Estella and Pip: An Archetypal Failure

If I were to describe the romance between Estella and Pip, I would have to, sadly, call it a Victorian-era reverse gender repeat of Twilight. From the beginning, Pip is infatuated with Estella not for her mind, not for her personality - which is, frankly, about as warm and inviting as an iceberg - but for her beauty. Pip loves Estella because she is beautiful; he follows her for several years because of her beauty, and nowhere is it suggested that he loves her for any reason other than this same beauty. Of course, I realize that in Victorian England, women were hardly expected to be anything more than beautiful ornaments, and that, moreover, the trope of the long suffering lover whose patience eventually is reward is a long used and long loved archetype. However, in the case of Pip and Estella, this trope does not work because Dickens relies solely on archetype when creating Estella; besides making her cold yet beautiful, Dickens gives her little else in terms of character. She is a skeleton, a flat character we cannot emphasis with - and, as a result, her romance with Pip is as believable as normal weather in Missouri.