What Estella Knew: Questions of Secrecy and Knowing in Great Expectations

Abstract

Abstract Great Expectations is filled with secrets. They are sometimes accompanied by the characters' puzzling behavior. For example, near the end of the novel, quite improbably, Estella is presented as if she knew about Pip's predicament: his discovery of the identity of the benefactor. There are other instances of similarly improbable “knowings” in the text. I submit that they may have derived from the novelist's real-life situation; his secret affair with Ellen Ternan and the consequent fear and anxiety (What if they know? They must know). These feelings led Dickens to put various “knowings” in the text, with the result that he was not aware they were too many to sort out. Also, I wish to demonstrate that this anxiety manifests itself most interestingly in “the play within the novel”; the melodramas in which Wopsle performs.