Great Expectations

ENGLISH-AREA OF STUDY
Belonging doesn’t just mean a sense of place: its being at home with yourself and knowing who you are. Belonging is not just a sense of place, it is derived from acceptance and contentment with oneself and the relationships developed with others. It is this way that to belong is to be at home with oneself and possess an understanding of who you are. The texts Great Expectations By Charles Dickens, Neighbours By Tim Winton and the poem ‘Alone’ By Edgar Allen Poe show that through acceptance of oneself and their relations with others that one can develop a sense of belonging to a group or form an independent notion of belonging not based on connecting with others. Material wealth nor social status are vessels to personal contentment and as such are not elements of belonging. Personal integrity and firm relationships with those that one is most identifiable with is what belonging is inherited from. In Great Expectations, The persona Pip tries to become a gentleman of society and in doing so he forgoes all personal integrity and previous relationships to fit into a class that will never truly accept him due to his lack of social status and parentage, explicit factors needed to belong to such a society as the upper class. The unattainable Estella is an ironic symbol of the class that Pip can never belong to as she judges him as “coarse and common” a trait that most of the superficial upper-class deem Pip to be not more than. She however is descendant from criminal heritage highlighting how even the upperclass are not without fundamental flaws. Nevertheless Pip endeavors to assimilate himself into the upper class and forgoes all of his personal integrity to take on the explicit and superficial values of the upper class as he feels “unsatisfied with himself”. The concept of belonging independently outside of class as one is able to accept themselves to be different is a concept explored extensively in the poem ‘Alone’. There persona is so out of...