Try to engage with even the most casual Swiftie about the mildest analysis of Taylor Swift and you’ll be met with the same retort: she’s such a great lyricist, they’ll say. Don’t worry, I’m not here to argue that today, nor I am interested in drawing some distinction between the high art of Poetry™ and the low poetics of what Taylor does. I have written many times against such distinctions.
I have spent many years among poets, and one thing I have learned is that they can be very territorial about who/what counts as poetry/poets. It’s something I always admired about them, in graduate school— how firmly they believed that what they were doing was different from telling stories. They were reinventing language itself. But it’s also a distinction that left me on the outside— because I was interested in narrative.
Swift’s roots are in country, so she, too, likes a good narrative—a prose poet, if you will. Responding to her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, some critics say she needs an editor; others say the stories she tells have usurped the musicality; still others say the album is “wildly ambitious and gloriously chaotic.” Either way, it’s clear that she likes plot and character (and secret codes). In this album, she also leans heavily into pathos.
A review for Rolling Stone says Swift has “bad men” on the brain— and how can one not think of all the tortured women poets, given the album’s title; of Plath’s bad daddies. When I first heard the title, I thought the “tortured” bit was in earnest, and I have to admit, I think I gasped (or laughed?) out loud. But on the album, Swift doesn’t take the romanticism of the depressive genius that seriously. In the titular song, after all, she’s not Patti Smith hanging at the Chelsea Hotel, she’s just a “modern idiot.” As an editor of Poetry magazine put it, “Is she making fun of us? I guess I kind of approve of that, too.”
Most of the album, however, is centered on romantic agony. My daughter, who loves Swift, doesn’t approve. She says the new songs are too slow and sad. She likes rock, verve, anger right now. She told me the other day that she talked back to the lunch lady, who was being a bitch (she didn’t say “bitch,” that’s my take), and she felt powerful. I didn’t get mad. I thanked her for sharing. We talked about power— what’s real power that lasts, that won’t hurt others. But I also said I understand that feeling of being powerless as a kid, as a girl, and using language, some attitude, some rule breaking, to take the power back. It felt good, she confessed. I liked it.
She’s very cool, but also very fluent in the language of emotions. Maybe she even knows “sad girls” are out. The sad girl Tumblr aesthetic of the early 2010s is perhaps dated, but it remains relevant to the lives of girls, who remain sad. As Leslie Jamison has written, however, in art criticism, to be a “sad girl” has become an accusation: “…calling a woman ‘vulnerable’ in relation to her writing was a way of praising her not for her artistry but for her exposure — for her willingness to make her fragility a public commodity.” We have moved collectively to other literary preferences, as many have come to question “sadness as a default narrative posture.” As Jamison writes, “pleasure and satisfaction can become structuring forces of identity as well.”
I’ve been immersed in Suzanne Scanlon’s gorgeous new book Committed: On Meaning and Madwoman, which takes women’s sadness—and madness— seriously. It’s a brilliant book— intellectually, structurally, emotionally— one of the best I’ve read in recent years. Scanlon writes of denying the influence of The Bell Jar on her own life, knowing that “to be a white depressive woman writer obsessed with Sylvia Plath is redundant.” Even mentioning the book or its author was to elicit eye rolls.
Of course, the dismissal of Plath and other tortured women in literature is highly gendered (and Plath is now experiencing somewhat of a revival, see especially
). It’s not only that Plath has become over-identified with her death, such that the legacy of how she left us frequently usurps the brilliance of her work; it’s that her brilliance can only be understood, felt, seen, if one takes women’s emotions seriously. Women who show feelings, however— especially feminine feelings, like sadness— tend to be seen as mere girls.As poet Arielle Greenberg writes, “Sylvia Plath has a lot to do with this received notion of the teenage girl reader/writer as wallowing in self-pity.”
