Taylor Swift and the Gothic Monster

Taylor Swift is probably not the first thing which pops in your mind for contemporary examples of the Gothic. You would probably think of Knives Out, a previous example I used on this very channel, for contemporary Gothic before you start thinking about Taylor Swift. Frankenstein is definitely up there, too. Not just the original text, which is definitely historically Gothic, but the various remakes and adaptations, too. The idea of roping into the same conversation a pop princess who makes her primarily female audience once again like and embrace the colour pink seems… well, definitely not Gothic. It’s vampires and cobwebs and moody buildings, not sparkly arenas and upbeat pop songs.

In case you didn’t know, I’m in the beginning of a lengthy, what will be multi-year anthropological study into the Mythology of Taylor Swift. I’ll leave some links down in the description if you want to know more. But spending so much time dedicated to Taylor Swift research, music, aesthetics, and storytelling has led me down so many different interesting paths so far. And there’s something so incredibly and inherently Gothic in nature there.

So, let’s talk about it! Today, we’re talking about exactly how Taylor Swift is Gothic.

Because, she kinda is. When you shove past the glitter and the colour-coded microphones, she has undead imagery, tied up with zombies, doppelgangers and ghosts. She lives among the dead, almost as much as cobwebbed dark tombs, even though its presented in pop music. And the death isn’t just an over-dramatism, but is representative about the place of women in society and in celebrity culture, about the nature of moving on, and the lingering presence of the past in the heart of the present.

But maybe, first, we should start with the most obvious of the Gothic imagery Taylor Swift uses. In the beginning of the Look What You Made Me Do music video, the camera moves through a strangely cartoon graveyard, and the music begins to play as Taylor’s hand pops out of the grand, and she climbs, zombie style, out of the grave.

The zombie is a good imagery of some of the constant references to “rising from the dead”. Its a literal line in the same song. Even less zombie-specific imagery recalls the “rising from the dead”, with references to phoenixes.

Alongside the notion of Taylor rising from the dead is the more oft-repeated idea of her already being dead actively - and yet not quite risen. The entire narrative of the song My Tears Ricochet from folklore is a narrative framed around her metaphorical death, the whole piece taking place at a wake.

For some of these references, for example the rising from the dead in Look What You made Me Do, the death is in relation to a shifting in Taylor’s “eras”. Like most pop stars, Taylor Swift is constantly in need to reinvent herself, forming new versions of herself with new styling, new sounds, and different emotional vibes.

Which leads us to another monster which rears its head every so often: the doppelganger. A new era equals a new Taylor Swift. A new album, a new era, a new Taylor. She reveals these different versions of her persona as aspects of herself, diffrent versions existing in different periods, marked by the specific outfits, hair, and style. She lived out these directly on the Eras tour, donning the same kinds of costumes for each Era, singng slightly more akin to how she sounded a t that time, and even having different choreography for each era.

Swift directly plays with t he doubling of herself in her work, specifically when it comes to the different versions of herself. Not to keep bringing it up as example, but in Look What You Made me Do, she plays with it directly in two ways. The first in her silly line of “the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Cause she’s dead!”. The second time is in the way she plays with the visuals of the music video, depicting literal other versions of herself, acting and talking as she did in that version of herself - either how she was, or how she was perceived to be.

She plays with this again on the Eras tour, with her backup dancers and singers in her various eras, and she gets to sing and dance between them, showing off her various versions on a show which does the same.

Essentially, she splits herself, dying and re-forming, coming back from the dead, pushed up from the dirt, year after year. Each era is essentially another death, another moment of passing and moving on.

So, we’re talking about some specific forms of the Gothic monster. But, there are so many different types of Gothic monster in the literary historical landscape, from vampires to ghosts to sewed up constructed beings. Monstrosity, and the supernatural threat of monsters, is a hallmark of the Gothic genre. While not all Gothic novels have a specific monster, the Gothic gave rise to so many iconic cultural monsters, and most of the novels have some of strange monstrous threat lingering in the background.

