Since Estella is constantly judged by her beauty and her future of breaking men’s hearts, she is no more human than a doll is. To begin with, while Pip is confessing his love for her, she tells him, “...there are sentiments, fancies- I don’t know how you call them- which I am not able to comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean as a form of words, but nothing more…” (ch.44, p. 389). This illustrates that Estella feels hopeless because she has never been treated as a person. Her adoptive mother, Miss Havisham, treated her as an object to be used against men; the boy who became infatuated with her, Pip, never liked her for anything more than her beauty; her husband, Drummle, abused her; she never truly knows love. Due to this, her outward appearance of indifference and cold heartedness …show more content…
Because she is constantly objectified, she cannot properly show her emotions, and therefore has no way to cure her desperation for attention. Estella’s lack of love in her childhood affected who she is now; the only way she can get the affection she wants is by playing the doll: by being beautiful, people will come to her, however, she can never really bond with them as she cannot let them in. This eventually leads to a terrible cycle where the more beautifully she presents herself, the more people come to her but never truly care about her, and the more people who don’t give her love, the more beautifully she presents herself, and so on. Another example of Estella’s lack of humanity is at the beginning of the book, where Pip first walks into the dining room of Statis House,and views the crumbling room around him; in that moment, he observes that it “was spacious” and “had once been handsome, but every discernable thing in it was covered in mold, and dropping to pieces” (ch.11,