Great Expectations
Great Expectations surfaces across two Taylor Swift songs, through allusion and thematic echo.
Appears in 2 songs
Associated with Charles Dickens
“So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs”
Picked up by community readers as Dickens's Miss Havisham: the cobwebbed house and the figure in white recall the jilted woman frozen in her decaying bridal home, an enduring image of feminine ruin curdled into something the village fears. The reading deepens the song's woman-in-white and haunted-house imagery with a named literary precedent.
“I look through the windows of this love Even though we boarded them up Chandelier's still flickering here”
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss the extended metaphor of the boarded-up house with a flickering chandelier. Uncle Jerry connects this imagery to Miss Havisham's house in Dickens' Great Expectations, the old house where she is still mourning her wedding. The parallel is the image of love somehow still trapped and flickering inside a decaying, sealed-up space.