In his novels, Charles Dickens depicted a society of the 19th century faithfully and vividly. At the same time, he disclosed the tragic lives of the poor, exposed and criticized the cruelty, injustice and hypocrisy of the upper class. In many his novels, he showed his profound sympathy for the oppressed, and “Recent criticism has come to value not only documentary and journalistic side of his works, but the very qualities of excess—large-than-life characters, verbal extravagance, sprawling melodramatic plots—that earlier critics had considered as signs of artistic weakness. His novels provide an abundant testing ground for new theories and methodologies.” ,源^自!吹冰/文-论/文*网[www.chuibin.com

With social science and theory of Literature and Art developing rapidly, “his novels attract the attentions of scholars coming from a wide variety of critical approaches: new historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic, as well as from the more traditional historical and formalist perspectives.” 

Although Charles Dickens is expert in portraying different characters in his novels and showing his complicated feeling through the stereotypes of images, the depicts of women characters in his novels still represents the prejudice of the society as well as the author against women. In his novels, he actually depicts many impressive and different women characters, however, as a whole, women are only taken to the inferior place, and many anti-traditional women characters in his novels show his cognitive limitations in the Victorian age as well as the great impact of his living experience on him.

1.2 Literary Review of Great Expectations

Great Expectations is Dickens’s later and mature work. It was classified as a book about the Victorian Age for a long time, and Dickens attracts many critics and reviewers as the spokesperson for the Age.

In Great Expectations, the distinctive character Miss Havisham catches many critics’ and researchers’ attention. The researches on Charles Dickens’ novels at home and abroad are plentiful and various. Researchers and critics study his works from many different perspectives and exploit perse theories. As a Dickens’s later and mature novel, Great Expectations also attracts many reviewers’ and critics’ attentions. In a word, the researches on Great Expectations mainly fall on the following four aspects:

1.2.1. The Researches on Artistic Techniques in Great Expectations

The various artistic techniques are exploited in Great Expectations, such as symbolic art, Dickens narrative technique, imagery, the art of suspense, narrative mode, etc. The articles of this aspect are plentiful. For example, Sun Shuling’s Sentimentality in Great Expectations (2001, 3), Huang Xiaohong’s The Art of Suspense in Great Expectations (2005, 3), Zhao Yanqiu’s The Narrative Mode of Dickens’s Novels and His Achievements (1995, 4), Fu Yunxia’s The Poetic Effect of Dickens’s Symbols (2000, 6).