Taylor Swift is truly a girl's girl
The fate of Ophelia
Look, life is too short to pretend you don’t like Taylor Swift.
If I leave you in a room for 2 hours and play Shake It Off on a loop. You will end up humming ‘haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate’ till the next decade.
I was listening to her song, The Fate of Ophelia and the boost of self confidence I got at: “I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I” is something I haven’t felt in a long time.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia was a young noblewoman in love with Prince Hamlet. He also loves her back. Life is good.
But then, Hamlet’s father is murdered by his brother Claudius and Hamlet spirals into rage & gets obsessed with revenge. Ophelia gets caught in the wreckage as her father uses her as a pawn to spy on Hamlet.
Hamlet who was already paranoid turns on her. Tells her he never loved her and humiliates her publicly.
Then he accidentally kills her father.
So now the man she loves has rejected her and murdered her father. She is completely alone in a court full of people playing power games who see her grief as an inconvenience.
She loses her mind. Wanders the castle singing broken songs. And then she drowns.
She never fights back. Never gets to choose. Every man in her life used her for his own purpose and when she was broken beyond repair, they all looked away.
She became one of literature’s most famous casualties.
Taylor looked at that story and said: No.
She flipped the script of her tragic ending by making Ophelia own up to her agency: “I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I”
Most of the time Taylor gives a modern woman, the confidence to slay. Almost all of her songs affirm this:
tolerate it was inspired by the book Rebecca, the du Maurier novel about a woman drowning in devotion to an indifferent husband.
In my tears ricochet a dead woman narrates her own funeral. But this ghost doesn’t drift away into nothing. She haunts back.
In *mad woman,* the world tells her she’s crazy for being angry. She doesn’t accept it.
Taylor writes a lot about boy trouble. Messy relationships, betrayal, heartbreak, being gaslit, being discarded, being the other woman, being the one who stayed too long.
But the boy trouble is never the end of the story.
It’s the middle. The complication.
The end of the story is always the woman standing back up or just a simple happy ending to a tragic love story.
Taking inspiration from books & tragic stories is not enough, her lyrics hit the right chords in our minds and heart because of how they are written.
Taylor’s biggest strength is how specific she gets in her descriptions of moments, places, and sensations in her songs.
Instead of telling you, “this relationship made me constantly anxious because I never knew where it was going,” she makes you feel that anxiety by singing the words:
are we out of the woods yet?
are we in the clear yet?
— Out of The Woods
Instead of saying, “I was doing well after our breakup, but then you called me, and I felt sad again,” she sings:
You call me up again just to break me like a promise
— All Too Well
Instead of “I was lonely and broken, but then you made me feel loved again”, she sings:
And when I felt like I was an old cardigan
Under someone’s bed
You put me on and said I was your favorite
— cardigan
The woman treats the entire world like raw material. Novels, overheard conversations, maths class, someone’s grief essay. Everything becomes a song.
Her own philosophy borrows from Nora Ephron: “Everything is copy.”
I kind of love that.
If this essay made you want to go listen to Taylor Swift on repeat, good. That was the intent.
Poitu Varen,
Akanksha