Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham is one of Victorian fiction’s most arresting studies of psychic arrest. This paper argues that her compulsive freezing of time stopped clocks, moldering wedding-cake, perpetual bridal dress literalizes the psychoanalytic mechanism of repression: the ego’s attempt to excise an intolerable memory by halting the forward movement of narrative itself. Drawing on trauma theory (Freud, van der Kolk), nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse (Conolly, Winslow), and close textual analysis, I show how repression simultaneously protects and imprisons Havisham, producing the “stunted psyche” that ultimately metastasizes into vengeful manipulation of Estella and Pip. Dickens, I contend, anticipates modern trauma science by dramatizing how unprocessed loss is converted into compulsive repetition and inter-generational transmission of harm.
Sarah Mehboob (Fri,) studied this question.