![]() ![]() The mother passes the knowledge on to the daughter. Man can’t bear the facts of life and women are stuck with it. Repetitive male fear kills women in Kathy’s novel. “The woman replaced him and replaced him (the form of this novel) and ultimately that killed the mother. These figural fatherly substitutions - many of whom we see alive and well today as politicians, societal leaders, friends, faux allies, etc., - repeatedly kill the mother (blood-line and symbolic). In Acker’s version, the paternal h/role left in the absent father’s wake is filled over and over again by men who violate, manipulate and abandon women, including Acker’s gender-shifting narrator. ![]() Peter, too, has lost his parents, but not in the way we were once familiar: his mother has killed herself, his mother’s mother has also died, and he has never met his father who fled before Peter was born. “I RECALL MY CHILDHOOD”: Pip has lost his parents. ![]() Charles Dickens’ Pip has just become Peter when Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982), a serialized collage of a book that steals from and destroys Dickens’ 1861 original, begins. ![]()
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