Chance, Fate, and Identity in Great Expectations and Villette

Introduction: Two Victorian Novels and the Chance–Fate Dichotomy

Great Expectations is a coming-of-age novel — a story of Pip and his initial dreams and resulting disappointments that eventually lead him to becoming a genuinely good man. During his journey into adulthood, Pip comes to realize two diverse concepts of what it means to be a gentleman, and he discovers that the real gentlemen in his life are not the people he had assumed. Dickens structures the novel as a life's journey laid out in three chronological episodes of almost precisely equal length. The first takes us through Pip's childhood and early youth to the moment when he leaves to discover where his newly announced "expectations" will bring him. The second shows the working out of these "expectations" to the moment of their shattering by the arrival of Magwitch. The last leads Pip and Magwitch through struggle and catastrophe — death in Magwitch's case, near-death in Pip's. Expectations are demolished, and past and future are at last annealed in a sober, responsible present.

Charlotte Brontë's Villette depicts Lucy Snowe, the novel's narrator, who flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy's struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë's strikingly modern heroine must decide whether any man in her society will allow her to live and still be free.

Both novels tackle the dichotomy between chance and fate, and how the protagonists — namely Pip and Lucy — build their lives around these two themes. In Dickens's novel, this opposition is manifested through most of the characters and is inextricably linked to the idea of success and what it entails for Pip. Brontë's perspective is rather different. Throughout Villette, coincidence drives much of the plot — such as the serendipitous and unforeseen reunion of Lucy, Dr. John, and Mrs. Bretton in Villette at the same moment — but Brontë handles coincidence skillfully, so that the reader has little difficulty believing it.

Pip's Shattered Expectations and Moral Growth

As a character, Pip's two most important traits are his immature romantic idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic impulse as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be any of those things. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones.

As a character in action, however, Pip's idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather narrowly. His tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him most. The theme of chance is inextricably linked to Pip's character: his expectations are illusory precisely because Pip disregards the intervention of destiny.

Character Expectations and Disappointment in Great Expectations

Virtually every character in the story experiences disappointment at one time or another. The first, chronologically, is Miss Havisham, devastated in her joyful expectation as she dresses for her wedding. This blow, and the crushing of Magwitch's hope for freedom, engender everything that follows. Then there is Joe Gargery's expectation of "what larks" with Pip as he grows to manhood; Mrs. Joe's hopes for benefit from Pip's connection with Miss Havisham; Pumblechook's fatuous confidence that his patronage of the now-fortunate Pip will be rewarded; Wopsle's equally unrealistic belief in his future as an actor; Biddy's hopes for a lifelong partnership with Pip; and Herbert Pocket's parents' mutual disappointments.

The catalogue continues: Miss Havisham looking forward to an old age warmed by a grateful adopted daughter; Magwitch's fond notion that Pip can be his "gentleman" and that he can live to see it; Compeyson's plans to betray Magwitch, gain revenge, and collect a reward; Herbert Pocket's naive belief, with his "wonderfully hopeful" air, in the efficacy of simply "looking about me"; Bentley Drummle's baronetcy dream knocked on the head by a horse; Orlick's murderous plans frustrated; and, in a light-hearted and satisfying moment, the reading of Miss Havisham's legacies to her fawning relatives. Dickens constructs an entire social world held together by disappointed hope, making expectation itself the novel's ruling irony.

Lucy Snowe's Estrangement and Narrative Ambiguity in Villette

Villette analyzes affective estrangement and provides a profound artistic investigation of the unconscious conditions, habits, logic, and tendencies of a radical and intolerable predicament of lovelessness. Brontë writes: "My mistress being dead, and I once more alone, I had to look out for a new place. About this time I might be a little — a very little, shaken in nerves. I grant I was not looking well, but on the contrary, thin, haggard, and hollow-eyed; like a sitter-up at night, like an over-wrought servant, or a placeless person in debt" (Brontë 103). This passage announces many of the subsidiary themes of what follows: the sense of life lived in isolation, transit, and subjection without adequate social, spiritual, or material resources; the suffering of a nervous derangement that signals buried grief and divides consciousness from its surroundings; and the use of alter egos to express the obsessive misery of alienation on which the text repeatedly insists.

What is perhaps most striking about the novel's construction is its narrative and scenic organization, which allows Villette to retain an essential relation to the present moment as an indefinite, unsettled, and uncertain interval. This is dramatically apparent with the unnamed Lucy on the novel's first page, encountered in her godmother's house with her family history and circumstances never made explicit. Although questions about Lucy's kinsfolk, their place of "permanent residence," and their ominous difficulties continue to reverberate in the text, the narrator implacably obscures lines of inquiry: "In the autumn of the year — I was staying at Bretton; my godmother having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence. I believe she then plainly saw events coming, whose very shadow I scarce guessed; yet of which the faint suspicion sufficed to impart unsettled sadness, and made me glad to change scene and society" (Brontë 62).

The ending of the novel, which combines the strongest intimations of disaster with the weakest provocations of hope, defines in a similar way the state of suspense in which Lucy oscillates between coexisting and contradictory orientations that she is powerless to escape, synthesize, or simplify. Lucy describes this experience as an intolerable oscillation between what she calls the "stone" of "Fate" and the "idol of Hope" (Brontë 232). Persistently caught between an abeyant past and an uncertain future, she cannot compose herself because events may correspond to her deepest wishes or may utterly confound them. Just as the narrator at the novel's opening shifts attention from her own circumstances onto Paulina and the Brettons, so too do the closing words dwell on the novel's most marginal characters rather than on Lucy herself: "Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy, succeeding life. Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas; Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell." (Brontë 596)

Conclusion: Fate, Hope, and the Victorian Self

Taken together, Great Expectations and Villette reveal how Victorian fiction uses the tension between chance and fate to interrogate the formation of the self. Dickens builds a world in which nearly every character is defined by the gap between what they hope for and what they receive, and Pip's moral growth consists precisely in learning to relinquish false expectations and value what is genuinely present. Brontë, by contrast, refuses resolution: Lucy's selfhood remains radically open, caught between competing orientations that the narrative declines to simplify. In both cases, the protagonists arrive not at triumph but at a sober, provisional maturity — shaped as much by what chance denies them as by what they deliberately choose. The Victorian novel, these texts suggest, finds its deepest truth not in the fulfillment of expectations but in the wisdom that emerges from their ruin.

References

Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. London: Penguin, 1985.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Penguin Classics, 2002.