The famous poet Richard Lovelace once wrote that "stone walls do not make a prison, nor iron bars a cage." Most people imagine a prison as a physical building or prison; however, it can also be a state of mind. Large numbers of people are imprisoned physically, mentally and emotionally. Charles Dickens conveys this idea through many characters in his famous novel Great Expectations; the most important is Miss Havisham, a bitter old woman whose life has come to a halt after being abandoned by her lover on her wedding day. The novel is about a young, low-class boy named Pip, who becomes a gentleman and through his journey realizes that no matter the course of events in his life, nothing could alter who he truly was inside. On the way to this intuition he meets many confined and imprisoned people; the first and most powerful of which is Miss Havisham. Dickens explores the theme of imprisonment by using Miss Havisham's house as a physical prison, her inability to let go of the past as a mental prison, and her hatred of men as an emotional prison. After Miss Havisham is betrayed on her wedding day, she isolates herself from the outside world in her large and immutable manor, Satis House, with her adopted daughter, Estella. Estella serves as a bridge between Miss Havisham and the outside world. The house, in many ways, is comparable to a real prison. When Pip initially arrives at Satis House, he is greeted by young Estella and notices that the large front entrance had "two chains running across it" (Dickens 51) as if preventing entry and exit from the house. After entering the house through a side door, “the first thing [Pip] noticed was that the passages were all dark” (Dickens 51) and “there was no daylight to be seen… middle of the paper…. ... what she is doing is cruel and continues to selfishly use Estella as a tool to break men's hearts Having been abandoned at the altar on her wedding day, Miss Havisham descends into a life of desolation, despair and never-let-not anger. never his house and not never interact with the outside world again, creating a physical prison. Her inability to let go of the past causes her to constantly be reminded of her pain, creating a mental prison. Ultimately, her pain causes her to develop a hatred of men, which causes her to leads to using Estella to break men's hearts just to please her, creating an emotional prison. Ultimately, Miss Havisham's imprisonment physically, mentally, and emotionally brings her and others around her with much conflict, pain, and suffering. Carlo. Great expectations. Ed. Edgar Rosenberg. New York: Norton, 1999.