Anthropologically, monsters can do a lot of different and overlapping things. It an be the harbinger of categorical crisis, which I’ve talked about before. The monster can also illuminate views on the environment, or even not be really “representative” of anything at all due to its very real presence and real experience for the people who tell the monster stories.

Regardless of their considerations, monsters are often the figures which police and construct boundaries and identity markers of the “normal”. Monsters are not always necessarily things to fear, though. There is a lot of similarity between monsters and gods - both walk the boundaries, both stand apart, both have supernatural strange other-worldliness. If we also think about cosmic horror, and also Rudolph Otto’s idea of the holy, gods can also induce feelings of fear and awe. But, maybe that’s a conversation for another video. But even when we look at Gothic literature more generally, there are often shifts in the approach of monstrosity where animosity is not present, and the monster instead becomes a site of identification, sympathy and self-recognition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one very obvious example of this.

Taylor Swift’s focus, therefore, on some monsters is still quite Gothic, ringing true to some of the strange interplays of Gothic themes and connections. She also creates complicated networks of emotions around the notion of her monster, sometimes feelings of connection and community with the monster, and sometimes rejection. Her song “Anti-Hero” plays up this complicated nuancing of emotions toward her, and herself as monster. In this, she proclaims herself a monster, “shot through the heart, but never killed”. She’s always looming, too big and too much. We both like her, and hate her. We reverie her, and fear her.

More than rising from the dead, Taylor Swift is also haunted by the dead. The most obvious example of this is on the song “Haunted” from Speak Now. Here, the use of “haunted” is a metaphor for the past relationship, still lingering in thoughts.

She is most haunted, however, on the album the Tortured Poets Department, where there is almost a constant presence of ghosts, death, and hauntings. On the song “loml”, there is reference to dancing phantoms, left ambiguous as to whether they are past versions of the lovers, or whether they are some other form of ghost.

On “How Did It End”, the song takes the form of an autopsy, leading the listener through the potential things which could have lead to the death of the relationship. The song culminates in a bridge, which brings all the haunting to life with a repeal of a soul leaving the body, and a play on the childhood chant of sitting in trees, but this time not kissing but dying.

So many of her songs involve haunting. The song seven, for example, on folklore also has the idea of haunting from the perspective of a child, who uses a haunted house to try and understand more complicated experiences of abuse. Marjorie from evermore speaks of still hearing her grandmother, who has long since past. While Taylor isn’t always haunted by a relationship necessarily, she always seems somewhat haunted.

As we’re looking at songs and song lyrics, perhaps its most pertinent to look at poetry when it comes to looking at the literature. David Punter looked at Gothic poetry, and how it’s references and metaphors are similar and different to Gothic prose. For Punter, Gothic poetry has a focus on the notion of doubt. The intrusion of death into the world of the living is often captured in Gothic poetry, and I would also add the prose as well, and tied to this is the conception of doubt. This doubt is based on the limits of human thought, and really the limits of the human in general. There are complex feelings of guilt and death makes something both present and absent at the same time - a duplicity of experiences which cause ideas of doubt.

Doubt and uncertainty is perhaps the best summary of the type of haunting for Taylor Swift. Ghosts are often reminiscent of uncertainty. For the narrator of seven, its the doubt of the complicated adult experiences of abuse. In marjorie, the doubt of uncertainty of the knowledge we have of the ones we love who have passed.

For the hauntings of romantic relationships, there is something inherently “past” which is still being held on to in the present. There is a dissonance here, a disruption of time unique to hauntings.

When we think about traditional ghost things, the ghost is a disruption of time - a literal presence of the past here, in the present, reminding us of what used to be. The Gothic’s obsession with haunting is focused on the idea of how hauntings and ghost provokes a kind of anxiety over what was once, and this is something I see replicated in Taylor Swift’s own hauntings. She continues to prod the doubts about what the reality of what used to be actually was, and considers the implications of what could have been alongside it.

In my previous video on how Knives Out is an example of the American Gothic, I talked about the nature of the Gothic “uncanny”. The uncanny typically takes something which is incredibly intimately familiar and makes it something altered and strange. Typically, the Gothic positions the uncanny as something on the outside. The monster is a force which comes from somewhere else and stands outside of the human. However, some Gothic literature shifts this uncanny to be more internalised. One literary scholar pointed out this to be the case in Jane Eyre, for example.

