ve come to believe his expectations weren’t so great to begin with.
As we know, Pip has heard Estella is “leading a most unhappy life”; the husband she’d separated from “had used her with great cruelty.” (Honor Winslow would be unhappy with herself for thinking of Estella as used or damaged goods.) Of falling in love, Pip observes: “How could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?” As Pip bluntly states, when he encounters Estella later (when they’re both older): “The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone.”
“It’s the right ending for the novel, my dear James, but it seems to me that Pip is asking for trouble when he sees ‘no shadow of another parting from’ Estella,” Thomas told young James.
“I would be running away from her, as far as I could get!” Jimmy Winslow cried.
“What a wily old fox you are—as a teacher, Tommy!” Constance told her husband. Thomas Winslow would be right; hearing Great Expectations out loud did indeed help young James as a reader.
What Thomas Winslow didn’t expect was that reading Great Expectations aloud made Jimmy Winslow want to be a writer—but only if he could be a novelist like Charles Dickens, as young James would tell his grandfather.
Thomas never meant to burden the boy with such an outdated desire; to be a novelist like Charles Dickens struck Thomas as a dinosaur of an ambition, and Thomas truly loved Dickens.
Yet he was aware that many of his colleagues thought teaching Dickens was old-fashioned.
He knew that most of his students detested Dickens.
As a would-be writer, wasn’t James Winslow doomed to be out of date before he began—condemned to obscurity before he started?
What havoc have I wreaked (or wrought)? Thomas Winslow (ever the English teacher) was worrying.
Thomas regretted his role in encouraging his beloved grandson to become a nineteenth-century novelist; he’d just been trying to help the struggling boy as a reader.