Taylor Swift is back on tour for the first time in FIVE YEARS.
The content I’ve been seeing online for The Eras Tour over the last few weeks has moved me to tears. Everything from the dresses she has been wearing whilst performing 'my tears ricochet' to the fact that 'Fearless' (the song) has made it onto a Taylor Swift tour setlist in 2023. I spent many evenings twirling around in my bedroom after school listening to that song. I also spotted that she performed 'Clean' AND 'Death By A Thousand Cuts' as the surprise tracks for one show - the audience that night will never get luckier!
Since Taylor’s last tour, she has released, not including the re-recordings, four albums - Lover, folklore, evermore and Midnights. The sister records were created in lockdown and were surprise releases. I’d wanted Taylor to release an album like folklore for years; I knew she was capable of writing a folky, storytelling, whimsical record and what she delivered was better than anything I could have imagined. We all became sombre woodland fairies in the second half of lockdown and this week, I decided to write a piece on the literary references I inferred upon listening to the album.
The lead single of folklore is ‘cardigan’, a song told from the perspective of the fictional character Betty. Betty laments her relationship with James, who in the present she is married to. When the pair were seventeen, however, he cheated on her over their summer break. The whole track is a poetic masterpiece and I love the repeated, relatable line ‘when you are young they assume you know nothing’. There are times when I wish I could slot into my 8-year-old self’s mind and imagination. I was definitely a more optimistic and quick thinker back then. Betty clearly was also, for she claims that she ‘knew (James) would come back’ to her.
Towards the end of the song, Taylor references ‘Peter losing Wendy’, alluding to Wendy’s decision to not stay in Neverland and live life eternally young with her childhood love. In J. M Barrie’s classic Peter refuses to grow up, rejecting Wendy’s offer that he return to London and grow up with her. Whilst Wendy is disheartened, she stands by the decision, telling herself that she’ll never forget Peter. Betty and James have a similar beginning though ultimately end up together; later in the album, in the song ‘betty’, James shows up at Betty’s doorstep and pleads for her forgiveness.
'seven' is an underrated gem, it was Mallika and I's favourite when the album first came out. In the Long Pond Sessions, Taylor says she got the idea partially due to seeing and relating to a child having a toddler tantrum in the middle of a supermarket. At one point do we accept that we have to bottle our feelings in? Whoever Taylor is speaking to in 'seven' appears to have concealed a great deal and, unbeknownst to young Taylor, is growing up in an abusive environment. Their father's constant anger and the need to play imaginary games however is noted by Taylor and she suggests 'we'll move to India forever'. I interpreted the line as a reference to A Little Princess. The protagonist, Sara, remembers India as her childhood home, a place where she was happy and not struggling. Despite her initial privileges, Sara is not spoiled, and when she is later thrown into poverty, remains kind. At one point, she shares her bread with someone despite being completely famished.
I read Jane Eyre when I was seventeen. The bildungsroman novel is divided into 38 chapters: we see the titular character leaving her childhood home where she is emotionally and physically abused, sent to boarding school and then become a governess in adulthood. After her education, Jane moves to Thornfield Hall to teach Adele Varens, a young French girl. Adele’s guardian is Edward Rochester, master of the house, whom Jane inevitably falls in love with. Anecdotes of their relationship are woven into folklore’s lyrics; Rochester tells Jane that he has a ‘strange feeling with regard to you as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you’. In ‘invisible string’, Taylor details all the connections and similarities she and her partner shared before they got together and how their relationship was inevitable. The title of the song alludes to the ‘Red threat of fate’, an adage in Chinese mythology, which implies an invisible red thread around the finger of those who belong together. Taylor also mentions going for lunch ‘by the Lakes’, not only referencing the Lake District itself but alluding to the album’s closing track.
The Jaye Eyre references continue in ‘mad woman’, the track title a reference to who the literary world now refers to as the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ thanks to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. On Jane and Mr Rochester’s wedding day, it is revealed the latter is married to Bertha Mason, whose mental health deteriorated rapidly after the wedding. Mr Rochester decides to lock his wife away in the attic of their home, leaving Grace Poole to care for her, though Grace’s drinking occasionally leads Bertha to escape and roam the hallways. She rips Jane’s wedding veil in half the night before the wedding, an incident Mr Rochester blames on one of maids. When Mr Rochester formally introduces his wife to Jane, she ‘scratched and growled like some strange animal’; Taylor makes similar statements in the song, likening the ‘mad woman’ to both a scorpian and a bear in its defence.
William Wordsworth is the first poet that comes to mind when I think of Romanticism. Taylor cleverly writes the line ‘what am I words worth’ in the ‘the lakes’, referencing both Wordsworth and his art simultaneously, and laments that she has come ‘too far to let some namedropping sleaze’ misinterpret her lyrics. The lakes are famously a place to escape and Taylor notes that the ‘Windmere peaks look like a perfect place to cry’. Poets turn to their words and their art to escape trauma. Similarly, Taylor turns to her own art to escape ‘hunters with cellphones’. Throwing a modern term in the midst of such poetic and thought-provoking language was risky, though Taylor succeeds in conveying how much of a curse social media can be. Whilst the constant communication a phone offers has benefits, there’s no harm in getting away from the world.
Upon my first listen of ‘the lakes’ I initially believed Taylor was referencing Virgina Woolf with the line ‘take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die’. Woolf’s death was tragic; the writer drowned herself by filling her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse after a series of devastating events. The Blitz destroyed her home and, according to her diary, she became increasingly obsessed with the concept of dying.
Hi everyone! I'm back.
I was away last week in Scotland for a wedding. I really hate missing a week on the blog posting - this is only the second time I've done it since July. Thank you for sticking around!
When you read this, I'll be in Stratford-upon-Avon trying not to buy all the literary gifts...
I might have to turn this into a series of some kind. There are SO many literary references on evermore and I know I've missed a few here. We'll see!
Take it easy,
Karisma
xxxx
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