Scorned Women and Their Protégées: Aunt Betsey, Miss Wade, and Miss Havisham

Abstract: In the characters of Betsy Trotwood, Miss Havisham, and Miss Wade, Dickens created a pattern of a scorned woman who adopts a protégée whom she teaches to hate men. This pattern has four main components. Firstly, the elder woman has had a negative experience with a man that mingles romance and economics. Secondly, the mentor selects a protégée whom she teaches to reject men, and, by extension, the nuclear family. The protégée is somehow disadvantaged in socio-economic terms. Next, the mentor is associated with rage and violence. Finally, both the mentor and mentee either come back into the fold of the patriarchy or are severely punished. Dickens's creation of this pattern is an endorsement of the traditional view that women should be wives and mothers and a rejection of the advent of what, later in the nineteenth century, would be recognized as the "New Woman."