Love and rejection — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Love and rejection
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores love, desire and rejection, from Pip's love for Estella to Miss Havisham's broken heart across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it', 'the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing', 'If I could only get myself to fall in love with you', 'If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces', 'So proud, so proud!', 'Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil', 'a warning to back and point my lessons', 'And will continue friends apart'.
Context: the two endings, one in which Pip and Estella meet briefly and part for good, and one that leaves open whether they stay together.
Love as obsession and as revenge, against the steady love of Joe, Biddy and Herbert.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
