Help, I’m still at Satis House: reclaiming female stasis

Everybody moved on/I, I stayed there/Dust collected on my pinned-up hair

In Chapter 8 of Charles Dickens’s classic novel Great Expectations (1861), the anxious young Pip is led by his playmate Estella to meet the mysterious Miss Havisham at her home, Satis House. Upon entering, Pip finds himself ‘in a pretty large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it’. Sitting at a dressing-table is ‘the strangest lady’ Pip has ever seen, ‘or shall ever see’:

She was dressed in rich materials – satins, and lace, and silks – all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on – the other was on the table near her hand – her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a Prayer-Book, all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass. […] everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. 

[…]

‘Do you know what I touch here?’ she said, laying her hands, one upon the other, on her left side. 

‘Yes, ma’am.’ (It made me think of the young man.)

‘What do I touch?’

‘Your heart.’

‘Broken!’

We later learn Miss Havisham’s story: as a rich young lady, she was engaged to be married to a man named Compeyson, who defrauded her of her riches and jilted her by letter as she was dressing on the morning of the wedding. Driven to a breakdown by grief, she stopped the clock in Satis House at the exact minute she received the news of Compeyson’s betrayal (twenty to nine). She has sat, ever since, in her wedding dress and flowers, still in the midst of putting on her shoes, surrounded by the uneaten wedding feast. 

In Taylor Swift’s 2020 song ‘Right Where You Left Me’, a bonus track from the album Evermore, she sings ‘Help, I’m still at the restaurant/Still sitting in a corner I haunt/Cross-legged in the dim light/They say “What a sad sight”’.  Dust, she tells us, ‘collected on my pinned-up hair’ as she sat at the table where her lover told her that he had met someone else, an unspecified amount of time ago (although, if we take the song as written in 2020, when Swift was 31, and she describes herself as ‘still 23’ in the lyrics, we might assume that eight years are supposed to have passed). ‘I felt the moment stop’, she tells us, and ‘everybody moved on’ except her: ‘friends break up, friends get married/Strangers get born, strangers get buried […] But I’m right where you left me’. ‘Kids and Christmas’ pass, she notes, ‘but I’m unaware’.

‘Did you hear about the girl who got frozen? The girl who lives in delusion? Time went on for everybody else, she won’t know it’. Well, as it happens, we have heard about this girl before. In fact, we have seen her in various manifestations throughout literary history. 

Swift’s line about dust collecting in her pinned-up hair is surely an allusion to one of Dickens’s most iconic characters. A couple of Swifties on the Reddit ‘megathread’ devoted to the song noted its ‘Miss Havisham vibes’. Yet Miss Havisham is not the first literary incarnation of the jilted lover for whom time has stopped. In 1603, William Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, a famously ‘problematic’ play that muddles the boundaries between tragedy and comedy. One of its minor characters is the ‘dejected Mariana’, who sits every day in ‘brawling discontent’ in a ‘moated grange’, having retreated there when her betrothed, Angelo, called off their marriage after her dowry disappeared following the death of her brother. 

Over 250 years later, Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson penned ‘Mariana’, inspired by Shakespeare’s play. Its refrain, ‘I am aweary, aweary/I would that I were dead!’, hymns Mariana’s broken heart. Her imperviousness to outside influence is reflected in the slow decay of her surroundings: ‘with blackest moss the flower-plots/Were thickly crusted’; ‘Weeded and worn the ancient thatch’. ‘Old faces’ peer through the door at her, ‘old voices’ calling her from without, but she is blind to the world beyond the walls of her desolate moated grange. She is ‘without hope of change’, for ‘He cometh not’, a line that shifts to ‘He will not come’ in the poem’s final stanza, a decisive indication that Mariana is doomed to wait forever. If she had existed in the twenty-first century, her moated grange might well have been a restaurant table. 

