Mrs.Joe Analyzation

"By this time my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him: while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on." p.11

ANALYSIS:
From pip's description of Mrs.Joe, we can tell a few key elements of her charachter. First of all, he says that her beating rampage begins when she's desparate. Remember when she beat up pip when he came home from the marshes in the beginning of the book? She beat him when she was WORRIED about him. Although she comes off as abrasive and cruel, she really just resorts to violence to protect herself from feeling vulnerable. When pip came home on Christmas, she beat him because she was worried he was out getting into trouble, when she beat her husband, it was because he had more power at that moment than she. Mrs.Joe is just a woman who is worried about losing control. In this scene in paticular, Mrs.Joe feels threatened because Pip and Joe are both referring to pip stealing food, which Mrs.Joe knows nothing about, which, making her the uninformed one, makes her  feel vulnerable.