She has also become the victim of her own madness. Estella tells her and Pip that she is incapable of loving anyone because that has been her training. Miss Havisham never intended for that weapon of revenge to wound her, as well as the young men that Estella rejects.
Yet, Estella is being as kind as she is capable of through her openness and honesty. She is dutiful, grateful, generous, and obedient to Miss Havisham but she cannot love her. Miss Havisham is now afraid of her own creation.
With Pip, Estella shows her own sense of caring and fairness, a kind of loyalty. She does not use him the way she uses all other men and she continually reinforces her warnings to him.
Pip's constant unhappiness in her presence remains unchanged yet he cannot pull away. He is also sickened watching Miss Havisham's desperate clinging to Estella. In a moment of insight, he sees his obsession as a dark, sick thing and feels dependent, degraded, controlled, but is unable to pull out of it. He resents Drummle's seeing Estella and the spider metaphor returns in descriptions of Drummle's movements around Estella. The Finches arrange a bloodless way to resolve the fight with Drummle producing a certificate from the lady proving his acquaintance and Pip apologizing when he does.
In the Eastern story. The sixth tale in this book has the wise vizier for the sultan foiling the sultan's enemies with an elaborate trap like the one mentioned here. A stone crushes the enemies as they sleep. The point is that the enemies thought they were at the peak of their power having trapped the sultan, and suddenly their luck ran out. The same is about to happen to Pip. However, the direness of the convict's situation was most likely nowhere near as bad as Dickens makes it out to be in the book.
The last time someone hanged for returning to England after being banished was in From , out of eight returned convicted transports, none was executed. She becomes an accomplished flirt, heartlessly leading men on. She sees herself as an object; she has to write Miss Havisham "and report how I go on—I and the jewels" page It has been suggested that Estella hates herself.
And worst of all, Estella has been robbed of the ability to love. How serious an offense is it that Miss Havisham blights Estella's ability to love? Dostoevsky said that hell is the loss of the ability to love. Is her treatment of Pip and Estella criminal?
Dorothy Van Ghent believes "Miss Havisham is guilty of aggression against life in using the two children, Pip and Estella, as inanimate instruments of revenge for her broken heart, and she has been changed retributively into a fungus. Van Ghent assigns another significance to this reciprocal change; she suggests it reveals the characteristic lack of complex inner life of Dickens's characters; for example, a great deal of Miss Havisham's inner life is transposed to the spiders and beetles on her hearth.
There are less romantic possibilities. Pip, who is habitually mistreated, expects to be abused and is comfortable being abused this is not the same thing as liking or wanting to be abused. Estella's cruelty fits his expectation of abuse, his sense of powerlessness, and his low self esteem, so he is drawn to her. A variant of the expectation-of-abuse theory is that Pip's sense of guilt requires punishment, which Estella amply provides. Pip reveals the urge to punish himself when, in reaction to her treatment of him, he kicks the wall and "took a hard twist at my hair" page Michal Peled Ginsburg offers a psychologically more subtle and sophisticated explanation: "The desire for Estella and Pip's feeling of insufficiency are two sides of the same coin: desire is the feeling of a lack.
It is Estella's perfection and self-sufficiency her pride that show Pip that he is lacking, and it is the fact that she makes him feel lacking that transforms her in his eyes to a perfect and totally self-sufficient creature. Dabney puts a different spin on Pip's relationship with Estella; Pip "is concerned with impersonal things—with class, with status, with habits, occupations, gestures, and language standard in a particular social milieu.
This view is not incompatible with the other theories suggested. This list is not intended to be definitive, but to stimulate your thinking and to encourage you to find your own interpretations of Pip's love.
If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces—and as it gets older and stronger—it will tear deeper—love her, love her, love her! I adopted her to be loved.
I bred her and educated her to be loved. Unlike the warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. 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.
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