We might also think of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ (1832), written earlier than ‘Mariana’, whose line ‘I am half sick of shadows’ epitomises the tedium in which she lives under a mysterious curse. She sits and weaves all day, unable to stop or to look out of the window towards Camelot (she uses a mirror instead), and we are told that she lives only a partial existence, ‘with little joy or fear’. The curse is broken when she looks out of the window to see the dashing Sir Lancelot, and from that moment on the Lady knows her fate is sealed: she leaves her tower, writes her name on the prow of a boat, and sails down the river in her death throes. Although there have been multiple interpretations of this somewhat enigmatic poem, we might read the Lady as having chosen a moment of pure, first-hand, unmediated sensory experience over a lifetime of shadowy, vicarious existence. (Or, to quote my favourite band, First Aid Kit, ‘I’d rather be broken than empty/I’d rather be shattered than hollow’). 

Swift’s interest in female stasis as a paradoxical means of articulating turbulent emotions is not confined to ‘Right Where You Left Me’. It is strikingly symbolised through a recurring image in her musical iconography. In ‘The Lakes’, expressing a wish to run away from ‘these hunters with cell phones’ and the ‘sleaze’ of the music industry, and escape with her beloved to the Lake District, she says, ‘I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet/’Cause I haven’t moved in years’. It’s the same image evoked in the music video for ‘Out of the Woods’, in which Swift, singing about the tensions and anxieties that hamper a new relationship (‘Are we out of the woods yet?’), flees a snarling pack of wolves, runs barefoot through a dark forest and thrashes around in a muddy lake while sinister tendrils snake around her slick limbs (this is an image with a long history in literature, too – but that’s another story). The scene changes to show Swift now entwined by the same tendrils as she stands on the stump of a tree, becoming progressively arboreal in an image that evokes the classical myth of Daphne and Apollo – except, in a reversal of the myth, Swift is desperately seeking the amorous encounter, rather than fleeing it. In the same video, she stands in a snow-covered forest next to a tree from which dangle pendulous stalactites, watching in horror – or perhaps amazement – as her own skin starts to prickle with jagged blades of ice, threatening her transformation to a frozen statue. ‘Did you hear about the girl who got frozen?’

One can’t help but think of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, or Disney’s Elsa – other women whose chilly petrification hints at emotional unavailability or desolation. Returning full circle to Miss Havisham, we might recall that the jilted lady adopts a daughter, Estella, whom she raised to distrust men in order to ‘save her from misery like my own’. Her endeavours, Miss Havisham admits, went too far: ‘I stole her heart away and put ice in its place’.

‘You left me no choice but to stay here forever’, Swift sings in ‘Right Where You Left Me’, an admission of stasis and passivity that is also curiously defiant. There is perhaps irony in the fact that Swift is, notoriously, anything but passive in her response to heartbreak, as her numerous songs that allude in highly specific ways to particular ‘exes, fights and flaws’ demonstrate; in fact, a large part of her fame and appeal lie in this ability to turn the intensely personal landscape of grief outwards into a highly marketable product. The bold visuals of the ‘Out of the Woods’ video, with their saturated ‘screaming colour’ and otherworldly quality, perhaps indicate how we should read these images of stasis that feature in certain of Swift’s songs. They are indulgent fantasies: safe experimentation with the notion of torpid heartbreak from a writer and performer confident in her own ability to deal in creative and dynamic ways with her emotions. We might even read this as a tentatively feminist act: to reclaim the image of the jilted woman, left with ‘no choice’ but to fester and fade away under the weight of her broken heart, as a momentary pause for reflection in a musical oeuvre that otherwise embraces and celebrates the dynamism, energy and potency of female emotion. As the ‘end credits’ of the ‘Out of the Woods’ video read, ‘She lost him. But she found herself. And somehow that was everything.’

It is no coincidence that Swift’s songs frequently utilise the metaphor of resurrection to describe healing from the pain of heartbreak or betrayal (‘High Infidelity’; ‘This Love’; ‘Electric Touch’; ‘Look What You Made Me Do’). Swift can adopt the persona of a Mariana or a Miss Havisham momentarily as a form of exploratory roleplay because the persona and brand she has spent her career developing is founded on the certainty – her certainty, our certainty – that she will leave that restaurant. Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time.

_{(Header image: https://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00092767.html)}