Miss Havisham’s Stunted Psyche and the Role of Repression in Trauma Response A Psycho-Literary Study of Great Expectations

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham is one of Victorian fiction’s most arresting studies of psychic arrest. This paper argues that her compulsive freezing of time stopped clocks, moldering wedding-cake, perpetual bridal dress literalizes the psychoanalytic mechanism of repression: the ego’s attempt to excise an intolerable memory by halting the forward movement of narrative itself. Drawing on trauma theory (Freud, van der Kolk), nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse (Conolly, Winslow), and close textual analysis, I show how repression simultaneously protects and imprisons Havisham, producing the “stunted psyche” that ultimately metastasizes into vengeful manipulation of Estella and Pip. Dickens, I contend, anticipates modern trauma science by dramatizing how unprocessed loss is converted into compulsive repetition and inter-generational transmission of harm.