A Madwoman’s Repressed Story: Ronald Frame’s Prequel “Havisham”

Despite Miss Havisham’s pivotal role in Great Expectations, Dickens left mainly unspoken the subplot related to her past. Her story is told by three male characters who paint a portrait of an uncanny female figure. Ronald Frame’s prequel, Havisham (2013), gives voice to Miss Havisham and restores her place in the story as an agent, showing how she has come to be ‘buried alive’. This essay examines the act of rewriting in psychoanalytic terms, as an act of excavation in the unconscious of the hypotext. According to this analysis, the rewrite aims to reconstruct the phase before patriarchal repression, when the heimlich had not yet become unheimlich. Adopting the feminist psychoanalytic approach and starting from the topos of the matricide collocated at the beginning of the rewriting, this contribution analyses Miss Havisham’s relationship with her female genealogy to illustrate how the hypotext doomed her to alienation and silencing, characterizing her as just another madwoman of the Victorian production.