Elizabeth
Vlossak is Associate Professor of History, Brock
University.
_____________________________________________
Taylor
Swift is famous for writing her life (and, most notoriously,
her ex-boyfriends) into her music.
But
she is also fascinated by history, and regularly incorporates
historic figures, places and events into her songs. An
avid reader since early childhood, Swift has long drawn
inspiration from women of the past (both real and fi
ctional)
who challenged social conventions and were punished for
not conforming to traditional gender roles.
In
her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department,
Swift positions herself in a long history of women who
upset patriarchal norms — women accused of “behaving
badly” — while also revealing the importance
of revisiting our understanding of the past based on shifting
evidence.
With
the albums folklore and evermore (both released in 2020
during the COVID-19 pandemic), Swift moved away from purely
autobiographical storytelling to exploring other people’s
lives.
In
addition to creating a cast of fictional characters, she
also delved into her family history, with moving songs
about her paternal grandfather who fought in the Battle
of Guadalcanal during the Second World War (“Epiphany”)
and her maternal grandmother (“Marjorie”),
whose career as an opera singer was limited by marital
and maternal responsibilities.
But
it’s “The Last Great American Dynasty”
on folklore that marked a major shift in Swift’s
songwriting. Swift recounts the life of Rebekah Harkness
(1915-1982), the American composer and philanthropist
who married the heir to the Standard Oil fortune and scandalized
her wealthy neighbours with her eccentric behaviour.
In
a surprising twist, Swift reveals that she now owns the
Rhode Island saltbox house where Harkness threw her wild
parties, and Swift is now the crazy woman upsetting the
neighbours. Swift not only reflects on how she continues
to be perceived by society and portrayed in the media,
but also questions the extent to which attitudes toward
women who are “different” have actually changed
since the 1950s.
Similarly,
Swift appears to be alluding to how her own dating history
has been recounted and scrutinized by the media. Some
commentators think Swift explores the life of Lady Idina
Sackville (1893-1955), the English aristocrat who scandalized
upper-class society for marrying five times. Because she
left her husbands so frequently and suddenly, Sackville
was nicknamed “the Bolter,” (also the title
of Swift’s track on Tortured Poets).
Sackville
was also the inspiration for English novelist Nancy Mitford’s
character the Bolter, also the name of a book by Sackville’s
great-granddaughter Frances Osborne about Sackville’s
life.
Swift’s
track could be heard to imagine Sackville’s perspective,
allowing her to explain what attracted her to these men
but why she eventually sought to escape them, regardless
of the social cost of taking back her freedom. It’s
not clear if Swift is writing about Sackville or if she
is writing about herself. Either way, we are asked again
to question how much has changed for women.
An
early 1930s file photo of actress Clara Bow, in New York
City. (AP Photo/File)
The themes of madness, misogyny, fame and female rage
are at the heart of Tortured Poets, and Swift frequently
invokes women of the past as a poetic device to add meaning
and nuance to her stories.
In
addition to likening herself to a witch, Eve and the Trojan
priestess Cassandra, she references American poet and
musician Patti Smith, rock legend Stevie Nicks and the
hugely successful 1920s silent film actress Clara Bow,
who abandoned stardom in 1933 at age 28 after being treated
terribly by Hollywood.
Swift
places herself within this pantheon of 20th-century American
women artists who, in their different ways, fought against
the sexism of the entertainment industry.
Swift
is keenly aware that she is herself both active making
history and a product of a particular moment in time,
living in a world shaped by the events and people that
came before her. While she has agency — she actually
wields far more power than most — she operates within
systems that continue to limit and affect her choices.
At
this year’s Grammy Awards, when Swift announced
she had recorded a new album, fans assumed it would focus
on the end of her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, her
boyfriend of six years with whom she had broken up shortly
after the start of her Eras Tour in the spring of 2023.
But
fans are now convinced that much of what turned out to
be The Tortured Poets Department surprise double album
is about her on-again-off-again “situationship”
with Matty Healy, the controversial frontman of the English
band The 1975 who was reviled by many Swifties. Fans have
gone back to Swift’s previous albums to reinterpret
them through the lens of this revelation.
Were
the songs that had once been assumed to be about Alwyn,
including those on her 2017 album reputation, actually
about Healy? Were the fictional characters in folklore
real after all?
Swift’s
discography is her archive, each album a collection of
files that she has chosen to declassify. These newly released
files can help her fans fill in some of the gaps on the
Swiftian timeline, and shed new light on what they already
know.
On
the one hand, drawing renewed attention to her past work
and keeping her own versions of her older albums streaming
is a slick business move by Swift. But new information
can also challenge previous assumptions and interpretations,
and be devastating to those who hold dear a particular
image of their beloved Taylor.
Swift
seems to understand that history isn’t supposed
to be comfortable. Just as she has reinterpreted the stories
of Rebekah Harkness, Lady Idina and Clara Bow, she knows
all too well that the way her story has and will be told
will change over time. And she is ready for it.
This article is republished from ENSIA
under a Creative Commons license.
