Often cited as Dickens’s first convincing female
character, Estella is a supremely ironic creation, one who darkly undermines
the notion of romantic love and serves as a bitter criticism against the class
system in which she is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to
torment men and “break their hearts,” Estella wins Pip’s deepest love by
practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the warm, winsome, kind heroine of a
traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she
represents Pip’s first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes,
Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip; as Pip learns near the end of the
novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the coarse convict, and thus springs
from the very lowest level of society.
Ironically, life among the upper classes does not
represent salvation for Estella. Instead, she is victimized twice by her
adopted class. Rather than being raised by Magwitch, a man of great inner
nobility, she is raised by Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express
emotion and interact normally with the world. And rather than marrying the
kindhearted commoner Pip, Estella marries the cruel nobleman Drummle, who
treats her harshly and makes her life miserable for many years. In this way,
Dickens uses Estella’s life to reinforce the idea that one’s happiness and
well-being are not deeply connected to one’s social position: had Estella been
poor, she might have been substantially better off.
Despite her cold behavior and the damaging influences in
her life, Dickens nevertheless ensures that Estella is still a sympathetic
character. By giving the reader a sense of her inner struggle to discover and
act on her own feelings rather than on the imposed motives of her upbringing,
Dickens gives the reader a glimpse of Estella’s inner life, which helps to
explain what Pip might love about her. Estella does not seem able to stop
herself from hurting Pip, but she also seems not to want to hurt him; she
repeatedly warns him that she has “no heart” and seems to urge him as strongly
as she can to find happiness by leaving her behind. Finally, Estella’s long,
painful marriage to Drummle causes her to develop along the same lines as
Pip—that is, she learns, through experience, to rely on and trust her inner feelings.
In the final scene of the novel, she has become her own woman for the first
time in the book. As she says to Pip, “Suffering has been stronger than all
other teaching. . . . I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better
shape.”
The mad, vengeful Miss Havisham, a wealthy dowager who
lives in a rotting mansion and wears an old wedding dress every day of her
life, is not exactly a believable character, but she is certainly one of the
most memorable creations in the book. Miss Havisham’s life is defined by a
single tragic event: her jilting by Compeyson on what was to have been their
wedding day. From that moment forth, Miss Havisham is determined never to move
beyond her heartbreak. She stops all the clocks in Satis House at twenty
minutes to nine, the moment when she first learned that Compeyson was gone, and
she wears only one shoe, because when she learned of his betrayal, she had not
yet put on the other shoe. With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss
Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to achieve her own revenge
on men. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded vengeance pursued
destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer greatly
because of her quest for revenge. Miss Havisham is completely unable to see
that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella. She is redeemed at the end of
the novel when she realizes that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the
same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she
has only caused more pain. Miss Havisham immediately begs Pip for forgiveness,
reinforcing the novel’s theme that bad behavior can be redeemed by contrition
and sympathy.
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