It is not only what she does to herself and Satis House which reflect her burning need for revenge but her behaviour towards other characters in the novel. Miss Havisham adopts Estella, with the intention of seeking her own personal revenge on mankind, through Estella. We see this when Miss Havisham introduces Estella to Pip, and instructing her ‘you can break his heart’. Estella has been trained from birth by her to regard all men as inferior beings, first describing Pip as ‘a common labouring boy’. Estella, as she has been taught by Miss Havisham, looks on Pip with disdain and immediately begins to rustle up feelings of inadequacy within him, ‘what course hands he has, and what thick boots’. Miss Havisham feels such a desire for revenge towards one man, that it forces her to hate the make species, and subsequently want to hurt any man she can, this is seen in Miss Havisham’s targeting of Pip. She knows she can use Estella as her weapon to act out her own vengeful fantasies.
Even when Pip is first called to play at Miss Havisham’s, there is a sense of foreboding, and her orders are strict and military, the reader can sense the power she has, even over oppressive characters such as Pip’s sister, Mrs. Gargery, ‘ she wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he’s going. And he had better play there’. Miss Havisham has targeted the innocent young boy, as a representative of the male species. On Pip’s second visit to Satis House, Estella’s power over Pip becomes more apparent and the reader recognises him as a target for Miss Havisham’s revenge, ‘you are to go and stand there boy until you are wanted’ and Miss Havisham’s control over Estella, which effectively controls Pip. In Pip’s second visit to Satis House, we witness Miss Havisham’s pivotal over the children,’ Miss Havisham watched us all the time, directed my attention to Estella’s beauty’. Estella’s beauty is Miss Havisham’s weapon and Pip soon falls in love with her. Miss Havisham is slowly and consciously drawing Pip in. ‘Come here! You may kiss me, if you like’, Estella says it like it is an order, and even when Pip does kiss her he, and the reader feels like it meant to little to her and yet so much to him. ‘As if the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing’.
Gradually as Pip falls in love with Estella he begins to be less content with his simple life at the forge, and is determined to better himself to please Estella. Pip is introduced to his ‘great expectations’ by Mr Jaggers from London, he believes his benefactor to be Miss Havisham, and so sets off to London to become a gentleman. Consequently he takes his humble upbringing for granted, forgetting Joe’s moral and ethical teachings. Miss Havisham, through Estella, has disrupted Pip’s life already by changing his self-image and attitude towards his upbringing, ‘ That’s just what I don’t want, Joe. They would make such a business of it-such a coarse and common business-that I couldn’t bear myself’. The reader must not forget that Estella once referred to Pip as ‘coarse and common’, in this we see the effects on Pip’s life, simply because Miss Havisham targeted him as a subject of her revenge on the male species. Estella has fundamentally changed the way Pip sees himself and taken advantage of his insecurities, ‘Dissatisfied with my fortune of course I could not be; but it is possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied with myself’.
The next major consequence, which Miss Havisham’s original desire for revenge has, is Pip disregarding his old life and going to London to get an education and become a gentleman. This is fundamentally Miss Havisham’s influence, as Pip is doing this all for Estella. Pip officially casts his once happy life with Joe and the Forge in pursuit of living out his Great Expectations, ‘and the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me’. The reader starts to see how Miss Havisham has changed the course of Pip’s life.
Pip goes on to be disappointed by his Great Expectations and his disillusions of whom his benefactor was. We discover it wasn’t Miss Havisham after all but a mere escaped convict Pip had helped many years before. This shows a sense of irony, as his Great Expectations were to become a gentleman, bringing him back to his originals status, a mere labouring boy. Towards the end of the novel, Miss Havisham dies and her power over the other characters dissolves. Miss Havisham’s desire for revenge prevents Pip and Estella leading the life they should have done for the majority of the novel but her death, leading to the re-birth of Pip and Estella has the opposite effect, and undoes her vengeful antics. Pip and Estella can finally be happy and be untainted by Miss Havisham’s desire for revenge, ‘I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place’.
