A Disquieting Recurrence Of The Familiar

The Satis House As Site Of The Uncanny

What makes a house haunted? Can even the living haunt a house? In this newsletter I’ll be approaching one of the most famous houses in English literature, Satis House, through a concept I explored in my last newsletter: the Uncanny.

“Miss Havisham with Estella and Pip,” by H. M. Brock

First developed by Sigmund Freud in his essay “Das Unheimlich” (the literal translation is “un-at-homeness”), the concept of the “Uncanny” was later explored by Jacque Lacan, who said that the Uncanny is a place “where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure.”

In Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, the Satis House—which over a number of decades became an extension of Miss Havisham herself—is a perfect representation of Lacan’s interpretation of the Uncanny. It is a place in which family is denied, and yet orphans are adopted; where the poor are secretly trained in the manners of the upper class; where Pip falls in love with his humiliator; where love itself is equated with pain; a place which depends on the influx of money from nearby, lower class residents while also denying those residents entry; where Miss Havisham wastes her life in elegy to her wasted life; and where no other time exists except the moment in which Miss Havisham was rejected, which ironically emphasizes just how much time has passed.

Considering the Satis House in this way allows us to recognize that although the action of the novel ranges from the marshlands of the Thames to the prison cells of London, this is the site in which the action originates and ends, the scene to which those who enter it feel they must return, the place where the characters find the character that will determine the course of their lives. It is not so much that the Satis House is haunted—it is the house that haunts the novel’s characters.

In accord with Lacan's interpretation of the Uncanny quoted above, the true dread and horror of Satis House is that all its residents and visitors are conditioned to treat its eerie, dilapidated spaces as somehow normal. In fact all the privileged spaces Pip enters into, from Satis house to Barnard's Inn, as well as the character of the upper class characters in the book from Miss Havisham to Drummle, reveal that the decadence of the British elite was already advanced in the early to mid-1800’s.

But because these spaces and their owners are privileged, they are exclusive, and their exclusivity ensures the aura of the elite remains intact for the remainder of the population. If the aura of the elite were less powerful, Mrs. Joe and Mr. Pumblechook would not have believed everyone at Satis house eats off gold plates as the dogs are served veal, just as Pip would not have felt pressured to lie to them about the reality of the dismal and dim mansion house he is being sent to. It is the sovereign position of Miss Havisham that reinforces the aura of Satis House, which despite its decay is an essentially inexhaustible structure in the imagination of those who are subject to its existence and influence, which in many ways includes all the characters in the book.