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Great Expectations
Analysis of Major Characters
Pip
As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations presents the growth and development of
a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip
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As a result, developing an understanding of Pip’s
character is perhaps the most important step in understanding Great
Expectations
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Dickens
takes great care to distinguish the two Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator
with perspective and maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels
about what is happening to him as it actually happens
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As a character, Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic
idealism and his innately good conscience
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His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems
from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of
being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like poverty,
ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral
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As a
character, however, Pip’s idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather
narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values
leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him
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On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a
fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book
(helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert’s way into business, etc
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Pip’s main line of development in the
novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness
and conscience above his immature idealism
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After receiving his mysterious fortune,
his idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a
gentlemanly life of idleness
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The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while
losing Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize
that one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and that
his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about
him most
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Estella
Often cited as Dickens’s first convincing female character, Estella is a supremely
ironic creation, one who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves
as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired
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Unlike the warm,
winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and
manipulative
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Ironically, life among the upper classes does not represent salvation for Estella
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Rather than being raised by
Magwitch, a man of great inner nobility, she is raised by Miss Havisham, who
destroys her ability to express emotion and interact normally with the world
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In this way, Dickens uses Estella’s life to reinforce the idea that one’s
happiness and well-being are not deeply connected to one’s social position: had
Estella been poor, she might have been substantially better off
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By giving the
reader a sense of her inner struggle to discover and act on her own feelings
rather than on the imposed motives of her upbringing, Dickens gives the reader a
glimpse of Estella’s inner life, which helps to explain what Pip might love about
her
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Finally, Estella’s long, painful marriage to Drummle causes her to develop
along the same lines as Pip—that is, she learns, through experience, to rely on
and trust her inner feelings
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As she says to Pip, “Suffering has been
stronger than all other teaching
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”

Miss Havisham
The mad, vengeful Miss Havisham, a wealthy dowager who lives in a rotting
mansion and wears an old wedding dress every day of her life, is not exactly a
believable character, but she is certainly one of the most memorable creations in
the book
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From that moment
forth, Miss Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak
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With a
kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as
a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men
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Miss Havisham
is completely unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella
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Miss Havisham
immediately begs Pip for forgiveness, reinforcing the novel’s theme that bad
behavior can be redeemed by contrition and sympathy

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