The women in the novel Great Expectations do not have the ample opportunities they would have liked to live out their lifelong hopes and dreams. Instead, they suffer some kind of devastating impact that has been caused to them by a situation that they themselves cannot help. This is evident in the life of Mrs. Joe, a simple teenager forced to raise her brother at a time when it is difficult to support herself, and Miss Havisham, an elderly woman whose dreams were torn away when she was left at the altar . . Dickens's female characters do not fit the ideals of Victorian society as wives and mothers, making them destructive to themselves and/or men. Joe, a character in the novel Great Expectations, is a great example of how a woman should not have behaved during the Victorian period. Mrs. Joe does not look like a Victorian woman was supposed to portray. Indeed, “Far from being described as curvy, or maternal, she is tall and bony” (Ayes 1). Throughout the novel, Mrs. Joe is described as taking on masculine power in her relationship with her husband, Joe, and how he has interpreted the feminine role. Instead of being called by her given name, which is never revealed, she is called Mrs. Joe to show readers that her masculinity is present by taking the name Joe for herself. Not only does she release a sense of masculinity in this way, but she is also the one who disciplines Pip in the novel. Pip acknowledges her authority by explaining that she has "...a hard and heavy hand and being in the habit of imposing it on her husband as well as on me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both raised by hand" (Dickens 5). .....middle of paper......land, but they lived on the property with her husband. A woman in this time period would not have used her child to get revenge on the opposite sex, fulfilling her own dreams instead of letting her child have his own high expectations for life. These two women in Great Expectations simply show how they were not portrayed as the typical housewife and mother one would expect for this time period. Works Cited Ayres, Brenda. Dissenting women in Dickens's novels: the subversion of domestic ideology. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. 86-88. Print.Dickens, Charles. Great expectations. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001. PrintHouston, Gail Turley. “‘Pip’ and ‘Property’: the (re)production of the self in GreatExpectations.” Studies in the Novel 24.1 (1992): 13. Premier Academic Research. EBSCO.Web. March 16. 2010.