Havisham

1. Havisham Carol Ann Duffy JNicolson

2. What’s Up With the Title? • Well, the poem is spoken by Miss Havisham and is about Miss Havisham, so the title seems pretty cut-and-dried to us. • But when you consider the fact that this character is always referred to as Miss Havisham in the novel Great Expectations, the title takes on an interesting new twist. Why leave out the Miss? The missing "Miss" has at least two intriguing effects. First, it takes Miss Havisham's gender out of the picture. When we read the title, we can't be sure this is the Havisham we're familiar with. • Second, by leaving it out, Duffy is, in a weird way, drawing attention to the fact that Havisham is her maiden name. She hasn't taken on her husband's name because she never actually married him. So here she is, an old spinster, stuck with the name she's had since birth. It's a constant reminder of her sad, sad life. • And finally, it makes her seem big and important. It sort of puts her on par with characters like Hamlet (whose play, after all, isn't called Prince Hamlet), or Othello (whose play is called Othello, not General Othello). She's a secondary character in Great Expectations, but in "Havisham," Miss H takes centre stage. JNicolson

3. Introduction • What is it about? A woman telling the tale of being stood up on her wedding day • What themes are covered? Anger, revenge, hatred, death • What tone does the poem have? Angry, aggressive, bitter • What literary devices have been used? Enjambement, metaphor, simile, oxymoron, dark imagery JNicolson

4. Introduction • Creates a persona • Monologue • Miss Havisham – character from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – jilted on her wedding day by her fiancée. • "Havisham" is a dramatic monologue, which means that it's spoken by a fictional character – Miss Havisham – who is very much not the poet Carol Ann Duffy. Dramatic monologues like this one focus on the unique perspective of the speaker, as if she were a character in a play. So when you read "Havisham," you might imagine the speaker standing onstage, with the set dressed as her creepy bedroom, spilling her heart out to the audience. JNicolson

5. Speaker Point of View • The Miss Havisham we see in Duffy's poem is slightly different from the one in the novel. The character in the novel seems bitter and unhappy, that's for sure; but there's an angriness and passion in this poem that we don't see in the novel. In Duffy's poem, Miss Havisham puts it all out there – her pain, her longing, even her erotic fantasies (and those definitely do not exist in the book!). Duffy brings out an imagined, hidden side of Miss Havisham. It's not pretty, but it adds depth to her character, and it stokes our pity for her even more than in the novel. JNicolson

6. Havisham Setting • The setting of "Havisham" isn't specified in the poem itself, but since Miss Havisham rarely (if ever) leaves her house, we're going to go ahead and assume that it takes place there. In the novel, Miss H lives in a crumbling, dilapidated mansion called Satis House, which was beautiful before it fell into disrepair because of Miss Havisham's neglect. As you read the poem, imagine you're in this decrepit mansion – surrounded by stopped clocks, a rotting wedding cake, and a host of mice. That should set the mood perfectly. JNicolson

7. Themes • Violence • Love • Death • Hate Violence and death feature because she wants to kill him for humiliating her. Love features because she loves him yet hates him because of what he did to her. This shows how she is feeling towards the man that left her. “Beloved sweetheart bastard” JNicolson

8. Line 1 • Beloved sweetheart bastard. • Alliteration/Oxymoron and Punctuation • The use of ‘sweetheart bastard’ shows that she loves him and hates him at the same time. The repetition of the letter ‘b’ show alliteration that helps link these words together to show how these conflicting emotions are linked inside her. Note the lack of exclamation mark – she is serious and seemingly no longer angry. JNicolson

9. Lines 1-2 • ‘Not a day since then • I haven’t wished him dead.’ • Enjambment • Here Miss Havisham alludes to her past. We, as readers, are expected to know what "then" refers to: her wedding day, on which she was unceremoniously dumped. The enjambment highlights the intensity of her vengeful desires. JNicolson

10. Line 2 • ‘Prayed for it’ • Irony • We usually pray for something good not for someone’s death! JNicolson

11. Line 3-4: ‘So hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,’ Metaphor Miss Havisham uses a metaphor, imagining that her eyes have become green pebbles and her veins have turned into ropes for strangling. Green is often considered the colour of jealousy and greed. The veins/ropes have a deathly connotation: these body parts are about pain and imprisonment. JNicolson

12. Line 4 • ‘Ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.’ • Metaphor • Accentuated veins - due to age, stress, murderous anger etc. Metaphor represents her aging, as well as the years spent ‘wringing her hands’ with emotion / anger / nerves JNicolson

