The Neurosis of passion Breaking Patterns of Sterility and Breaking Patterns of Abuse. Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations, attempts to delve into the Victorian gender construction. Incorporated within this persona is the struggle to break away from the cycles of generations of abuse and patterns of sterility. Through the eyes of his young protagonist, Dickens arranges an immediate gender conflict through absent mothers and deficient mother substitutes as the pivotal female characters in the beginning …showed first 75 words of 1947 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1947 total…women call to mind the realization that freedom comes at a very high cost to Dickens. Females seem to slide into three categories, cold and mobile, lukewarm and able to achieve a loyal marriage, or passionate and insane. Bibliography Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1996 Small, Helen. Love’s Madness Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity 1800-1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 Lubitz, Rita. Marital Power in Dickens’ Fiction. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1996