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Swimming Lessons
reading is fun
Despite the fact that Estella from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is cold and cruel, she is also surprisingly honest. In the Second Stage of Pip’s Expectations, Pip is walking with Estella in the garden at Miss Havisham’s. This is the first time that Estella has met Pip as a gentleman. They are talking about Pip’s fight with Herbert, back when they were kids. When Pip asks Estella if she remembers giving him food and making him cry, Estella tells Pip, “‘You must know…that I have no heart… I have no softness there, no-sympathy-sentiment-nonsense.’” (194-195) Estella is telling Pip straight up that she isn’t going to be kind, and that she really doesn’t care. She isn’t trying to trick him into thinking she feels something. Later on, Pip and Estella are at a ball in Richmond. They are talking about how Estella is flirting with Drummle, who Pip despises, while she doesn’t smile at him. After Pip blurts out that she never smiles at him like she does Drummle, Estella responds in a rare display of emotion, “‘Do you want me then,’ said Estella turning suddenly with a fixed and serious, if no angry, look, ‘to deceive and entrap you?’” (256) By telling Pip that she is deceiving Drummle, she is saying in a roundabout way that she isn’t out to deceive Pip. She isn’t showing a façade of emotions that she doesn’t feel to Pip, he is seeing the true her. Even though she is heartless, she is brutally honest about her faults with Pip.
