Great Expectations #4

I read all afternoon and evening, but it was absolutely delightful because the plot is moving along so quickly now. The character to talk about today is Estella. She is cunning and cold, and drags Pip everywhere with her. He isn't a suitor, and she flirts with the other boys more. After Pip sees her smiling at the jerk Drummle, he says to her:
“There is no doubt you do,” said I something hurriedly, “for I have seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never give to- me.” “Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and serious, if not angry look, “to deceive and entrap you?” “Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?” “Yes and many others- all of them but you” (290). Estella seems to be trying not to hurt him, by not flirting with him. Although she is cruel on the outside, it seems as if she is trying to be nice on the outside. As a reader, I feel like I should despise her for being so mean, but I don't, and maybe it is because she isn't trying to be mean, it's just who she is. On more than one occasion she seperates Pip from everyone else. In her own way, she is being kind to him, trying not to hurt him, trying not to lead him on. Why does she do this? To be completely honest, this novel doesn't have that much in common with what we have studied in class. The main theme of Great Expectations are that money and social standing don't make you any happier, and that is not a theme in other things we have studied. Perhaps a theme that would go along with The 400 Blows or Black Boy is that you can't make someone love you. Pip cannot make Estella love him, just as Antoine and Richard Wright couldn't get their mothers to love them. Pip is facing a major conflict right now. Pip needs to figure out how to get his benefactor out of the country. His benefactor has been revealed, and it is not Miss Havisham like he thought, but instead it is a man known as Provis or Magwitch, who is the convict that Pip helped when he was young. For awhile he was very confused. He knows that he won't marry Estella now. Anyway, Pip and Magwitch are being watched, so Magwitch has to go into hiding. Pip is going to great lengths to protect someone that he had just met for a few days when he was young, although he does owe him a lot because Magwitch paid for him to be a gentleman. Now Pip feels bad about that, and doesn't want to spend anymore of his money now that his future is so uncertain. Pip narrates, "Even I myself began to know the want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve it by converting some easily spared articles of jewellery into cash." He is selling his stuff so that he doesn't have to trouble Magwitch (although it wouldn't trouble him anyway).