Miss Havisham's Banquet and Its Joycean Afterlife

Food is a leitmotiv in Dickens, and in Great Expectations it appears to be the objective correlative of the moral stance of the characters. This is especially evident in the representation of Miss Havisham’s decaying banquet: in letting food putrefy, Miss Havisham reduces her own body as mere flesh to feast upon, and it is only by nourishing herself on other bodies that she can satiate her appetites. After exploring how Dickens relates the verbal and visual representation of food to the psychological and emotional depiction of his characters, this paper will focus on Miss Havisham and her banquet before concentrating on “the Joycean afterlife” of Dickens in “The Dead”.