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The instrument of her revenge is Estella and to a certain extend Pip.
Both Pip and Estella are like pawns in her hands and she plays chess
with them after she has been put into checkmate by Compeyson. When
he has left her her nightmare begins and this is emphatically
confirmed by her surroundings. Miss Havisham tries to escape her
nightmare by creating a sham world in her daydream, her dream is Estella
and her dream can only come true if Estella can hurt a man the way Miss
Havisham has been hurt by her fiancé - an experience that has left her
half crazed. Poor Estella is part of this bad dream, she only exists in
someone else's dream and when she finally fights for release from this
bad dream, she ends up in her own nightmare with Bentley Drummle
When she is at long last released from that bond there is no more dream,
there is no more nightmare and there is hardly any Estella left.
Her coldness may have gone but nothing gentler seems to have taken its
place. The drive that has kept her going has gone but having gone no
new force has taken over and she has no force of her own. Estella never
dreams
All these "dreams", daydreamsnightmaresillusions or whichever name
might be considered most appropriate share the fact that the prevailing
character of the sentiments they create, the light in which the reader
comes to regard the character is more important than anything else.
This holds good for Pip's dreams as well. In his dreams he is alive,
not only in his daydreams, his illusions, his "great expectations"
which fill the whole novel and fill Pip's whole life until he is so
crudely forced to face reality by the appearance of Magwitch who tells
Pip what his "dreams" are based on but also his night dreams, when his
guilty conscience visits him. More often than not these dreams are
fearful, fear pervades those passages as it pervades Pip's whole life.
This is why I think that the feelings radiated by and in the dream are
the most important part and according to me not enough attention has
been paid to that side of the dream.
Pip's great expectations are created and roused by Magwitch. They start
shortly after he has met Magwitch on the marches. It is in Chapter 10
that Pip is in the village inn with Joe when Pip sees a stranger who
stirs his rum-and-water with a file.