Similarly, Taylor Swift turns the uncanny onto herself, often depicting the ghostly monster not as an outside force, but as an internalised one. It is her own self haunted, not a building or a space. She is the monster, and the one being hunted by the monster. She is not just the monster on the hill, but also the one being haunted.

Taylor Swift blurs the boundaries of the monster to complicate its own idea. Each monster also runs into itself in its own discussion of meaning. The ghost, representing the mixed anxieties of what was and what could have been, follows on to the notion of the double narrative. She both is and isn’t haunted, and both is and isn’t doing the haunting. It is Taylor herself who is described as zombie, constantly rising the dead. It’s Taylor herself who presents her doubling, the multiplicity of herself as person and figure. And it both her that is being haunted and her that is haunting.

The haunting in Gothic literature is a doubling of narrative - marked by the absence of some other story which we would more wish to hear. This other narrative fits our desires more precisely. In her song How did It End, I think this doubling of narrative is discussed, along with the narrative we would prefer to be hearing.

Taylor Swift is quite famous for her biographical style of writing, more confessional type lyrics. She often, though not always, writes directly about her own life experiences, the point where fans often untangle the songs “muse”, or the person the song is directly about. When the Tortured Poets Department came out, following two breakups - one with long-term relationship Joe Alwyn and very short fling Matt Healey - the fanbase was interested in hearing a breakup album focused on the year long relationship with Joe Alwyn. The demise of such a long-standing relationship was something people wanted to hear more about, and sought to listen to untangle the realities of what happened. However, what we received was a far more complicated album, one with lots of ambiguity and doubling. More songs seemed to reflect the short stint with Matty Healey rather than Joe. The relationship with Joe, however, haunts the piece, popping through in small pieces here and there to complicate the narrative and make us wonder about the pieces we were getting.

In other words, the haunting of the album is caused by the fans own “empathetic hunger”, to use the phrase from the song How Did it End. The driving interest and need to know the juicy details of a relationship where we know neither party. Instead of hearing a detailed breakdown of the specifics, we got a thoughtful exploration.

In some ways, the songs themselves become monsters, a doubling of narrative which haunts us, the listener, as we struggle to find a thing we doubt, we are uncertain of, and we are so desperate to know more about.

While she describes anxieties and doubts around the relationships she has had with men, Taylor Swift’s Gothic monstrosity is also a representation of the the female celebrity figure. Her constant death, her doppelganger nature, her incessant need to reinvent herself comes from the precarious place of the female pop star. She must constantly remain individual, while also be similar enough to be able to connect and draw these similarities with the audience who consumes her (and yes, I mean for the a double meaning there). In an attempt to meet this, Taylor constantly reinvents herself in her various eras, forming new versions of herself to constantly create new ways for the audience to connect, new forms of her to show similarities, and diversify enough to stay relevant - new styles, new sounds, and different emotional vibes to create new variants.

Alongside her own variants, Taylor is haunted by the existence and persistence of other female celebrities who have paved her way. Her song “Clara Bow” for example has a female celebrity being haunted by the one who came before, all marked with a life of misery, all used by the industry and controlled.

And women, more generally, are complicated in their position. The anxieties and doubts which haunt her work is also tied to the place of women in contemporary society. In the Man, she talks about how society views female celebrities inherently different than men. In Lavender Haze, she laments on how society only views women through the Madonna/whore complex. In Cassandra, she talks about the way men and wider society never want to believe women.

Like the monsters she calls upon, and even the Gothic genre she is directly using, Taylor Swift’s use of the monsters is marked with ambiguity. They both are and are not what they are. They come to represent many aspects of her life and music, the relationships she has been known for, but also the complicated place of women in contemporary society, specifically if she is a celebrity. In this way, Taylor Swift directly haunts us, the listener, through her own music.

In this way, despite the glitter and the pink and the sparkly bodysuits and stiletto heals - Taylor Swift is actually pretty Gothic.