Mrs. Joe is herself certainly non the worst of the offenders in regard to materialist desire. She is not nearly as generous with what she does have as Joe is. She is place upon by what she does have to give Pip, and she is cold-hearted in her de spelld that the boy be grateful eternally for the little he receives from her: "'Now,' state Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the string section: 'if this boy an't grateful this night, he never will be!" (p. 81.)
Mrs. Joe, nevertheless, in comparison to Joe, is far more greedy and is a harder person as a result of that greed. For example, when the "strange man" gives Pip some money, Joe mentions it to Pip's sister. Mrs. Joe, overhearing, responds triumphantly:
'A dismal un, I'll be bound, or he wouldn't have given it to the boy! Let's look at it.' It took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. 'But what's this?' say Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the paper. 'Two One-Pound notes?' (p. 107)
Mrs. Joe spends a stage set of energy being mean that she might further as well spend being greedy, but when the opportunity comes to plant that greediness, it is clear that she is indeed highly possessive and desirous of having of having much more that she does have in her lot as a wife to a working man.
Both Miss Havisham and Miss Estella ar as bad as, if not worse than, Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe. The former two live the thick life that the latter two would love to live, and their characters are just as seriously fl confusiond by their possessions as are the characters of Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook by desiring those possessions. All four characters have materialistic visions of themselves and other(a) human beings. They measure a person's worth by what he or she has, and they fail to see the human qualities in mass which underlie their possessions or their lack of possessions.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Penguin, 1987.
The materialism of both Pumblechook and Mrs.
Joe is demonstrated in their questioning of Pip some the things Pip saw in the rich Miss Havisham's house. This line of achievement also demonstrates the obsequious nature of Miss Estella and the latter's willingness to turn herself into a kind of servant for Miss Havisham in order to delight in the woman's wealth. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe are put in a state of money-worshipping awe when they hear from Pip that Miss Havisham sits on a " shady velvet couch" and that her four great dogs "fought for veal cutlets out of a silver basket." They also hear that Miss Estella " turn over . . . her cake and wine at the coach-window, on a specie plate" (p. 97). It does not matter that Pip is exaggerating and inventing what he supposedly saw at Miss Havisham's; the point is that the episode intelligibly demonstrates that Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe are materialists, when push comes to shove, and their characters are seriously distorted by that materialism.
intimately related to the riches awaiting Pip, and he claims a recite of times to be responsible for bringing those great expectations to reality. Pumblechook is a man who believes that he knows the world and its material ways, and this is expressed in the arithmetical demands he makes on Pip. He believes that Pip in some way belongs to him, almost as a possession
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