Great+Expectations

I have actually been browsing //Great Expectations// in the hopes that it would give me all sorts of ideas of how to approach //Mister Pip//, but I'm afraid I now see them all the more as two very separate works. Matilda herself suggests that //Great Expectations// does not have much relevance to her world. Dickens' novel is about Pip's disillusionment with the benefits provided by riches and patronage, and Dickens' critique of the British society that creates small-time crooks like Magwitch and then prosecutes them to the full extent of the law. The perspective of the two books, told retrospectively from a vague moment in the narrator's future, is completely similar, though I find that in //Mister Pip// there is more foreshadowing and an ominous tone. I suppose to some extent we can ask students what parallels they see between Pip's desire to forget Joe Gargery, the man who raised him, and Matilda's desire to leave her mother behind. Of course, there is much more keeping Matilda from returning to her roots than there was for Pip. In many ways Matilda's social rise is a good thing. She certainly never characterizes it as a bad thing, though it only takes up the last fifth of the book, whereas it consumes most of Pip's career in //Great Expectations//. But perhaps Matilda describes her village with a similar ambiguity to how Pip sees his loved ones. That is, there is a certain tone that seems to both mock and endorse the characters. Students could be asked to investigate this ambiguity, and perhaps even write an essay about their own loved ones in which they poke fun at them but also reveal the values that they share. Among the few other correlates I find, the way that Matilda investigates the history of Mr. Watts for vague reasons in similar to the way that Pip investigates the history of Magwitch without being able to say exactly what it is he is interested in discovering. From the realist stance, we should not be surprised to find that fewer things fall perfectly into place in Matilda's case. //Mister Pip// also makes a statement about how books should be read. As a general thing, the children are not taught the history of England, or the biography of Dickens, or given much context at all. The students are allowed to ask the teacher to clarify vocabulary. The teacher does most of the reading as a way to teach reading. The teacher serves as a model for the students. Matilda constructs meaning mainly by relating Pip to herself and her own desire to escape her powerless childhood. Students in a real classroom can discuss how //Mister Pip// portrays reading, and how they think reading should work. Perhaps student's could use //Mister Pip//'s relationship to //Great Expectations// as an inspiration for their own classroom to adopt a book. Or at any rate, students could write a play poking fun at themselves and their community, using the general structure of //Mister Pip//. There would be readings from some core book, connections of that book to students daily lives, and also show-and-tell based on important beliefs and practices in the community. It would all be a sort of classroom lampoon and retrospective. Students can work on specific scenes in smaller groups and by obeying the structure of the book still have it all tie together as a plot.