Wednesday
Four years ago, borrowing an idea from New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, I wrote a blog post comparing Donald Trump to Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Today I update that post since it is more relevant now than it was in 2017.
Havisham, you’ll recall, is the elderly spinster who can’t get over having been jilted at the altar decades before, becoming permanently embittered. To avenge herself against men, she adopts an orphan girl (Estelle), hoping that she’ll break hearts. Her plan works as Estelle breaks the heart of innocent Pip, the novel’s protagonist.
Bruni compared Trump to Miss Havisham over the way he was continuing, almost a year after he won his election, to obsess over Hillary Clinton:
He’s more or less back to chanting “lock her up,” as if it’s early November all over again. He has frozen the calendar there so that he can perpetually savor the exhilaration of the campaign and permanently evade the drudgery of governing and the ignominy of his failure at it so far.
Nov. 8 is his Groundhog Day, on endless repeat, in a way that pleases and pacifies him. That movie has a co-star, Clinton. If he dwells in it, he dwells with her. He can no more retire her than Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, could put away her wedding dress. Clinton brings Trump back to the moment before the rose lost its blush and the heartache set in.
The problem with the original Havisham comparison, of course, is that Trump actually won the election. It’s as if Miss Havisham had actually gotten married to Compeyson but remained bitter because… Well, actually that plot wouldn’t make any sense, just as it didn’t make much sense with Trump.
Now, however, the parallel actually works because Trump was indeed jilted by the voters in 2020, one of only three presidents in the past 100 years to be defeated while running for reelection. Now Trump can’t let go of the fact that he lost, even as (as is the case with Havisham) his wedding dress ages, along with the wedding cake. Imagine these as election-night paraphernalia, made up to celebrate a victory that never happened. What Pip sees is both horrific and pathetic:
Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.
She was dressed in rich materials,—satins, and lace, and silks,—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her hand,—her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.
It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.
If it were only Havisham and Trump withering away in permanent bitterness, it would be one thing. However, both find a way to pass their bitterness along to others, with catastrophic consequences. Havisham creates, in Estelle, the hollow shell of a human being, someone with a heart of ice who then makes others suffer. Trump, meanwhile, has created followers, starting with the January 6 insurrectionists but extending now to virtually the entire Republican Party, who either believe his lies or pretend to. These are now consumed with Trump’s own bitterness and are out to break democracy itself.,
In my 2017 column, I urged the GOP to take a lesson from Pip, who must realize that Miss Havisham is not the benefactor he thought she was. (His actual benefactor is an escaped convict.) Only later does he learn that she has taken him in, not to benefit him, but to enroll him in her narcissistic plot: she needs someone on whom Estelle can practice her heartbreaking skills. How many Republicans have been similarly taken in by Trump, thinking that he will benefit them, only to have their great expectations blasted?
In that early column, I hoped that at least some Republicans would realize that pinning their future on Trump was a fool’s errand. In the novel, Pip must break free from his imagined dependence on Havisham and grow up on his own.
Little did I imagine that Trump would just populate the world with little Havishams–or to change texts for just a moment, that Trump would fulfill the dream of the monster in Shakespeare’s Tempest, raping Miranda (democracy in our case) and “peopl[ling] this isle with Calibans.”
But back to Dickens. The difference between Havisham and Trump is that, in the end, she regrets the damage she has caused and asks for forgiveness, whereas I can’t imagine our past president doing anything of the sort. I like to think there’s a possibility that the ice-hearted followers created by Trump will soften, as Estelle does by the end of the book. Pip certainly ends his account optimistically.
Many readers of the novel, however, think that Pip is naïve and that Estelle has been irreparably damaged. As you read the final paragraphs, tell me what you think, both with regard to Pip and Estelle’s future and our own:
“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.
“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
Optimist that I am, I have always believed Pip and I have always believed in America’s future. Recent events have taken their toll on me, however. Now, I worry we may be stuck forever in the ruined place.
