The Miss Havisham Effect 105g5d

The Miss Havisham Effect: Exploring the Addiction Behind Heartbreak She must have it. That need within her, the aching desire burning within that leaves her breathless and pacing at night, overrides the notion of logic or self preservation. She needs her fix, that thing that she feels will bring her back to life when nothing else will. The same very thing that will send her soaring into the heavens for that sweet brief period of ecstasy will then catapult her to the ground, shattering her into a million pieces. But she craves the fall, the bittersweet despair of falling from heaven. Such is the mind of an addict, craving what will inevitable destroy her, on the brief promise of pleasure. Although the most common addiction is associated with drugs, there are alternate forms which may be just as harmful. A new theory has proposed that addiction can even be fueled by the dopamine response in the action of pining for lost love. This theory has unofficially been coined by some as the “Miss Havisham Theory”. In Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, Miss Havisham struggles with the absence of control associated with loss and grief. This struggle eventually exhibits itself in a dopamine based addiction founded in her inability to manage her grief and fueled by her continued dwelling. When Miss Havisham is jilted on her wedding day, she not only experiences the loss of a man she fell in love with, but the loss of a familiar reality in which she had a sense of control. She experiences grief not only from her loss, but from her “...failure to make her private dream a public reality and to create an identity outside her private sphere”(Raphael 402). The reality that she has chosen for herself has disappeared with her runway fiance and the control that she believed she had over her life has disappeared as well. Essentially, it is not just the loss of her future fiance, but the loss of her sense of reality, and control, that causes her pain. Donna S. Davenport continues this idea by adding, “...the healthy, normal grieving process...is not just pain cause by the loss of attachments. It is also the reactive suffering to having our illusions of control assaulted and the pain we cause ourselves by trying to protect those illusions”(332). In a matter of minutes, Miss Havisham had her sense of reality stolen from her, along with several other things, from a man whom she believed she was destined to spend the rest of her life with. In these minutes she is forced to realize that any sense of control she believed to have had, was nothing more than an illusion. Her loss of control is perhaps the greatest obstacle she has in overcoming her grief. This can be noticed through her relationship with Estella. For Miss Havisham, the determining factor, that led her to what she believed was her ultimate downfall, was her heart. Had she never loved, nor had feelings she would avoided the horrid ordeal altogether. Thus she raises Estella to essentially be “heartless” as not only a revenge to the male sex, but as a way of protecting her from the same fate. In a cold conversation between Estella and Miss Havisham, Estella remarks:

...if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it for it had blighted you and would else blight her; if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed

and angry? (306).

By using daylight as a metaphor for love, Estella explains how her upbringing by Miss Havisham taught her that love and emotions were enemies. Thus as an adult, she has none because she was never taught to embrace them as a child. The upbringing of Estella is a perfect example of Miss Havishams struggle for control. Finding that she has lost control in her own life as a result of falling in love with the wrong man, she essentially tries to regain this control through Estella, in teaching her to not make the mistake she herself made. However this eventually backfires as Miss Havisham realizes that her daughter can love nothing, not even her own mother. The loss of control Miss Havisham deals with is a classic sign of grief that she struggles with throughout the novel. However instead of eventually accepting that one cannot control certain events within a lifetime and overcoming this, she continuously pines her lost love. This pining eventually results in her being stuck in place, trapped by her own grief. When Pip meets Miss Havisham for the first time, he gives the following description:

saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. (58).

Pips description of Miss Havisham describes the age of time between her heartbreak and the present. Time has caused everything to age and fade; the dress, the flowers, the heartbroken bride. This suggests that much time has ed already and she has not moved on. As the novel continues, Pip visits her continuously with the same result. He remarks on another visit, “There was a clock in the outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham's room, and like Miss Havisham's watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine”(80). Like Miss Havisham's clocks, she too is stopped at twenty minutes to nine, stuck in place by a sense of grief that she cannot overcome. In that same visit, Pip also describes another room within the house, “It was spacious...The most prominent object as a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks stopped altogether. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite indistinguishable...”(84). The mass in the center of the table is eventually identified as Miss Havisham's bridal cake, and serves as another representation for the age of time. All of these things; the faded wedding dress, the decaying flowers, the frozen clocks, the aged bridal cake frosted in cobwebs; not only represent the age of time, but the inability Miss Havisham has to move forward. Although initially caused by the loss of control and an overwhelming grief, Miss Havisham is holding herself in place by her constant dwelling.

The constant dwelling, or pining, exhibited by Miss Havisham is result of an addiction to the action of pining itself. The addiction of pining derives from the chemicals within the brain that deal with rewardresponse and grief, most commonly dopamine. The brain undergoes a reward-response to maintain social relationships with the people in our life. When these people leave, whether it be death or other circumstances, the brain is then deprived of the dopamine activated reward-response associated with that person. When one experiences some form of heartbreak or loss, grief is the natural response to overcome the absence of that person and the changed dopamine levels. However grief is complicated, and although there is a general idea of what grief entails, it varies for the individual. In the case of Miss Havisham, grief exhibits itself through controlling Estella and burying herself in pieces of a broken past. The problem arises when one does not fully accept their grief, and thus develops what Mary-s O'Connor calls “complicated grief”(Pining). This happens when one does not fully go through the grieving process and instead fixates on the person they lost, or pines over them. Miss Havisham suffers from “complicated grief” as she was never able to overcome it. By thinking of the person she lost, the brain releases some dopamine that triggers the reward-response. The reward is not as good as when the person was present, but to Miss Havisham any reward is better than pain. Mary-s O'Connor has found, “Those who adapt to their loss stop getting this [dopamine] reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it because each time they see a cue, they still get that neural reward”(Pining). Essentially by surrounding herself in “cues” related to her jilted wedding day, Miss Havisham is relishing in the constant dopamine response associated with the remembrance. She has become addicted to her grief, and cannot move on, because the need of the dopamine response outweighs everything else. By the exploration of Miss Havisham's character, and a new theory, it is evident how the “Miss Havisham effect” earned its name. Although dramatized in the novel, Great Expectations, it mirrors an issue that was and is seen in society today, as well as provides the basis for a deeper exploration of why this occurs. With Miss Havishams addiction, as in all addictions, there is usually a weakness that causes the addicted person to be hindered in esaping. For Miss Havisham, her inability to accept a loss of control and deal with her grief was the weakness that propelled her into addiction. Every addict has their drug of choice, that one vice that burns them so beautifully. For Miss Havisham, it was the needle prick of a lost love and the pulsing of dopamine through her veins to her broken hear.