Great Expectations : 作品のテーマと 'self-help' のコンテクスト

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Samuel Smiles's best-selling Self-Help (1859) had an incalculable effect on Victorian's value system and moral orientation. Self-Help gave people of working class and middle class the advice that they should live by indefatigable industry and perseverance. Charles Dickens (1812_70) put the principle of self-help into practice in his life. David Copperfield (1850), his autobiographical novel, shows Dickens's practice of self-help. The life of Dickens who succeeded as a writer although John, his father, had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison and he had to work at Warren's Blacking warehouse, is full of the spirit of self-help. Jerome Meckier thinks that Dickens equates the impulse toward selfimprovement with base cravings for social and material advance. In "Great Expectations and Self-Help : Dickens frowns on Smiles", Meckier tries to show that Dickens frowns on Smiles from the viewpoint of self-help which is often related to success in society in Great Expectations. However, Dickens does not frown on Smiles and does not consider Joe who prefers self-sacrifice to self-help as a parody of the Smilesian hero, because Self-Help can be considered from the aspects other than success in society. It should be considered from the viewpoint of morality and ethics, although it is connected to success in society. This paper shows how the theme of Great Expectations has connection with the context of `self-help', and that Dickens effectively represented Smiles's opinion in "Character-The True Gentleman" (Chapter 13 of Self-Help), in Pip's joining gentleman class and fall from it. Meckier is wrong in thinking that Joe who prefers self-sacrifice to self-help as a parody of the Smilesian hero when we consider Joe from the viewpoint of ethics of both works. Meckier observes that Joe does not rise in the world in Smilesian way, but a rise in the world is an impossibility for him because he could not get the opportunity of education. Moreover, it does not matter whether Joe can rise in society or not, if he symbolizes an ethical standard to which Pip must get back to live an honest life. Joe who nurses Pip as a patient and pays Pip's debt although Pip fell from gentleman class, is a character who shows that a poor man may be a true gentleman in spirit and in daily life; Pip expresses Joe as "a gentle Christian man". Dickens agrees with Smiles's opinion and clearly explains that the crown and glory of life is character and that it exercises a greater power than wealth, by showing the great influence of Joe who is an uneducated and mere blacksmith on Pip.
桃山学院大学の論文
2008-03-03

Great Expectations : 作品のテーマと 'self-help' のコンテクスト

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