13. Line 5 • ‘Spinster.’ • One word sentence • Miss Havisham calls herself a spinster, which a not-very-nice word for an older woman who has never been married. Is she feeling sorry for herself? Does she see herself as others see her? Probably yes to both. Placed at start of stanza, one word sentence, bitter tone. JNicolson

14. Line 5 • ‘I stink and remember’ • Observation • Miss Havisham admits that she stinks – literally. She hasn't changed her clothes in decades. Her odour must be unbearable, and she knows it. JNicolson

15. Line 6 • ‘cawing’ • Imagery • Emphasises primitive rawness of emotions. Avian terminology used to show how she feels demeaned or rejected by her lover who has flown the nest? The cry of a crow creates gothic imagery JNicolson

16. Line 6 • ‘Noooooo’ • Neologism and repetition • A neologism meaning "new", is the name for a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. • Neologism created to represent the pain (no word previously created to express). • Repetition of vowels emphasises intensity of anguish JNicolson

17. Line 7 • ‘yellowing,’ • Word choice • Lines 5-7: Miss Havisham tells us of her "yellowing" wedding dress. You might see this as a symbol of her old age, her lost hopes, or her spinsterhood. She clings to the memory of her ill-fated wedding, and one way she does this is by never taking off that dress. JNicolson

18. Line 7 • Trembling • Perhaps she is frightened of looking in the mirror and seeing what she has become. JNicolson

19. Line 8 • ‘slewed’ • Double meaning • Double meaning – past tense of ‘slay’ suggesting she has smashed the mirror in anger / also means drunk, suggesting she is unable to see her true reflection through the blur of alcohol JNicolson

20. Line 8 • ‘her’ ‘myself.’ • Symbolism • Use of feminist reference to that of Julia Kristeva – she is unable to identify herself – ‘he’ made her an ‘object’ and she now fights to regain the ‘symbolic’ (myself) JNicolson

21. Lines 8-9 • ‘myself, who did this to me?’ • Enjambment • Miss Havisham is still not going to take some responsibility for her current state of affairs. • Just after the pause of the stanza break, where we briefly toyed with this idea, she asks, "to me?" Suddenly we're sure Miss Havisham believes she's not at fault. Someone has done something to her. She doesn't take the blame for the shape of her life. • Breaks like this in poetry are called enjambments. Enjambments occur when a poet breaks up a sentence or phrase in a strange place rather than at the end of a sentence or a punctuation mark. • Duffy breaks her lines at strange places, often right in the middle of a phrase. While sometimes enjambments can make a poem more fluid, in "Havisham" they make the poem sound choppy. It's like nothing connects together properly – everything is a bit out of joint. JNicolson

22. Line 9 • ‘Puce’ • Word choice • Colour of deep red to purple-brown suggests old blood which represents old wounds. JNicolson

23. Line 9 • ‘sounds not words,’ • Suggests she no longer can access language to express her feelings – a feminist analysis explored by Caryl Churchill in ‘The Skriker,’ where pain is so deep there is no language available to describe it. JNicolson

24. Lines 10-13 • ‘lost body’ • Sexual imagery • Here, our speaker imagines the "lost body" of her former fiancé and alludes to the erotic things she'd like to do to it. But this moment doesn't last long. She wakes up harshly with a start. The only pleasant body in this poem is a figment of her imagination. JNicolson

25. Line 11 • ‘my fluent tongue in his mouth’ • Sexual imagery • Sexual fantasy/dream reveals she cannot rid herself of her desire/affection which now torments her in the living nightmare of her waking existence. JNicolson

26. Line 12 • ‘suddenly bite awake.’ • Word choice • When she wakes the hatred and anger return. The act is ‘sudden’ to him in the dream and the suddenness wakes her – and us, as the reader, to the viciousness of the attack (or dreamed attack.) JNicolson

27. Lines 12-13 • ‘white veil’ • Ambiguity • Here, our speaker says that love is nothing but veiled hate. Or does veiled hate belong to love? Either way, she's playing on the idea of a wedding veil, seeming to suggest that love is just a fiction – a beautiful veil behind which lies only hate and spite. Triple meaning – ‘white’ suggests innocence, ‘white veil’ represents the wedding, ‘veil’ represents in feminist terms that she is concealing something JNicolson

28. Line 13 • ‘red balloon bursting’ • Word choice, metaphor and alliteration • Here Miss H shares her thoughts on marriage: Behind all love is hate. The buoyant red balloon of marriage will eventually burst with a bang. The metaphor is used to express her embarrassment about being jilted (the veil concealed this.) • The alliteration symbolises her broken heart, her life being destroyed abruptly. JNicolson

