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 - 55 -

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The Dutch Dickensian | 1978 | | pagina 56