She is proud (page 52) rude (page 53) insulting (page 58) and evil (page 59 where she enjoys seeing Pip cry). Estella is a snobbish girl who loves to tease the boys and then make them suffer.
When Pip is leaving, Estella says to him “Come here! You may kiss me if you like.” (87). It was very clear that she was letting Pip kiss her not because she liked him ; it was as if she was doing him a big favour. To make him like her even more, yet she would never like him.
When Estella meets Pip in London, Pip says, “It is impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract me; that she made herself winning; and would have won me even if the task had needed pains.”
Pip is in love with Estella despite her cruelness. Estella’s complete dominance of Pip, became possible because she was aware that he was madly in love with her. In Pip’s own words (on page 213), “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
His love for Estella also had a effect on Pip. She changed his whole view of life. “…that the best step I could take toward making myself uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew.” (81).
Everyone’s opinions of Estella are about the same. All the boys believe she is very pretty but when they fall in love with her, they get their hearts broken. Estella was raised to treat men that way. Pip also got very upset when Estella led Drummle on. “Do you deceive and entrap him (Drummle), Estella? Yes, and many others – all of them but you….” Said Estella.”.
Dickens doesn’t leave Estella so one-dimensional – he shows us the inner life of this girl who has herself been so tortured and twisted by a desire to be more than her station at birth. We get a sense that Estella struggles against the cruelty and shame she is made to endure. In doing so, Estella proves that she does have a heart, albeit a damaged one.
Her marriage to Drummle prolongs her own agony, she loses her wealth and beauty. Her own feelings about Drummle are brought out in page 285 when she compares him to a moth.
Ultimately, she learns the same lesson as Pip:
Feelings can’t be suppressed enough to prevent us from feeling,
and holding emotions back cripples us.
At the novel’s end Estella experiences her own kind of evolution, bent into what she hopes is a better shape that will allow her to undo some of the damage she has caused. She regrets the pain she caused to Pip and decides to be good friends with him. (Page 442)
While for the most part Estella represents the evil side of humanity, it is her compelling character that makes Pip’s love for her so intense and make Great Expectations such an exciting book.
Estella is Miss Havisham's adopted daughter and her project in cultivated cruelty. Raised by the old woman to be cruel and hard to men, Estella, a great beauty, entrances Pip. She is mean to Pip for most of his life, although at the novel's end they meet again, and she seems to be a softened, changed woman. Estella is another child of mysterious parentage, and Pip eventually learns that she's Magwitch's daughter.
Estella is as beautiful and cultured as she is cold and brutal, and Pip immediately falls in love with her at a tender age. The daughter of Magwitch the convict, she is taken in by Miss Havisham from the age of three and taught to hate and mistreat men of all kinds, Pip among them. The more Pip loves her, the more Estella seems to enjoy torturing and manipulating him. She is from even lower stock in the class system than he is, and one might think she resents his intrusion into the life she has found among the wealthy.
. As they get older, the only feeling that she shows is in her concern for Pip by telling him that he is warned.
