What is the relationship between Estella and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations?

Estella and Miss Havisham are not close.  They are puppet and puppet-master more than daugther and mother.

To understand the rocky and unusual relationship between Miss Havisham and Estella, it is important to know their history.

Estella is Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter.  She is the child of Molly and Abel Magwitch.  Unfortunately, shortly after she was born both of her parents ended up in jail.  At this point, her father was deported and her mother was acquitted.  Her lawyer Jaggers then sent her to live with Miss Havisham, because the lady was lonely and expressed a desire for a daughter to adopt and raise as her own.

Miss Havisham had been tricked by her brother Arthur and his associate, Compeyson.  She thought she was going to marry Compeyson, but he deserted her on her wedding day.  As a result, Miss Havisham seems to have suffered some kind of mental collapse.  She cloistered herself up in her house, stayed in her wedding dress, and changed nothing for more than a decade.

Estella often refers to Miss Havisham as her mother by adoption.  Whether either one has affection for the other is hard to say.  Miss Havisham is selfish and cold.

Miss Havisham, you must know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in your part of the world, and was a brewer. (ch 22, p. 123)

Arthur was “riotous, extravagant, undutiful—altogether bad” and his father disinherited him, leaving Miss Havisham alone with the fortune.  Arthur thought himself ill-used, and devised the marriage plot.

Miss Havisham has plans for Estella.  She is to be her instrument of revenge on the male sex.  So Miss Havisham raises her to be flirtatious and cruel.  She directs her every move, using Estella as a kind of puppet.

When Estella is older, she acts coldly toward Miss Havisham.  The old woman is surprised.

“Did I never give her love!” cried Miss Havisham, turning wildly to me. “Did I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy at all times, and from sharp pain…” (ch 38, p. 207)

Estella reminds her that she is everything she was taught to be.  She resents her upbringing, and the fact that she was used.  Pip accuses Estella of marrying Drummle just to get back at Miss Havisham, but Estella insists she is doing it so that she can make one choice on her own.  The fact that it causes Miss Havisham and Pip pain is a bonus.

What is Miss Havisham's hope for Estella in Great Expectations?

Miss Havisham intends to make Estella into a kind of weapon she will use in order to exact vengeance upon men. The aging lady's entire life, since having been stood up at the altar, has been consumed by narcissistic grief. She has essentially destroyed her own life, or at least completed the job that was started by the bridegroom who deserted her. Estella is a beautiful young girl whom Miss Havisham is deliberately bringing up to be self-centered, insufferably snobbish, and even cruel—to attract men and then reject them.

In the very first meeting with Pip, Estella makes fun of him when they are playing cards, saying things like "he calls the knaves jacks!" and making Pip ashamed of his working-class background. There is something both pathetic and absurd, but also understandable, about the fixation Pip develops on Estella. She keeps him at arm's length and makes him suffer, as Miss Havisham intends. In many ways, Pip's obsessive love prefigures the feelings of Philip for Mildred in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage—with the difference that Mildred, unlike Estella, has apparently no positive qualities at all, not even beauty.

The ending of Great Expectations in its final version, unlike in the original version Dickens intended, has the hopeful statement by Pip that "I saw no shadow of another parting from her." It is in keeping with the overall positive message of the story that, in spite of the horribly dysfunctional situations and cruelty of many of the characters, human beings can triumph over adversity.

What are Estella Havisham's dreams and philosophy in Great Expectations?

Having been taught from an early age to be cold-hearted and cruel, Estella has never learned to care about what happens to any one--not even to herself.  As such, Estella is rather a tragic figure; she has simply been manipulated by Miss Havisham to wreak her vengeance upon the male gender.  But, by generating such a cold, brutal nature in Estella, Miss Havisham has fostered a young woman who has little or no feelings.

Without the human feelings of love for others, there is little that Estella aspires to other than becoming a lady since meaning in one's life depends upon sharing emotions.  She cannot respond to the love of Pip and only identifies with Bentley Drummle because he, too, is cruel.  Always candid and honest, Estella tells Miss Havisham that she cannot love her because Miss Havisham has taught her not to love, but to be cruel and to have a "self-possessed indifference": 

 "You should know...I am what you have made me.....Who taught me to be hard?....Who praised me when I learned my lesson?"

Having been "made" by Miss Havisham, Estella meets Pip years later and is "bent and broken" by her marriage to the brutish Drummle.  She does tell Pip that she has thought of him, but says honestly again that they "will continue friends apart."

In the revised ending of Great Expectations, Estella indicates that she has learned from her suffering and Pip feels the assurance "that suffering...had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be."