Plath and other sad girlie poets are supposed to be for college girls— young women who want to be intellectuals, but are too wrapped up in their own feelings. Thinking is not supposed to implicate the emotions after all, that’s girl stuff. And— there’s something presumably adolescent and girlish about sadness itself. It’s not manly, and it’s not mature. But as Scanlon writes, there’s another perspective, one she knows not to say out loud at the dinner party: Plath blew herself up so that we, those “girls with the ugly feelings, the rage and the disgust and all the rest”, could live.
Scanlon claims in her book, too, that in fact all writers inhabit a space between sanity and insanity. This is why we are interested in the figure of the tortured poet— not because one needs to be sad or in pain or clinically depressed to write or make art, but because writing (poetry or otherwise) is a kind of madness, a letting go, an encounter with the unreasonable.
Taylor is no tortured poet, not like that, not really. Or is she? She’s a distant cousin of Emily Dickinson, after all. And one theory that's gone viral is that actually, the album isn’t about the sadness inspired by all of Taylor’s ex lovers—rather, it’s about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
The theory, unfortunately, is not that convincing. It seems more likely that Swift is just tapping a broader history of sad women and aesthetics (lots of dark academia, it has been noted). But maybe, she’s also just one of us girlies with ugly feelings. In “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” Taylor mocks the farce of the parasocial relationship, the spectacle of celebrity, and her ability to appear productive, happy, even while she’s suffering privately. Someone said to me the album addresses “mental health.” I prefer Scanlon’s term, “madness,” which she admits is less precise, premodern, but in that way, “avoids the present biomedical moment.” Scanlon writes that to “speak of madness in life and literature” is to speak “of something spiritual.”
As my daughter listens to more music, and identifies her own tastes, I’ve been thinking about how we learn about feelings—and about what Arlie Russell Hochschild called “feelings rules,” or cultural norms about when and where and how we are to express feelings. I can see that in the music my daughter is consuming, whatever her momentary preferences may be, she’s learning something about the kinds of emotions girls are supposed to have in public spaces and experimenting with ways to talk back to those rules.
“It is an idea easy to dismiss, that we can be altered by books — don’t read too much, they tell young girls — but it is also a very serious idea,” Scanlon writes. It’s easy to dismiss the idea that we can be changed by music, too— an art form that is arguably now more important to most young girls, most young people, than books (sorry writer friends). Even my daughter, who eats books like air, relates to music in a different way, because it lets her move her body — a head-to-toe expression of feeling. Lately, we’ve been listening and moving together, pulling up and out all kinds of emotions, surprising ourselves with what comes through us.
And, it’s also easy to forget that even the sad girl breaks the rules. What’s really the difference, after all, between being sad, when you’re a girl, and being bad?
From Lana del Rey’s song “Sad Girl”:
I'm a sad girl
I'm a sad girl
I'm a sad girl
I'm a sad girl
I'm a bad girl
I'm a bad girl
I remember going through a period in my teens where I was obsessed with books about teen girls who went truly crazy. Who ended up in institutions. I just noticed one of those books on my shelf the other day. It's called Lisa, Bright and Dark. If I remember correctly, she had multiple personalities, but that might be one of the other ones I read in that period.
Why did I find those stories so compelling? Probably, yes, because I had SO MANY BIG FEELINGS, so reading about teen girls who were overwhelmed by their feelings and their psychology resonated. I think it was also that I felt really trapped in the "good girl who doesn't make mistakes" narrative and the thought of just letting go and falling off the edge of the world was intoxicating to contemplate. I couldn't do it, but I could live vicariously through those girls who did it, which fed something in me.
Hearing your voice on all of this was much appreciated (dare I say, needed). I was exploring this week what you said about learning about feelings. The reason I’ve always been drawn to art like this is because growing up it was the only place (music, TV and film, but mostly music) where people said out loud what I suspected we all were feeling but refusing to name. Making the implicit, explicit. My first taste of therapy acknowledging. as you said here, the madness.