How successful is Dickens in his presentation of female characters?

How successful is Dickens in his presentation of female characters?

There are many female characters in Great Expectations, but most of them are quite

incidental and of no great significance to the plot. Some of them however are essential to the story and play a large part in the plot.

Miss Havisham, combined with Estella are the people who are the ‘snobby’

influence in Pips life, they seem to become desirable characters to Pip after he meets them for the first time at Satis house. Their values do battle with his own at the end of chapter 9; the values that Miss Havisham and Estella have introduced to him, and Joe's humanistic values that he has grown up with. Questions have been raised over whether Miss Havisham and Estellas are believable as actual characters. Miss Havisham can be described as over-dramatised as a decaying part of a decaying house where time has been suspended. She is calculated and spiteful almost to unrealistic odds. There is also a hint of witchery in her character, evident in chapter 29 where she tells Pip to love Estella; “ ‘If she tears your heart to pieces - and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper - love her, love her, love her!’................it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse.” This passage, where Miss Havisham is charged with almost a sexual energy, is quite frightening to the young Pip. She has created Estellas to wreak her own revenge on men, and is successful in this, but in the process becomes devoted to Estella herself, and then feels pain when Estella cannot return her feelings as she has been rendered ‘heartless’ by Miss Havisham's upbringing. The fact that she shows remorse at the end of the book gives her character an added depth, and therefore most people feel she becomes more realistic. She is a victim of her own creation, and a figure of pity.

We first meet Estellas as a quite nasty child, very aware of how her class makes her

‘better’ than most people. She enjoys Pips pain and humiliation when he visits Satis

house, and enjoys putting him down due to his “labourers hands” and “coarse boots”. In

the true style of a young lady of her class of the time she is sent abroad to a ‘finishing’ school, and returns to her débutante in London, once again meeting Pip.