ABSTRACT
This chapter’s analysis of Great Expectations places the punk girl in the social context of the 1970s crisis in the American family and the associated call for a return to family values. Her location within a parodic version of the Oedipal family, and her revisiting of various versions of the family romance (the classic novel by Dickens, a historical romance by Victoria Holt) reveal the conventional family to always be a place of crisis for the dissident girl, with family values severely circumscribing her ‘great expectations’. The punk girl, through the chanelling of desire in and through the family and desire’s shaming via incest, is trained for submission to patriarchal authority.
