Have you ever seen the film Great Expectations?
Its an adaptation of a novel that was transferred into a major block buster
film, that in an odd way reminds me so much of the short story A Rose for
Emily. While I was watching the film, I remember having an extremely similar
feeling as to when I began reading the novel A Rose for Emily for the class assignment.
Just like in A Rose for Emily, there is a
character in the novel named Mrs. Havisham. This character has become so
deranged by the failures of her husband lack of arrival at their wedding that she has tried to preserve her
wedding in hopes that her husband would come back.
In A Rose for Emily, Emily becomes so obsessed
with her husband and the idea of him leaving her that she kills him and keeps
his body preserved laying next to her in their bed. We know that she has known
of her husbands murder because there is a perfectly indented pillow and a
strand of Emily’s gray hair.
In the film, Great Expectation not only does
Mrs. Havisham’s obsessions take over her thoughts, but she has never taken off
her wedding dress, has left the cake the same way it was left in the corner,
the wedding decorations hanging from all sides of the home have never been
taken them down.
The town speaks about her, and has hopes of
entering the home to see how she is and see the home since most people believe
she is deranged and is kept insane, just as the woman in A Rose for Emily.
I found this was extremely interesting because
both society’s seem to have similar views on these “crazy” woman. Both of these
woman’s homes are “stuck in time” and are derived from their insane obsession with
love for the man they believed wronged them.
http://vodly.to/watch-2738753-Great-Expectations
It’s interesting that both the stories only portrayed the women as being absolutely insane. What I want to know is what drove them to go so crazy. In the story “A Rose for Emily,” it was never explained what happened between the couple that made Emily believe that her ‘fiancée’ was going to leave her, and then decided to kill him. I personally have never read or seen “Great Expectations,” so I am really interested to know what drove Mrs. Havisham to her supposed insanity. You mentioned that her husband had a lot of failures and that he left; but was it his failures or his actual departure that drove her crazy.
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