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.”
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