Miss Havisham’s Rage: Imagining the ‘Angry Woman’ in Adaptations of Dickens’ Famous Character

Abstract

Miss Havisham is a spectral spinster figure that haunts the western imagination, an emblem of an ostensibly ‘unjustified’ and ‘unjustifiable’ female rage, a repository for masculine fears and fantasies about women, age, sexuality, and power. This article examines the shifting visions of Miss Havisham as an object of horror in film, fashion, kitsch, on the internet, and, more recently, as a revisionary figure of female resistance in Tony Jordan’s television series, Dickensian. In so doing, it maps the tensions that exist between conventional representations of Miss Havisham that envisage her as an irrational, embittered, and narcissistic old woman and those that construct her as a representation of justified female rage against the intersecting forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and ‘toxic masculinity’.