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Unit 16: Great Expectations: Characterization and Ending of the Play

Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn Notes
to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like
poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip
the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for
good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip’s idealism
often leads him to perceive the world rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify
situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care
about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for example, he immediately begins to act as he
thinks a gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and
coldly.
On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can
be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly
buying Herbert’s way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all those who love him.
Pip’s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place
his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.

Not long after meeting Miss. Havisham and Estella, Pip’s desire for advancement largely
overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes
seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness. But
the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss. Havisham, is his secret
benefactor shatters Pip’s oversimplified sense of his world’s hierarchy. The fact that he comes
to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces
him to realize that one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and
that his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about him most.
Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the man who narrates the novel, completing
the bildungsroman.

Estella
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

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