ABSTRACT
In a secluded spot in the garden of Satis House, during his second visit to Miss Havisham, Pip has a fight with Herbert Pocket. The contest provides an occasion for the portrayal of erotic contact and exchange, both hetero-and homo-sexual.1 Pip’s reward for winning is the opportunity to kiss Estella, the unseen observer, whose evident arousal complicates her image as the proverbial ice-maiden, for ‘there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something had happened to delight her . . . [and] she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me. “Come here” ’ (93).2 The sensory charge of the male-male encounter is also strong. Stripping plays a part, as Herbert undresses for combat, ‘pulling off, not only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too’ (91-2). Yet this formal routine, which is described as ‘light-hearted, businesslike, and bloodthirsty’, is perhaps less of a tease than Pip’s uneasy preoccupation with particulars of his antagonist’s physique: ‘Although he did not look very healthy – having pimples on his face, and a breaking out at his mouth – these dreadful preparations quite appalled me. . . . [He] was a young gentleman in a grey suit (when not denuded for battle), with his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels, considerably in advance of the rest of him as to development.’ This fascination with the repulsive and ungainly, the mixture of disgust and enthralment, recalls David’s curious attachment to Uriah Heep.
