Indecision, Secret Offspring, and Taylor Swift

[kimberly_a]

I was at Berkeley Bowl today, and they always have this whole area full of gorgeous yet inexpensive fresh-cut flowers, and since I have some extra money this week (and the flowers were only around $4 a bunch), I decided I would buy myself some. But then I kept dithering. Should I get the sunflowers? Or the African daisies? Or maybe the deep red

Comments

[kimberly_a]

Thanks for pointing me to that essay. I think it's a bit pretentious (Aren't we taking Taylor Swift a bit too seriously here? She isn't T. S. Eliot, folks.), but still had some interesting things to say. I was surprised by the strong implication that "people" have criticized Taylor Swift for "corrupting" or "not understanding" the Romeo and Juliet story because of how lightly she uses the references in the song, which had absolutely never occurred to me and which seems (to me) ridiculous. Two kids in love, parent(s) insisting that they be apart ... this *obviously* merits some R&J comparisons! Not every relationship situation that has R&J overtones must must must end in tragedy or the writer is "missing the point." It's *okay* to riff off existing/accepted culture and do something different with it.

However ... I still don't buy the essayists explanation of the Scarlet Letter reference:
Likewise, when Swift refers to herself as a “scarlet letter,” she’s not literally branding herself an adulterer (the phrase is a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel of the same name), but comparing herself to forbidden fruit; like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, who wore a scarlet ‘A’ on her chest to signify her sin, the narrator in “Love Story” is “off limits,” desirable but forbidden by her social enclave (in this case, the narrator’s family, or, more specifically, her father).

This seems stupid to me. Didn't Taylor Swift (or whoever writes her songs, or even the person writing this essay!) take the S.A.T.s? Do they even understand how parallelism works? When you're making a comparison like this, there are certain major elements in the story:
Hester Prynne, forbidden woman
Hester's husband, guy who got betrayed
Arthur Dimmesdale, forbidden guy (and sexed up minister)
Pearl, Hester's bastard daughter (the fruits of sin!)
the "scarlet letter," a piece of cloth (the brand of a sinner!)

Now, saying, "I'm a scarlet letter," in the context of the song seems to be just grabbing some random bit of the story -- the even people who haven't read the book -- will recognize, and throwing it in there.

Just because a story is about forbidden love doesn't mean any old random reference to another such story makes sense. I mean, she could have compared herself to a balcony, right? That wouldn't make it a sensible R&J reference. Because the balcony is a recognizable piece of the R&J story, but it wasn't in love (or anything else Juliet was, except, I suppose, Italian).

Forgive the rant. It's not directed at you. I just ... I'm a big literature/rhetoric/language nerd, and crappy parallelism like this bugs me.

[kimberly_a]

Wow ... I wrote that immediately after waking up this morning, so upon rereading it seems rather incoherent.

The points I was trying to make:
1. A scarlet letter is not forbidden.
2. This is horrible parallelism, which makes for less effective emotional resonance.

And, just as a point I thought of more recently (after waking up a bit more), the whole "scarlet letter" reference seems really inappropriate for the story and tenor of the song. Adultery? Bastard children? Fornicating ministers? There's a certain innocence to the love story in the song, and it's an innocence that is also found in the R&J story ... but the darkness of The Scarlet Letter just seems really inappropriate.