When Pip blames his pseudo-mother/sister for thé pain of Es tel la's
humiliation of him, Dickens may be expressing his resentment against his
own mother for his own vulnerability and domestic problems. Orlick's attack
certainly would have given some satisfaction. Yet there is pathos in
Mrs. Joe's conciliatory attitude during her illness and ultimate death,
even extending to Orlick, suggesting regret as well as a silent assurance of
good intentions, something more satisfying than the utter silence Dickens
felt that his parents had preserved about the blacking-factory period.
It is in Orlick's perverse recriminations, when all our attention is
focused on Pip's predicament, that we find our last baffling statement
about Mrs. Joe: 'But it warn't Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was
favoured, and he was bullied and beat' L111,404-5)Pip was more favoured
than Orlick, he had a home, he was looked after, but Pip will never see it
that way.
Perhaps Estella is not such a 'deeply frustrating riddle' as Robert Garis
has it not until the final chapter, at least. Admittedly, her portrayal
is a complex one, torn as Pip is between his dreamworld vision of her and the
reality of the way she torments him. Somehow he has to come to terms with the
fact that she is as much part of his great expectations as Miss Havisham's,
but, as in all other things,,he quickly finds a satisfactory reason:
I saw in this, that Estella was set to wreak Miss
Havisham's revenge on men, and that she was not to
be given to me until she had gratified it for a
term. I saw in this, a reason for her being before
hand assigned to me. Sending her out to attract and
torment and do mischief, Miss Havishem sent her
with the malicious assurance that she was beyond
the reach of all admirers, and" that all who staked
upon that cast were secured to lose (XXXVIII,288)
He is soon to find out that it is all a dream and that he was only too willing
a victim of Miss Havisham's revenge: 'You made your own snares. Jenever made them'
(XLIV,341But in this Estella herself has been a reluctant agent. 1
Like Biddy and Herbert, she has repeatedly tried to make Pip see her as she
really is, or as she sees herself: an empty shell with no warmth to offer.
But being unfeeling, why should she care to warn Pip What is Estella really like?
We know from her own account the effect of her upbinging in Satis House, surrounded
by darkness and decay, by the preying and scheming Pockets, and by the
devastating results of a broken heart. That her solitary upbringing did not turn
her into a dreamy child, full of romantic illusions, may be partly due to her
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