The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 11. This is the eerie scene as described by Pip on entering the banquet room of Miss Havisham’s house. On a table he observes an uneaten and decaying wedding cake, which she has kept as a symbol of her heartbreak and moment she was abandoned at the altar many years before. It has been left in place to rot after her planned wedding that never took place. A simile compares it to a black fungus. Cobwebs and spiders crawling in and out of it complete the bizarre scene. Amid the decay of Satis House the cake is a powerful metaphor and reminder of Miss Havisham’s failed wedding and refusal to move past her trauma.