“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces, – and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper, – love her, love her, love her!”
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 29. Miss Havisham maniacally exhorts Pip to love Estella no matter how much she breaks his heart. The intensity of her repetition of “love her” and the words that follow are reminiscent of a witches incantation. Driven by revenge for having been jilted on her own wedding day, Miss Havisham wants Pip to suffer for love as she has done in the past. So she has brought up and schooled Estella to be the instrument of her revenge on all men. It is ironic that she sees love not as a force for good and happiness but one to be used to manipulate and inflict pain.