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A Mouldering Feast: The Dangers of Victimhood as Identity

August 14th, 2024 | 8 min read

By Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

Of his many famous characters, Miss Havisham is among Charles Dickens’ most vivid. The chief antagonist of his 1861 Great Expectations, she’s compellingly repulsive. We also find her vaguely familiar: like the rest of us, she’s a victim. What’s unsettling about Miss Havisham is that she’s made victimhood her identity.

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Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

Rebecca Brewster Stevenson is a writer, speaker, and theology teacher at Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill in NC. She holds a Masters in Liberal Studies, focused on philosophy and literature, from Duke University; and an MLitt in analytic and exegetical theology from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of the novel Healing Maddie Brees, non-fiction Wait: Thoughts and Practice in Waiting on God, and a co-author of a study of Galatians. When not teaching or writing essays on theology, she’s at work on a novel set in Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt and based on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. She’s also broadening her MLitt dissertation, “Joy in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death,” into a book on human identity and joy. She lives with her husband and near her grown children and four grandchildren in Durham, NC.