29. Line 14 • ‘Bang.’ • Sentence structure • One word sentence/onomatopoeia emphasises power/suddenness of above. Short sentence for effect – also represents the shock she experienced JNicolson

30. Line 14 • ‘stabbed at a wedding-cake,’ • Violent imagery • Miss Havisham says that she stabbed at a wedding cake. The wedding cake becomes a concrete symbol of her failures in love. Even the wedding cake deserves to be stabbed. Miss Havisham has no faith in marriage at all, it seems. ‘Stabbed’ creates violent imagery / ‘stabbed at a wedding-cake’ shows literally her anger and metaphorically shows her opinion on marriage JNicolson

31. Line 15 • ‘Give me’ • Sentence structure • Command. A morbid, macabre, erotic perverse request. Deeply disturbed, vengeful and malevolent. Long + slow – combination of enjoyment and torture JNicolson

32. Line 15 • ‘male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.’ • Imagery • Miss Havisham desires "a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon." What does she want to do with this decaying body? Is a corpse the only male body she could ever get to know carnally? We kind of don't want to know. Line 15: She wants a corpse for a "long slow honeymoon." Is she talking about an actual honeymoon? Is she using a metaphor for death? Whatever it is she wants, we're sure it's not pretty. She takes the pleasant idea of a romantic getaway for newlyweds and turns it on its head. Miss H imagines a honeymoon with a corpse. She clearly sees her possibilities for another marriage (and any sort of a normal life) as dead. Frankly, honeymoon with a corpse might not be any worse than anything else that's happened to her. Use of dark imagery and the reference to death links to idea that the ‘honeymoon’ would provide the long painful death she wants. JNicolson

33. Line 16 • ‘heart that b-b-b-breaks.’ • Use of blosive ‘b’ in a stuttering style, suggests the is breaking down again / she suggests that her life has broken as a result – not just her heart • The "b-b-b-breaks" of the final line is like the tyre breathing its last sad breath before it leaves you stuck in the middle of a busy road. It's a harsh and sad poem, just as Miss Havisham is a harsh and sad woman. Line 16: We're told that it's not only the heart that's capable of breaking. Love doesn't just affect us emotionally; we feel it in our organs. And when love is lost, Miss Havisham seems to be saying, the body can break as much as the heart. Miss H's speech (her "b-b-b-breaks") is as broken as her body and her love life. This could mean she is broken hearted. It could also mean that Havisham loved him so much she doesn’t want to marry anyone else and she doesn’t want to carry on with her life. JNicolson

34. Enjambments • Because of all of its enjambments, this poem sounds incredibly choppy and jerky. The poem sounds like it's being forced out of Miss Havisham in spurts – like she's a flat tire sputtering out of control. • Alliteration, or the repetition of consonants at the beginning of words: • Line 1: "beloved" and "bastard" • Lines 13-14 "balloon bursting" and "Bang." • Consonance, or the repetition of consonants in the middle of words: • Line 8: "slewed mirror, full-length" • Line 16: "don't think it's only the heart that" • Assonance, or the repetition of vowel sounds: • Lines 1-2: "day" and "prayed" • Line 3: "hard" and "dark" • Line 5: "Spinster. I stink and remember." • Line 6: "cawing" and "wall" • Line 7: "open" and "wardrobe" • Line 8: "slewed" and "who" • Line 10: "lost body" • Lines 11-12: "mouth" and "down" • Lines 12-13: "awake," "hate," and "veil" • Line 14: "face" and "cake" JNicolson

35. Repetition • That is an awful lot of repetition. And the more you read the poem, the harder it is to ignore. But why do you think Duffy included so much of it? What's the effect of this repetition? For one thing, it makes Miss Havisham seem a bit loonier than she already seemed, as if she's repeating sounds that she can't quite get out of her addled brain. And for another, it adds to the choppiness of the poem; these sounds, like the enjambments we discussed in "Form and Meter," pop up in unexpected places. It's as if we never know what's coming. At any moment, Miss Havisham could really lose her grip on reality, but for now, we're grateful we can make sense of her ramblings. JNicolson

36. Final thoughts • Perhaps Miss defines the character socially - whereas the poem concentrates on the nature of the character's individual feelings - the character's psychological/sexual nature, rather than her social being. • The lack of ‘miss’ makes her seem less of a woman.  • However, Duffy wants to examine the sexuality of Miss Havisham and explore the sheer amount of pain the character has suffered. This is why Duffy chooses to write the poem in the first person. JNicolson