Blog TakeOver - Who, Me? I Live Here Don't I??

I'm a character out of Antonia's book, but I'm sure I existed and lived here before her anyway.

My name is Joe. I'm blonde, with a hint of strawberry - shaggy hair, blue eyes, icy if you must know, and a mouth that doesn't turn down too much at the corners despite being thin.

I laugh a lot, am a wiry, lanky twenty-nine year old with a passion for Lowry paintings. Antonia reckons I like to think I'm Lowry, but I don't, I just like to think I can paint like him.

See, I never was good for much at school; I could draw, but only stick-like fashion, and sketches that created childish scenes. Then I discovered Lowry and saw that he'd made stick-drawing fashionable. So I practised didn't I? I practised all the time, until I made those stick figures a bit livelier, yes, with personalities of their own, even though their features became muted and bland and sometimes even featureless, yet retaining a semblance of a self.

I learnt how to draw a group of people so that it looked like they were one, and busy, and industrial or poignant in some way.

So, I aint the ghost of Lowry, see. I could paint you, Antonia, and fashion you into stick and merge you with a crowd like a giant colourful mural; you could be on a street somewhere in the north, tiny red hat perched on your head, brown woollen coat clutched about you, lacy red brolly perched on the end of a slim, bony wrist.

What? You are doing that right now?

See, I told you I lived here. It was me that made YOU!

Blog Takeover Day x Two

Remember the last Blog Takeover Day? Miss Havisham paid a visit.

BLOG TAKEOVER X ONE LINK HERE

See older posts for more.

Well it starts again on 1st January 2010. You can choose whoever you like to take over your Blog for the day, could be a character of yours, a famous character, or just anyone real or fictional.

If you can't start on the 1st, don't worry, start whenever you like.


For more info see Quiller's Place.

LINK HERE TO QUILLER'S PLACE

Miss Havisham - My Final Words - AND DID YOU KNOW?

My final words were to Pip, after he saved me from the fire:

"Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her!'"

But still I died, weeks later, and Estella became my chief beneficiary.

AND DID YOU KNOW? The condition "The Miss Havisham effect" has been coined by scientists to describe a person who suffers a painful longing for lost love, which can become a physically addictive pleasure by activation of reward and pleasure centers in the brain, which have been identified to regulate addictive behavior - regions commonly known to be responsible for craving and drug, alcohol and gambling addiction.

*The above is referenced on Wikipedia*

Adieu....

Miss Havisham - Film Adaptations of Great Expectations - Who Played Me?

+ Martita Hunt (1946)

+ Margaret Leighton (1974)

+ Joan Hickson (1981)

+ Jean Simmons (who had previously played Estella in 1946 opposite Hunt) (1989)

+ Anne Bancroft (1998)

+ Charlotte Rampling (1999)

If I could have, I would have played myself...just because I enjoyed the misery and mayhem that I caused, because of what had been done to me...though secretly, I wished for a happy ending...


'Believe this: when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more. But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.'


AND THEN: TO PIP:

"Until you spoke to Estella the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!"

Miss Havisham - What They say about Me!

I've been called some things in my time, and though I wasn't around when the general public spoke so much about me, here is some of what I now know people thought about me. You find out so much after you've left this world you know...

I've been called strange, grotesque, the wicked witch in the fairytale, passionate, proud, beautiful, headstrong, vengeful, a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton.

And do you know? They're all true.

They say I trained and used Estella to avenge society. No, I did not teach Estella to love, and there was, deep within her, something that responded to emotional fury. But was it society I wanted to strike at? No, it was myself.

I had power in the form of wealth. A spinster living in a run-down mansion with my adopted daughter, Estella. Did I use wealth to manipulate others to do as I wished? Why yes, I did. I used as I had been used.

Did being jilted at the altar ruin my life? Why, yes, it did.

Miss Havisham - a bit about what THEY said

Herbert Pocket speaking to Pip:

'The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter —'

`Which she received,' I struck in, `when she was dressing for her marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?'

`At the hour and minute,' said Herbert, nodding, `at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that it most heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can't tell you, because I don't know. When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the whole place to waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day.'

`Is that all the story?' I asked, after considering it.

`All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it out for myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it was absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten one thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced confidence, acted throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits.'

`I wonder he didn't marry her and get all the property,' said I.

`He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may have been a part of her half-brother's scheme,' said Herbert. `Mind! I don't know that.'

`What became of the two men ? ' I asked, after again considering the subject.

`They fell into deeper shame and degradation — if there can be deeper — and ruin.'

`Are they alive now?'

`I don't know.'

Miss Havisham - What I said to Pip

`What do you think that is?' I asked Pip, again pointing with my stick; `that, where those cobwebs are?'

`I can't guess what it is, ma'am.'

`It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!'