No More Water, Bring Fire: Taylor Swift’s Salvage of a Shakespearean Tragedy
Picture this: a woman enrobed in flowers with a grief-stricken expression painted across her face as she floats over a water body. You probably thought of the iconic painting of Ophelia by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, didn't you? We've all seen this painting, whether or not we know about the story of the tragic character of Ophelia, who barely finds a place in the pages of (and the hearts of characters) in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
As an English literature student who has done a detailed study of the text and considers this play my all- time favourite literary text, it has been long overdue that I did a comparative analysis of this overlooked character as depicted in Shakespeare's play vs Taylor Swift's latest hit: The Fate of Ophelia.
In the play, Ophelia seems to float through the world, bowing down to the whims and fancies of those around her, without any standing of her own. Her identity is shaped entirely by the pressures around her, and she hence becomes a figure who falls prey to the haunting clasp of depression ("melancholia", as it would be called back then). Taylor flips this tragic end that Ophelia suffered with the line "You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia". The 'you' here is a direct reference to her to-be-husband, Travis Kelce, and how his love saved her from meeting a similar end as that of Ophelia's. Her song thus invites us to imagine an alternative ending where Ophelia might have been saved by those around her.
In the play, love no longer remains enriching. It sets her on a path that leads her further away from herself. She becomes privy to royal schemes, as a result of which she finds herself estranged from Hamlet, possibly the only person who could have alleviated her woes. The song, too, describes Ophelia as living "in fantasy", a kind of delusion where her love for Hamlet that she believes to be nurturing and sacrosanct is, in fact, "a cold bed full of scorpions" (what an apt way to put it!).
I find the exploration of memory in the two to be extremely fascinating. In the play, Ophelia loses her sense of coherence. Her songs are scattered and dreamlike, and her imagination becomes a clear sign of the madness that consumes her entirely. The song, on the other hand, transforms this dream space into clarity. The tower, the grave, the night sky, and the fire become symbols of rebirth, granting her the freedom to shape her inner world, something that Shakespeare never granted Ophelia. Taylor has always been a staunch feminist, and subverting this trope of the melancholic, despaired woman that was so rampant in classic literature is a tactical move aimed at those who have read and critiqued the text. In a way, she has embedded herself within the canon by alluding to such a beloved text (and playwright). The interplay of classic texts and popular culture has always fascinated me, and I believe this song will now be placed alongside the text itself in school/college curricula (atleast I hope it will)!
Water, in the play, has been portrayed as a key symbol in the death (or rather, suicide, as a large number of critics and readers believe) of Ophelia. Gertrude, the Queen of Denmark, describes her death as "When down her weedy trophies and herself/Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;/And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up". This borderline romanticised description of the drowning Ophelia presents her as if it were she who caused her own undoing. Shakespeare, as he often does in his tragedies, presents the female protagonist as meek and passive, reinforcing the notion that women were prone to melancholia and could break down under extreme pressure, especially that of a political kind, as one sees in the play. Taylor's music video instead portrays her braving the seas with confidence- the only woman on a ship with multiple men, while the other women shown are half submerged under the waves, seeking her help (or possibly revering her for the anti-Ophelia that she is)!
The notion of burial, too, is rewritten so subtly, and yet so impactfully. In the play, a detailed debate surrounds the body of Ophelia, and the burial rights that are due. The gravediggers question whether someone who drowned themselves deserves honour in death. It is often said that in death, a person's sins, flaws and shortcomings are all forgotten, they are only remembered with calmness and a void that fills the souls of everyone who knew the person. However, even in her death, Ophelia's character is judged by those around her, despite her royal background that placed her higher in the hierarchy. In the song, the symbol of the grave finds its way in, yet from a different vantage point. It becomes a space that she rises from rather than falls into. The line “you dug me out of my grave” brings to mind a kind of resurrective imagery. It also reveals a modern understanding of despair, wherein the grave that traditionally represents perpetual emptiness, loneliness, and self abandonment provides a glimmer of hope. Taylor is allowed to climb out of it, and in doing so, she refuses the old assumption that women who break under pressure are lost forever.
"He who was living is now dead, we who were living are now dying", says T.S. Eliot in his 'The Waste Land'. Ophelia too, finds herself at the centre of a wasteland created by political, social and moral breakdown. Denmark has been transformed into a site rampant with turmoil at the micro, macro and mezzo levels, what with the regicide of the erstwhile King Hamlet, the Machiavellian treacheries that dominate life at the court of Denmark and the adultery and "o'erhasty marriage" of Queen Gertrude and Claudius, the brother (and murderer) of King Hamlet. Being a woman, Ophelia is doubly oppressed and is ultimately left to the embrace of death. Taylor changes the entire narrative here, wherein she portrays nothing even remotely resembling a wasteland. Rather, her environment is nourishing and drags her out of any troubles that plagued her initially.
The song then becomes a proof of the idea that art can indeed rescue the world :)
Until next time!
~Veenaaz
Comments
Post a Comment